Dive Brief:

• India, China and Malaysia remain the world's top three offshoring destinations. Asia continues to dominate, as six of its countries are among the top 10, according to the 2016 Global Services Location Index (GLSI) from A.T. Kearney, a global management consulting firm.
• The GLSI is a research paper that analyzes and ranks the top 55 countries for outsourcing worldwide based on metrics in three categories: financial attractiveness, people skills/availability and business environment.
• Apart from rankings, the latest study also identifies "new disruptions and threats" to the outsourcing market, according to A.T. Kearney.

Dive Insight:

According to A.T. Kearney, the real story of its seventh annual GLSI lies in the disruption being felt throughout the industry thanks to automation.

"Even though the top six or seven countries are landing in the same order this year as 2014, looking forward, this could all change radically because the very nature of what's being outsourced is changing," says Arjun Sethi, global leader of A.T. Kearney's Strategic IT practice and principal author of the study. Sethi says that for the first time, automation could displace the leadership of the likes of India and China in outsourcing.

For example, the GLSI projects that Robotic Process Automation (RPA) will ripple through the service economy over the next decade, as the tasks that most back-office employees perform will be the quickest to automate. However, Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) is also looming.

While RPA robots are "taught" to emulate what humans do using a company's own user interfaces, BPaaS service providers are standardized and process "across multiple customers" at once.