{"id":12804,"date":"2025-09-08T09:13:23","date_gmt":"2025-09-08T14:13:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wwwtest.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin-new\/?post_type=campus_story&p=12804"},"modified":"2025-09-08T09:13:23","modified_gmt":"2025-09-08T14:13:23","slug":"uw-milwaukee-undergrad-students-study-ai-outsourcing-and-what-it-means-for-human-jobs","status":"publish","type":"campus_story","link":"https:\/\/wwwtest.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/story\/uw-milwaukee-undergrad-students-study-ai-outsourcing-and-what-it-means-for-human-jobs\/","title":{"rendered":"UW-Milwaukee undergrad students study AI outsourcing and what it means for human jobs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Graphic<\/a><\/p>\n

In the 1960s and \u201970s, the U.S. manufacturing sector began hemorrhaging jobs as companies outsourced production to places like India and China, where wages were lower and labor was less expensive.<\/p>\n

Today, American companies are at the beginning of another wave of outsourcing. This time, the jobs aren\u2019t heading overseas. Instead, they\u2019re being turned over to artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor example, if you\u2019ve ever called a customer service line in the past, you\u2019d have another human, most of the time in another country, pick up your call,\u201d said Gaurav Saluja. \u201cBut now, these companies are moving them online and having AI pick up the phone the first time. If AI can solve your problem, they don\u2019t have to bring it to a human \u2026 saving businesses quite a bit of money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saluja and his research partner, Gaurav Sachdeva, are UWM students studying this new trend of AI outsourcing under the mentorship of Avik Chakrabarti, associate professor of economics.\u00a0Saluja<\/a>, a double major in economics and computer science, and\u00a0Sachdeva<\/a>, who is majoring in management and finance, have completed their first year at UWM. They presented their research at the UWM Undergraduate Research Symposium in the spring.<\/p>\n

The incentive and pitfalls of AI outsourcing<\/h2>\n

Offloading work onto a digital assistant is becoming an attractive option for businesses looking to cut labor costs. Instead of using employees to take customer service calls or handle data entry, they are increasingly turning to AI. This not only saves money on wages that would have otherwise been paid to the employee, but it decreases overhead costs as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t have to go through the hiring process,\u201d Sachdeva pointed out.<\/p>\n

\"Two
Gaurav Sachdeva (left) and Guarav Saluja stand by
\ntheir research poster at the UWM Undergraduate
\nResearch Symposium in April. (Photo courtesy of G
\naurav Saluja)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And even if you don\u2019t completely outsource the jobs, AI can still increase a business\u2019s productivity, he added. Say it takes a software engineer 10 hours to write quality computer code for a project. Artificial intelligence can generate that code in two to three hours at a lower standard of quality. The engineer might take two to three hours to edit and improve upon the AI-generated code. A project that originally took 10 hours now takes only six. Now, the engineer is free to work on tasks to grow the business.<\/p>\n

But AI has its drawbacks. Many critics worry about its lack of flexibility, Saluja noted.<\/p>\n

For example, \u201csocial media trends \u2013 a human may be able to recognize and capitalize on that and build a lot of revenue for a business, whereas AI may not immediately understand that or be able to predict it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

There are also concerns around ethics. Companies are beginning to explore replacing higher level managerial positions with AI, Saluja said. While artificial intelligence may be able to optimize profits, it may not be able to address the very human concerns faced by everyday workers.<\/p>\n

New job opportunities<\/h2>\n

One thing that Saluja and Sachdeva noticed during their research was that even as people lost their jobs to AI, new positions were being created.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s say that 10 software engineers are needed to maintain this database, and let\u2019s say that AI increases their job efficiency by about 200%. Now, I might only need five software engineers to maintain the AI,\u201d he said. \u201cThey can either cut those five positions, or they can let those five software engineers now work on building (a new product). Now they\u2019re increasing their productivity, which can increase their competitiveness in the market.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s little comfort to workers who do lose their jobs to AI software. In many cases, companies find that while they\u2019ve saved on unskilled labor, they now need employees who can work with the AI, perform quality control checks, tweak algorithms and so on. Sachdeva discovered that many of those businesses landed a solution for both problems: They would retrain those \u201cobsolete\u201d workers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are workplaces that are giving employees the opportunity, if their job was replaced, to learn about AI and how it\u2019s used in that particular job. They gain more skills to manage that AI,\u201d said Sachdeva.<\/p>\n

Still, many workers will lose their original jobs. Sachdeva acknowledges that reality but thinks that we ought to approach the advent of AI in the same way we did when new technologies like computers or the internet were introduced.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not going to replace workers; it\u2019s going to change the responsibilities of the workers and what they\u2019re asked to do,\u201d Sachdeva said. \u201cAI is changing so fast that we don\u2019t know where it\u2019s going to lead.\u201d<\/p>\n

The next steps<\/h2>\n

Their research is not over. Saluja and Sachdeva are planning to continue their work with a specific focus on how AI outsourcing is affecting Milwaukee companies. The two plan to approach several businesses in the city, ranging from small businesses to large corporations, to ask questions about how leaders are thinking about artificial intelligence in the workforce and if they plan to use it \u2013 or have already implemented it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m particularly interested in how some companies are using AI for those higher-level manager positions. If we do have any of those in Milwaukee, hopefully, a few months down the line, we\u2019ll have some preliminary results as to how effective AI is at doing those jobs,\u201d Saluja said.<\/p>\n

Both are excited to stay involved with research at UWM over the next year.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving an undergraduate research project helps you take what you\u2019re learning in your classes and apply it to hands-on experience early on in your college career,\u201d said Sachdeva. \u201cWe\u2019re getting that knowledge and learning soft skills as well: Communication, teamwork and being able to manage a project.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those are some of the skills that AI can never replace.<\/p>\n

\n

Written by Sarah Vickery<\/p>\n

Link to original story: https:\/\/uwm.edu\/news\/undergrad-students-study-ai-outsourcing-and-what-it-means-for-human-jobs\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the 1960s and \u201970s, the U.S. manufacturing sector began hemorrhaging jobs as companies outsourced production to places like India and China, where wages were lower and labor was less expensive. Today, American companies are at the beginning of another wave of outsourcing. This time, the jobs aren\u2019t heading overseas. Instead, they\u2019re being turned over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":12809,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","institution":[107],"story_category":[],"class_list":["post-12804","campus_story","type-campus_story","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","institution-uw-milwaukee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwtest.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/campus_story\/12804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwtest.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/campus_story"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwtest.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/campus_story"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwtest.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwtest.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12804"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwtest.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwtest.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"institution","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwtest.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/institution?post=12804"},{"taxonomy":"story_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwtest.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/story_category?post=12804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}