Reengineering professional services through automation, remote outsourcing, and task delegation

Abstract

Digital technology has enabled significant productivity gains in many industries. Manufacturers have benefited from robotics, and service businesses have benefited from self-service technologies. An area that has seen only meager productivity gains is professional services, such as healthcare, consulting, legal services, and higher education. Despite the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and other new technologies, professional services continue to be labor intensive with high labor costs. In 2021, Sampson published an empirically-based framework suggesting that emerging technologies would allow professional services to improve productivity by automating some tasks with self-service technologies, outsourcing some tasks to remote professionals, and delegating some tasks to semiprofessional workers. The underlying theory was that this restructuring hinges on the creative and interpersonal skill requirements of various tasks. Our research builds on Sampson's framework by modeling a professional service operation and studying the influence of task offloading on costs and quality. Our model involves discrete event simulation parameterized by empirical data. We consider labor costs, managerial costs, delay costs (including customer balking), and assessment costs. Results show contexts wherein increased task offloading can reduce costs with negligible impact on quality, suggesting great opportunities for reengineering professional services through increased automation, offshore outsourcing, and task delegation.