The Many Product Opportunities of Outsourcing with Andy Schachtel of Sourcefit

Andy Schachtel, founder and president/CEO of Sourcefit, returns to the Outsource Accelerator Podcast, and each time he does, the company has expanded into new territory. This episode is no exception.

Andy walks through Sourcefit’s growing stable of specialised products, its move into customer experience and onshore delivery, and why he stays optimistic about outsourcing even as AI reshapes the industry.

He also makes a case few operators are addressing yet: the need to build AI skills and governance now.

Sourcefit

Founded in 2009, Sourcefit has grown from a single offering into a multi-country operation with a suite of specialised brands. Andy describes a footprint that now spans several continents.

“We’re a BPO outsourcing company that I founded in 2009. We have operational centers… four of them in the Philippines, one in South Africa in Cape Town, Madagascar servicing the French market, Dominican Republic servicing nearshore in the United States in Spanish, and we just stood up an operation in Belfast.”

That growth is matched by a product range built around distinct processes.

“We also have EORganic, which is our EOR service, SourceCX, which is oriented around CX and advanced customer experience solutions, SourceCycle, which is servicing medical billing, revenue cycle management in the United States, and WorkingAI, which is our AI solutions division.”

An onshore option for regulated industries

The new Belfast entity is a deliberate answer to clients in regulated sectors like insurance, where some work has to stay onshore.

“Clients are constrained by a lot of regulatory compliance obligations. So certain members of teams need to be certified and need to be physically present in a certain jurisdiction, especially like in this case, the UK.”

Sourcefit’s response is a hybrid model that blends onshore and offshore under one organisation, which Andy calls Sightline.

“We have a program called Sightline, which is a kind of a hybrid framework whereby we’re hiring seniors first, we’re building the teams beneath those seniors, and then delivering according to SLAs… The fact that the client is able to hire the senior leadership directly gives them a little bit more insight into the management and gives them a little bit more control.”

Building deeper, specialised products

The many product lines were not planned so much as grown, as Andy’s team turned recurring client requests into dedicated units.

“We grew up kind of having to react to clients inquiring about our services, so we tried to be as flexible as we could be through the years.

We realized that we could service our clients better by forming business units that are solely dedicated to a specific type of process like customer experience.”

That depth shows in tools like Pulse BI, which Andy nicknames “binocular intelligence” for the way it fuses HR and operational data that are normally siloed, so problems can be caught before they surface.

“We bring together those two data sets and give clients a prediction: if you don’t do this particular training within a certain time frame, you risk having your operational metrics decline in the future.”

Moving up from staff augmentation

Sourcefit began in staff augmentation and deliberately climbed the value chain as clients handed it more responsibility.

“We didn’t wanna just be the pejorative, like bums on seats… you’re trying to offer more higher value services.”

He argues that traditional, long-term outsourcing contracts now carry a hidden risk, which is part of why clients want more control and transparency.

“The risks that companies have with outsourcing a traditional model is technology debt. Let’s say you have a three-year contract, you outsource a process to someone, and then three years later, the end of the contract rolls around.

The landscape may have completely changed from a technology perspective, and can you then even understand it?”

Retaining optimism about outsourcing

Presented with the argument that AI will hollow out the BPO industry, Andy offers a nuanced take. The biggest providers may contract, but the underserved SME market points the other way.

“There is enormous room for future growth of SMB offshoring, and I think that that’s not gonna be upset at all by AI.”

He splits the outlook by segment rather than treating the whole industry as one.

“The massive BPOs are gonna see growth somewhat limited, or they may decline in their numbers… But if you’re looking at companies like ours servicing the SMB market, and we can do micro-optimizations for these SMBs, that’s where the future is.”

Getting ahead on AI, from skills to governance

For Andy, the harder AI problem is not the tools but the people using them, and the judgment that separates a usable output from a good one.

“We’re trying to train judgment and taste, which is what we’re all trying to find in our employees who are using AI. A lot of times they can use an AI tool and deliver something that’s output by Claude or ChatGPT and still is not great, because they just lack the judgment or the taste.”

The other gap is governance. Andy warns that regulation is already arriving and most companies are unprepared, which is why Sourcefit is pursuing ISO 42001 certification and building around visibility, a human in the loop, an audit trail, and escalation protocols.

“There has to be someone in authority at every decision point. So if a regulator or a client comes in and says, ‘Well, AI made this decision,’ who is responsible for AI making this decision?”

For Andy, Sourcefit’s expanding suite reflects a single conviction: outsourcing keeps opening new opportunities, in regulated onshore work, in customer experience, and now in helping clients adopt AI safely, as long as providers keep moving up the value chain.

To learn more about Sourcefit, visit sourcefit.com or email contact@sourcefit.com. If you’d like to learn more about what we do in the outsourcing space, send us an email at ask@outsourceaccelerator.com.