Sending routine work to lower-cost offshore locations hasbeen viewed as a threat to domestic jobs, but those low-costoffshoring destinations now face a challenge of their own fromcloud-based automation.

Outsourcing providers have long employed automation. But arecent report from management consulting firm A.T. Kearneyhighlights the growth in business process as a service (BPaaS),which lets companies hand off routine chores via the cloud tosoftware systems that perform those chores without humanintervention.

Any activity that is repeatable and rules-based is a goodcandidate for such automation, said Cliff Justice, a partner forinnovation and enterprise solutions at KPMG. “Payroll, AP, orderentry—all of those activities follow a set of rules and parametersand workflows.”