Is Uzbekistan the Next Hot Outsourcing Destination with Frank Prempeh of Corpshore Solutions

Frank Prempeh, CEO of Corpshore Solutions, returned to the Outsource Accelerator Podcast to discuss the BPO’s expansion into Uzbekistan, where it became the first Canadian outsourcing firm to set up.

From the country’s deeply multilingual workforce to AI-driven demand for non-English data annotation, Frank lays out a clear case for Central Asia as the next major outsourcing destination.

Why Uzbekistan and why now

Founded a decade ago and headquartered in Toronto, Corpshore is a diversified BPO and IT outsourcing provider.

Frank says:

“Corpshore Solutions has roughly been a decade in the BPO and IT outsourcing industry. Over the past few years, especially with the emergence of AI, we’ve also added in AI delivery and AI implementation.

We’re seeing lots of demand for AI data annotation, data labeling, and AI training, so we found the utility to also add that into our service portfolio.”

Operations now span the Dominican Republic, Uzbekistan, Kenya, Uganda, the Philippines, Mexico and Colombia.

The Uzbekistan move began when IT Park Uzbekistan, the government body under the Ministry of Digital Technologies, reached out. Corpshore was surprised to learn it would be the first Canadian BPO to set up there.

“Our target is combining the nimbleness of a startup — being able to quickly move in the direction that a client wants us to move — as well as comprehensiveness in terms of geo-languages.”

That nimbleness, Frank said, is what let Corpshore beat larger Canadian compatriots to the country.

“When they reached out to us, because we have that openness to move very quickly compared to the conventional BPO firms, we took on the opportunity right away. The offers they presented to us were very attractive.”

The Silk Road advantage: A multilingual workforce

Uzbekistan’s strategic appeal, in Frank’s view, is linguistic depth that few outsourcing destinations can match.

“Uzbekistan is incredibly multilingual. It’s historically a Silk Road country, so besides having capabilities in English and even French — which was very much to our surprise — it also has the Soviet/Russian influence… the Korean influence due to migrations arguably from the Korean War… Persian influence… and Turkic influence.”

Roughly five million of Uzbekistan’s ~38 million people — about 12.5% — are proficient English speakers, concentrated in Tashkent and the second city of Samarkand, where Corpshore is incorporated.

The AI-driven demand for non-English data annotation

The conversation sharpened around AI. Frank says the training-data boom has created demand for annotation work in languages outside English — and that’s where Uzbekistan’s mix comes into its own.

“We’re seeing lots of demand from the East, particularly from China… With the current AI revolution, lots of data annotation has been done in English, but there’s also growing demand for other languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Russian.

The historical outsourcing locations in the nearshore regions are not able to meet that demand. That’s where countries like Uzbekistan are able to step into the fray.”

He stressed that quality annotation can’t be solved by translation alone.

“It’s very imperative that certain processes are actually annotated in the original language.

When you’re trying to translate from English to a different language, you have issues with translation and transliteration. You’re not gonna be able to capture the full import of the meaning.”

Salaries, safety, and 24/7 readiness

Cost remains a fundamental driver — and on that front Uzbekistan competes with, and in some cases beats, established hubs.

“In terms of salaries, on average — if you’re talking about tier-one customer support — approximately between two seventy-five and four fifty USD per month.

For higher level supervisors and some managers, you’d be inching towards seven hundred, eight hundred, to a thousand dollars per month.”

Infrastructure — electricity, internet, transit, facilities — is geared to round-the-clock operations, and the country sits geopolitically insulated from regional flashpoints.

“You have that peace of mind as a company in being able to operate without wondering [if there are] gonna be some bombs flying into your call center facility.”

Attrition is another sell. With foreign BPOs still novel in Uzbekistan, working for one carries reputational weight — the opposite of the saturation-driven churn now common in the Philippines.

AI as a clarion call, not a threat

Frank’s read on AI for the outsourcing industry is firmly positive — but with a sharp caveat for operators that sit still.

“It will be a net positive, and it’s also a clarion call for all BPO firms out there to diversify their business processes and integrate AI. The conventional brick-and-mortar model is not going anywhere, but there’s gonna be an evolution.

You have to be very astute [as a company] in figuring out how to integrate AI into your business and IT processes so you don’t get disrupted.”

He pointed to Klarna’s well-publicised AI-first reversal as the cautionary tale.

“They decided to lay off a substantial amount of their staff to go a hundred percent in AI, and it didn’t quite work out.

Customers are still a mile away from accepting interactions with humanoid robots on the phone. They still wanna hear a human being speak with them — and having that empathy and understanding.”

Corpshore now runs an in-house AI annotation division and uses AI tools internally for content, financial modelling, and customer-support augmentation, rather than treating them as a threat.

To learn more about Corpshore Solutions and its operations across Uzbekistan, the Dominican Republic, and beyond, visit corpshore.solutions and look for Corpshore Solutions on all major social media platforms.

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