Agility Staffing Services explores the future of AI-enabled offshore staffing through its AI +Human hybrid model. This podcast with co-founder and CEO Rob Brough highlights responsible AI adoption, ethical automation, workforce impact, and scalable agentic workflows.
For business leaders, especially in the healthcare and accounting space, who are seeking optimized productivity and savings on people cost, this human-centered AI-assisted operations will change the way organizations are run. Smart software automation (or AI) paired with high-performing human agents doing oversight and decision-making outside coded systems is the business strategy to win in 2026.
How would you describe Agility’s approach to adopting new technologies such as AI?
Well, I think the best answer for that is cautiously. You know, we do want to stay up with technology to make our clients… give them the flexibility that they need, and any cost savings that come along with it. AI has been around a couple of years. There’s a lot of fluff out there about the capability of AI and what AI can do. And so, you know, my answer I suppose is, Nia, is cautiously. We do have an initiative that we’re currently working on for our healthcare clients and we also have another one for the accounting community that we’re going to start marketing over the next one or two months.
What motivated Agility to integrate AI into our outsourcing services?
Well, I think the answer to that, you know, I’d go back to my first answer is we want to do this cautiously but we also don’t want to get left behind. We want to be able to enhance the operations of our clients. So, it’s something that we have to do. But as I said earlier, we’re doing it cautiously. It’s step by step. We’re not rushing into it.
Is AI part of our long-term strategy or is it a support tool?
Well, I think it’s a support tool today. It obviously is part of our long-term strategy to embrace AI and step our way through the process. It does concern me, I have to say, because already we see in various industries especially with programmers in the US where you’ve got tech companies laying off literally thousands and thousands of young programmers. It worries me about where the job market’s going to go and, you know, what if every country in the world ends up with 25 or 30% unemployment because AI is taking over the role of so many people, especially young people, who’ll miss that stepping stone to be able to learn and gain the skills… you know, learn their profession and gain the skills that are necessary to advance up the ladder. So, I don’t know where all this ends, but I do have to say, Nia, that I am concerned about it. And I don’t want to see mass layoffs of people with AI. I want to see AI making people’s jobs easier, getting rid of a lot of the grunt work and allowing people to be able to serve their stakeholders in a much more comprehensive way but without massive layoffs.
Talk to us about the AI +Human hybrid model and why this is the superior approach especially for industries like healthcare?
Well, I think, Nia, that this goes back to my previous answers and I really want to see AI being a tool that humans can work with to get rid of some of the drudgery and use humans for what they’re good at, which is using human knowledge, use human empathy… use the skills that humans have with humans. And, you know, I know there’s AI agents that talk now and do a pretty good job at it. But at the end of the day, I like… I believe, you know, all of business is people dealing with people and AI working away in the background doing, you know, drudgery work is all fine. But I think, when it comes to dealing with people, I still prefer to see humans dealing with humans, you know. And I know in my own business, I’ve never subscribed to the “Let’s get really cheap… and let’s replace our front desk receptionists” with some kind of phone system that you’ve got to go through this menu and by the time you get to where you need to be, you’re so upset, you really want to throw the phone against the wall. ’Cause I feel like that every time I have to use it. And I’ve got to say, I feel like that when I’m talking to robots right now as well. The robots are all generally useless as well. And it drives me insane. You know, people want to deal with people. And especially, you know, in healthcare, we’re dealing with a lot of older people. I don’t… I personally don’t want to see a AI go there. I know it will one day, but I personally don’t want to see that. So, as I say, I want to… I believe that using AI to be able to enhance the way people work, to be able to make them faster, to be able to get rid of errors, especially keying errors, entering data, things like that… it’s just a great thing. So, you’re talking about software automation on steroids really, and that’s a great thing. And, you know, you get rid of rework, you get rid of quality problems but people can still use the people’s innate skills when dealing personally with stakeholders. And so the AI +Human model is simply that, that’s what I call it. Which is, hey we’ll create smart software automation that helps support people and let people front that and use what’s good about both. But let’s not eliminate people.
In terms of workforce impact, how has AI changed the nature of work for your employees?
Well, currently it hasn’t. You know, it’s really early days. Lots of people are working out within the healthcare space and within the accounting space how they can you use AI in the ways that I’ve already mentioned and it’s generally around, you know, how do we speed up processes that humans have to do that might make the process very slow. You know, like data entry, for instance. It just makes no sense not to use… let’s call it smart software automation. But at the same time, you know, I don’t want to see huge job losses around this. So, it’s how do we use people more effectively and the people we have, and not lay off like you see with the huge US tech companies laying off literally tens of thousands of people. You know, that to me is a real problem. And you’ve got young people who can’t get jobs or struggle to find jobs, you know, on that first step of the ladder. And so, you know, companies, I think, have to reinvent themselves and the way they deal with people as this happens. And, you know, it could be a great thing for people, including the staff that we have. We have a staff leasing model. So, really how companies employ the staff that we provide to them remotely is up to them. But, you know, using those staff smarter, getting more value from them rather than having them down in the muck dealing with this work that’s drudgery is a great thing, and can relieve a lot of pressure off people and you’re going to have much happier staff getting rid of that work so long as they can be engaging with stakeholders in a way that adds value to the organization and that’s where I see the potential uplift.
Has AI reduced the need for certain roles or will it open more opportunities for the company to serve clients?
That’s a good question, Nia. And so right now it hasn’t, but I know, you know, certainly my largest client is working on various AI initiatives. You know, ultimately it could affect jobs and I’m just hoping that it’s used in a way that won’t dramatically affect jobs. That it is used to enhance the quality of the work that gets done, you know, so in other words, you don’t have keying errors, you don’t have any mistakes that have to be reworked so quality scores can, you know, be 100% instead of 98% in the particular case of the client that I’m talking about. And that staff can be used to enhance other value within the organization. I think that, eventually where AI is going, as I said earlier, it does concern me. I can see, especially with agentic AI where you can largely replace humans with thinking pieces of software, it could really badly impact jobs if we allow it to. And, you know, my personal hope is that governments step in and just don’t allow it. I don’t know what you’re going to do with the population. But you know, already if you go onto YouTube or TikTok and you see all these people talking about, you know, you can create an agent and you can …this agent can do all this work for you and you can go to sleep and you’ll be earning money while you sleep. Yeah, good luck with that if you try and do that on an industrial scale. Because, I can tell you my partner that I work with in AI, you know, has had 20 years in software automation leading up to, you know, now working on Agentic AI. And industrial scale AI… is expensive to develop, expensive to run. It’s not cost-free. And like any computer program, anything can happen. So, and, of course the amount of energy it takes to run these things is huge. So I think, and again why I say, I’m approaching this cautiously because you know, there’s so many problems in the world today, you know, there’s the threat of war… even in the skirmishing that’s going on… the threat of internet disruptions, electrical disruptions, you know, there’s so many potential threats and I think if businesses aren’t careful, they could face tremendous problems if they jump into so-called AI bots, both feet, and depend on them too much. Because, people you can redeploy them if there’s an issue in an area; people you can teach them new things very quickly. If your AI is down for whatever reason, you’ve got a major problem. And I personally would never like to see a company relying 100% on AI and having no people. Again, like you see, a lot of content creators talk about, you know… There’s just so much fluff out there and so much misinformation. But this is difficult. It’s expensive. It’s expensive to continue to run. And so it’s not, you know… It can be cost effective, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not cheap. And so, to me, yes using it in the right way and then utilizing your people in the right way along with it… the AI +Human model that I talk about that I believe is something that will work well… I think will do really well. But two feet in, 100% AI, relying on agentic AI bots for everything in the future… just think about what that means for the world and (what that) means for the communities that we live in. For people are out of work, what are they going to do? So, you got to think about these things. You can’t just be blindly into this. And to me, having my staff, paying them well, giving them, even though they’re remote staff and we’re based in the Philippines, I make sure my people have a living wage. And, you know, my thing has always been to pay at least double what the salaries in some of the major BPOS are. You know, wringing every last dollar out of everything… There’s more to life than that. So… I know that’s a long-winded answer Nia, but that’s how I feel about it.
Can you elaborate on the productivity gains that we talk about?
Yes. On the examples that I’ve got up on our website, an agent that we created for a client, it’s a patient onboarding agent and it deals with a difficult problem, which is handwritten faxes coming from doctor’s offices. I’d say 90% of incoming patient data is through an EHR and it’s already digital. But when you’ve got to deal with this kind of problem. One, it can be difficult to read those documents. And so having smart software that can read them very accurately, present them for comparison to be checked and then go on and do other aspects of the onboarding process automatically really helps free up the human that’s overseeing. Now one thing you do have to remember, of course, is and this applies to any AI agent. If your AI agent is working in a piece of software or multiple pieces of software, it can only work as fast as that software works. So if that software is slow that particular day for whatever reason, it can’t work faster than the software. So in the example that we’ve put up, we see that a human working at, you know, warp speed, if you like, could work with up to five AI agents… working with data rather than five humans doing that job. So that’s the scale that you could get out of it. Pushing the human to the ultimate limit, which is not anything I recommend. But certainly there’s a lot that can be done by… through automation as long as you use this AI +Human, the human can check the work. We do it so the human can check each major step and make sure that everything is correct and allow the software to proceed onwards rather than let it do it everything in the background and later on you find out that it’s screwed up. That’s not going to be a good thing. So that’s the approach that we’ve taken.
Are there specific industries or types of clients that benefit most from AI enabled outsourcing?
I don’t think so, Nia. I think every area of business can use AI. I think a lot of it depends on the size of the business ’cause as I said, if you want to develop… let’s call it industrial scale AI software solutions…they’re not cheap. And, you know, I, in business, certainly wouldn’t like to be relying on some of the ones that I see talked about by these content creators on Tik Tok and YouTube. I’m not saying they can’t be done, but they’re not… that’s not something that could be done at an industrial scale, and reliably. So, you know, it depends on the size of the business a lot. But I think every business, and certainly the two areas that with Healthscope-Agility… that we deal with, the two main areas that we deal with are accounting and various healthcare applications. So in both of those I sort of, I do see applications.
How can Agility assure clients about data security and safety with the AI +Human service?
Well, the way we’re doing our development is we treat the AI bot as a… like a human. So, they run off a computer. Just… the easiest way to think about it is let’s say that you’ve got a laptop and we could run two AI agents on one laptop. Now those AI agents are given credentials to get into client systems just like their human counterparts. It might be RCMagent1@ whatever the client’s email is. And they get issued with that email address. They get issued with the login credentials and they log in automatically just like a human does. And all of the work is done within the client system. So all of our usual IT security protocols remain in place and they work within the client systems just as human beings do today, very successfully. We are ISO 27001 certified, so we work to very strict standards. We get an ISO re-certification every year. I believe in making sure that we can deliver very secure systems for our clients from the aspect of where our people are working in our offices, gaining access to client systems.
Are there specific industries or types of clients that benefit most from AI enabled outsourcing?
You know, the time it takes to develop an agent. These are… we have an agent we call Specia, which my partner developed… my AI partner developed. So what we do is we take Specia and we code that to the client’s business rules. Then of course we test the agent, Nia, so the agent has to be tested in the sandbox and we make sure the agent is doing as it should. And with the AI +Human model, we then deploy the agent live and we’re doing it in a way where the human is checking each major step to make sure that the AI is performing as it should.
Are there specific industries or types of clients that benefit most from AI enabled outsourcing?
You know with every process, you have your KPIs and what I would be wanting to see is 100% quality scores. So instead of having, you know, I know a lot of our quality scores are already 100% with humans but, you know, we got some at 98%. And every time you’ve got a quality issue you’ve got a rework issue. So that’s more work that has to be redone and that’s not something that any business really wants to tolerate. So, you know, I think it’s quite a simple answer, Nia… Are you meeting the KPIs that you set out for the software automation project that you started with. And for me, it all comes down to productivity. Do you meet the productivity goal based on the speed of the third party software sets that you’re working in? And do you meet 100% quality goal? Because that should certainly be the goal.
To learn more about our AI +Human hybrid model, visit this page.
For more insight on AI and offshore staffing for healthcare companies, check this blog:
How can offshore staffing and AI +Human automation improve healthcare admin tasks for cost efficiency and productivity
Business dealing with finance and accounting can also benefit from AI-assisted offshore staff:
How AI and offshore staffing can improve efficiency of back office and admin work for accounting firms
For insights into offshore staffing, read this:
From burnout to breakthrough: How remote staffing transforms businesses