Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly revolutionizing software development, particularly in software engineering outsourcing. AI accelerates project timelines, reduces costs, and enhances efficiency by automating repetitive tasks like code generation, debugging, and testing. AI-powered tools further help improve collaboration between remote teams by offering improved project management, predictive analytics, and real-time communication enhancements. Moreover, AI ensures higher code quality through advanced error detection and optimization algorithms. It also enables more accurate analysis of vast datasets to understand the user needs better and build personalized software solutions. Besides, AI supports seamless integration of distributed teams, driving innovation and productivity in software engineering outsourcing while mitigating challenges like time-zone differences and language barriers.
GoodFirms Roundtable is a series of podcast interview discussions where leading industry experts, CEOs, and people holding prominent positions in IT services and software companies share their valuable experiences and opinions on various topics. The podcast discussion becomes a rich source of information for budding entrepreneurs willing to start their businesses.
GoodFirms recently had a chance to interview Mladen Lazic, COO, Scopic. In the following podcast discussion, Mladen shares his knowledge and views about the role of AI in software development and how it will reshape the software engineering outsourcing industry.
Scopic is a US based custom software development company that excels in broad-spectrum IT services, including software development, web development, mobile app development, AI development, AI consulting, cloud services, software design, staff augmentation, and more. The company caters to businesses of all sizes across versatile industries like education, manufacturing, finance, real estate, media & entertainment, and design. Scopic is the perfect digital partner for businesses, managing their end-to-end project needs from consulting on project ideation to implementing the most effective tech stack. Through its top-notch services, the company enables its clients to rejuvenate and turn their vision into a profitable reality.
The Podcast Discussion Highlights the Following:
- What software engineering outsourcing involves, and how will AI influence this?
- How AI helps in filling skill gaps and supports rapid development; Some examples of how AI aids the outsourcing industry in meeting the demand for skilled software development.
- How is automation influencing the roles of developers and other professionals within the outsourcing industry?
- With more tasks being automated, how Scopic leverages AI, ensuring that the technology supports human talent rather than replacing it.
- How does less dependency on human knowledge holders impact productivity and project outcomes?
- With AI becoming more integral, how have customer expectations evolved regarding speed, quality, and innovation in outsourced projects?
- Example of a project where the Scopic team leveraged AI to not only meet but exceed the client’s expectations.
- Skills that are essential in AI-driven software outsourcing, and how Scopic positions its team to attract or develop this specialized talent.
- Will the growing demand for AI expertise increase the emphasis on AI roles and restructure the software engineering outsourcing industry?
- How AI can improve QA and security within outsourced projects; Some tools or methods that can be effectively used for this purpose.
The Podcast Also Covers These Crucial Points:
- Common challenges that companies face in integrating AI in outsourcing, and tips on how these issues can be addressed.
- How the Scopic team ensures data privacy, security, and compliance to protect sensitive data, especially with global clients.
- Future trends in AI-powered software outsourcing.
- How real-time AI processing at the network’s edge can impact industries like healthcare or autonomous vehicles?
- Some advice for businesses looking to explore AI-driven outsourcing for the first time as AI continues to evolve.
For Listeners New to This Concept, Could You Briefly Explain What Software Engineering Outsourcing Entails, and How AI Is Starting to Influence or Reshape This Practice?
Mladen explains that outsourcing software engineering is the concept of offering professional services in the area of software development to companies and individuals. It allows entrepreneurs to avoid the hassle and pain of hiring and managing an in-house development team and enables big companies (even software companies) to quickly scale up and down based on their demand. Mladen highlights that after 2020, companies were more adaptable to remote work and working with offshore companies, and this paved the way for affordable outsourcing options.
Mladen further details that the release of ChatGPT has displayed the high level of maturity and usability that AI has reached, making it impossible to be avoided and eliminated. Thus, outsourcing companies are influenced by AI in multiple ways, including process improvements for enhancing efficiency both in business operations and technical aspects. Besides, companies are experimenting with AI in problem solving and cost optimization. However, according to Mladen, this has a drawback too, as companies are now using AI to replace humans to the extent of leveraging autonomous AI software developers.
Moreover, Mladen highlights that AI has also increased client expectations by opening up opportunities, compelling outsourcing companies to upgrade their engineering staff to be able to meet these requests.
There’s a Lot of Talk About How AI Can Fill Skill Gaps and Support Rapid Development. Could You Share Some Examples of How AI Specifically Aids the Outsourcing Industry in Meeting the Demand for Skilled Software Development?
Mladen clarifies that AI fills the skills gap by removing the need for Googling and shrinking the time for developers to jump into another language/framework. AI thus acts as coding assistant, allowing developers to avoid the need to go out of their editors and save time on searching for solutions. Further, it enables developers to switch and adapt to new tech and rapidly write code in varied languages not familiar to them and helps them do much more without compromising on productivity.
How Has This Automation Influenced the Roles of Developers and Other Professionals Within the Outsourcing Industry?
Mladen clarifies that automation has enhanced day to day work by simplifying things, making repetitive tasks more pleasant, and enhancing quality; for example, it helps people review docs without missing important details. However, it can put some jobs at risk as eventually junior developers, instead of writing new code, will focus more on learning how to effectively review the code and Software Engineers will work as reviewers for quality control of the output of coding LLMs. However, Mladen adds that the need for "human touch" cannot still be eliminated in AI-powered coding, and the human brain will be needed to solve problems.
With More Tasks Being Automated, How Does Your Company Ensure That AI Supports Human Talent Rather Than Replacing It.
Mladen reveals that Scopic is leveraging AI to augment and make the work easier, and the company is trying to create a blend of human and AI, without replacing either. For this, they are encouraging their staff to learn and leverage AI to enhance outcomes and save time. Moreover, Scopic is providing AI/ML training to their Engineers to ensure better adoption.
From Your Experience, How Does Less Dependency on Human Knowledge Holders Impact Productivity and Project Outcomes?
Mladen again clarifies that AI can only augment existing human knowledge, not replace it. However, it helps enhance productivity and provides buffer time to the team, ensuring enhanced project outcomes; but, as this will also raise expectations, the buffer will be soon gone. Mladen further highlights that another question that prevents humans from being replaced by AI is that if the human component is eliminated, who would bear the responsibility for the quality and accuracy of produced software?
With AI Becoming More Integral, Clients Are Likely Expecting Faster and Higher-Quality Results. How Have Customer Expectations Evolved Regarding Speed, Quality, and Innovation in Outsourced Projects?
Mladen reveals that Scopic is not facing such issues with client expectations because the company is keeping their expectations realistic on the potential of AI, including the fact that AI still cannot replace developers, and to ensure quality, engineers still need to go through every line of code and verify it. However, Mladen believes that the trust in AI output will increase with time, for both the company and the clients.
Could You Share an Example Where Your Team Leveraged AI to Not Only Meet but Exceed a Client’s Expectations?
Mladen informs that Scopic was building a software for a client from the dental industry that involved an algorithm for teeth segmentation from 3D scan. It required taking a 3D scan of a person's jaw, segmenting teeth from the scan, and enabling orthodontists to manipulate the teeth individually and plan the treatment accordingly. However, the solution had deficiencies and required manual input and user interference to extract the teeth properly from gingiva. Scopic developed a custom ML model to eliminate the limitations and enhance the solution, with amazing results, proving that AI is not just LLM and helping Scopic exceed client's expectations.
What Skills Are Now Essential in AI-Driven Software Outsourcing, and How Are You Positioning Your Team to Attract or Develop This Specialized Talent?
Mladen emphasizes that while many companies are still following traditional development and avoiding AI, it will soon become an integral part of every project. It will become imperative for software engineers to understand AI concepts, including prompt engineering, model inference, AI/ML project lifecycle, and more, to be able to use the prebuilt models and successfully manage debugging, testing, and similar aspects of the SDLC.
Given the Growing Demand for AI Expertise, Do You Think This Will Lead To a Restructuring in the Outsourcing Industry to Place More Emphasis on AI Roles?
Mladen believes that soon AI/ML skills/knowledge will become a mandatory requirement for people to work on projects, and software engineering will witness a permanent change; and how we approach problem solving and do day to day work will be highly influenced and driven by AI.
How Has AI Improved QA and Security Within Outsourced Projects? Are There Any Tools or Methods You Find Especially Effective for This Purpose?
Mladen specifies that Scopic is leveraging AI and LLMs to make their QA processes more robust and detail oriented. Further, the company is trying to use AI to identify test cases from a specification document and to verify existing test cases. Besides, Scopic is experimenting with coding assistants like GitHub, Copilot, and Codeium to write unit cases. Mladen adds that the results with all of these usages look promising.
Despite the Benefits, Integrating AI in Outsourcing Comes With Challenges, Please Brief Us About a Few Challenges and Tips on How You Address These Issues Within Your Organization?
Mladen reveals that the apprehensions about data privacy and security were the most obvious challenges in integrating AI in outsourcing, as even some of their clients made them commit not to use AI tools. The issue was partly addressed by general acceptance and global education and popularization of these tools. However, Scopic further established an internal AI committee composed of people from operations, legal, and engineering to examine and make sure that the AI tools they choose offer utmost data privacy and protection.
Mladen highlights that another significant challenge was regarding unrealistic client expectations. The company tries to educate them on the potential of AI tools in software development and how much effort it takes with the limited control available over these LLMs. Furthermore, identifying and debugging is much more difficult with AI and ML based development than in traditional software development due to code complexities.
Besides, Mladen believes that the most challenging part is data collection for machine learning and having the right amount of data available. Scopic is trying to address this issue by searching for publicly available data and doing data acquisition or synthetic data generation.
Data Privacy and Security Are Big Concerns in AI-Driven Outsourcing. How Does Your Team Ensure Compliance and Protect Sensitive Data, Especially With Global Clients?
Mladen elaborates that Scopic takes all the necessary measures for maintaining data confidentiality and security, in two layers. In the first layer, the company takes all the data security and privacy recommendations from HIPAA and SOC 2, uses security best practices, and trains their workforce on how they must handle this data. For the second layer, which involves using third party services (like OpenAI), Scopic follows due diligence about the third-party provider and makes sure that the data shared with these providers is kept private and secure, with the acceptable retention rate, and that it is not used to train these big models.
Looking Ahead, What Are the Top Trends You Foresee in AI-Powered Outsourcing, and How Do You Plan to Adapt or Lead in These Areas?
According to Mladen, the future potential of AI-powered outsourcing will depend on the industry and how the capabilities of AI/ML will grow. However, the top trends of AI-powered outsourcing will include the BPO sector where AI will help optimise business processes and reduce costs; Scopic is trying to leverage this internally first and will then offer this to their clients.
Further, Mladen details that in ML/DL, ML will help create new models that will solve specific problems. For this, Scopic is hiring trained and skillful ML engineers and looking for partners and solutions for data gathering and data labeling. Besides, another significant trend in AI-powered outsourcing will be the Gen AI (LLMs) Integrations to provide better quality products. Scopic has been using this ever since OpenAI opened up their API. Mladen adds that the company is trying to adopt all the new AI services and open source models, finding ways to support and help their clients solve their problems.
IoT Integration With AI Is Another Exciting Frontier. Could You Share How Real-Time AI Processing at the Network’s Edge Might Impact Industries Like Healthcare or Autonomous Vehicles?
Mladen believes that having AI inference run on the edge will enable companies to use the high power resources on servers on the edge of the network, enabling development of mobile-friendly solutions. This will further enhance the quality in real-time health monitoring or real-time monitoring of drivers conditions. Moreover, running AI on the network's edge combined with the new capabilities of smartphones and smart devices, can help create wonders in self-care and remote care solutions for the healthcare sector.
Finally, as AI Continues to Evolve, What Advice Would You Offer to Businesses Looking To Explore AI-Driven Outsourcing for the First Time?
Mladen informs businesses that AI is another major leap in software engineering. Thus, when they look for outsourcing partners, they must make sure that they choose experienced companies that are adopting the AI wave and have established workflows and processes to drive projects to completion. Moreover, the outsourcing partner must treat them more like partners instead of clients, educate and advise them, and help them understand the work better.
Lastly, What Feedback or Suggestions Would You Like to Share With GoodFirms to Help Us Serve You Better?
You can listen to this podcast here.
What’s Next
AI is rapidly transforming software development outsourcing by automating repetitive tasks, improving accuracy, enhancing developers’ productivity, and accelerating project delivery. AI-powered tools help streamline coding, testing, and debugging, reducing development time and costs. Moreover, AI-driven predictive analytics allows better resource allocation and risk assessment, enhancing project management. Further, AI fosters collaboration across teams through real-time insights and automation.
With so much to offer, AI helps drive efficiency and innovation in software development outsourcing, creating new opportunities for both businesses and outsourcing companies. Embrace AI in software development outsourcing for dynamic, scalable, and competitive outcomes.
You can share your knowledge or experience on our platform on any topic related to IT services. Just drop an email to [email protected].