Sending routine work to lower-cost offshore locations has been viewed as a threat to domestic jobs, but those low-cost offshoring destinations now face a challenge of their own from cloud-based automation.

Outsourcing providers have long employed automation. But a recent report from management consulting firm A.T. Kearney highlights the growth in business process as a service (BPaaS), which lets companies hand off routine chores via the cloud to software systems that perform those chores without human intervention.

Any activity that is repeatable and rules-based is a good candidate for such automation, said Cliff Justice, a partner for innovation and enterprise solutions at KPMG. “Payroll, AP, order entry—all of those activities follow a set of rules and parameters and workflows.”