As AI Changes Outsourcing, Penbrothers Is Rethinking What Offshore Talent Means
As the outsourcing industry comes to grips with the implications of artificial intelligence, it faces a new challenge: whether skilled workers offshore will be able to apply this new technology to their work. This issue has become increasingly relevant to Penbrothers, an offshore staffing company established in the Philippines in 2014.
Penbrothers began its operations in a modest 50-seat office in Makati and has since grown into an organization that was ranked the fastest-growing company in the Philippines by Statista and the Philippine Daily Inquirer in 2024. The company has provided dedicated offshore teams for companies such as Singapore-based marketplace Carousell, gaming company Gamesys, workforce management company Servantex, and online education platform MasterClass. The company’s growth has been influenced by how it uses technologies, including AI, to support professionals, rather than replacing them.
Technology has been a part of Penbrothers’ business model for years. When the COVID-19 pandemic derailed the company’s efforts to offer coworking space, it began concentrating its efforts on remote staffing, which requires technology for mediated communication and other work functions. Penbrothers also developed The HUB, an internal software platform that supports several processes, including recruitment, onboarding, payroll, benefits, and employee engagement. The platform also incorporates artificial intelligence for functions such as conducting applicant interviews. These AI-powered interviews work in conjunction with human-led ones and evaluation by talent acquisition professionals, playing an important role in the company’s workforce infrastructure.
From Data Entry to AI Work: The Spot Ship Case
While the company has shown it understands how to incorporate these new technologies internally, how do these technologies affect the offshore workers it deploys? To answer this question, we must observe how Penbrothers has been assisting international companies in forming whole functional units offshore, ranging from marketing and business development to technical and data-based roles. One recent example is the maritime technology company Spot Ship, which employs artificial intelligence and machine learning technology for tasks like route optimization, vessel maintenance, and cargo optimization. As per the data published in Penbrothers’ case study, its Philippine team has grown from 14 employees in 2022 to 44 employees in 2023 and 129 in 2024. The work scope went beyond initial data entry roles and included other, more sophisticated functions.
According to Penbrothers’ calculations, the annual costs for the 129-member Philippine team amounted to $1.67 million, compared to $7.68 million that would be needed to staff the equivalent U.S. team, a gap of $6 million. While these figures provided by Penbrothers are not verified by an outside audit, the significant cost disparity remains a key element of offshore staffing.
The company’s work with Spot Ship exemplifies why offshore staffing is still relevant, despite the presence of AI technology. Spot Ship’s technology relies on AI and machine learning for applications like route optimization, vessel maintenance, and cargo optimization. In this particular case, offshore workers can either perform tasks that cannot be easily substituted by AI or work directly with AI as technicians. According to the World Economic Forum, demand for AI and machine learning specialists was projected to grow 40% globally by 2027, creating more openings for offshore AI specialists.
By 2024, Penbrothers was already reaching out to the wider AI community in the Philippines. It became a supporting partner of the IGNITE 2024 innovation conference, which attracted about 1,000 participants from startups, investors, enterprises, government, and the media. The conference concentrated on how AI was “rewriting the rules of business,” an increasingly pertinent topic for the staffing industry as employers rethink which tasks can be automated and which still require human input.
The Offshore Paradox: Cost vs. Capability
All these factors imply that AI is influencing the offshore staffing model followed by Penbrothers over the last decade. The company began by offering international companies access to Filipino professionals. As demand for distributed teams rose, it further developed its model for recruitment, onboarding, HR, compliance, and employee support. Now technology is influencing both the recruiting process and some of the jobs being performed by offshore employees.
The situation creates a potential paradox for offshore staffing. On the one hand, if AI eliminates enough routine work, labor costs become less important. On the other hand, if AI makes skilled workers more productive, companies may be more interested in hiring offshore workers in large numbers.
For Penbrothers, therefore, the challenge is not just to integrate AI technology, but to adapt its workforce model to an economy where the most valuable offshore worker is no longer the one who can perform a task at a lower cost, but the one with the knowledge and skills to leverage technology for their benefit.