Why the Next Bangalore or Hyderabad or Bonifacio Won’t Be a Place
Agentic AI, Virtual Delivery Centres, and the Rise of Digital Execution Cities
The global offshoring boom of the early 2000s reshaped organisations by separating execution from place. Agentic AI is repeating that shift. But this time, execution is being separated from people altogether. What emerges will look less like automation and more like a new kind of BPO city.
Globalisation is a relatively recent phenomenon. And in the early 2000s, something subtle but consequential began to unfold inside Western organisations. Standing in line for coffee in the Sydney CBD, shoulder to shoulder with the bankers of George Street and Martin Place, it was easy to assume that everything was working as designed. The offices were full. The deals were flowing. The machinery of capitalism looked solid.
But what began as a quiet experiment in cost reduction soon exposed a far deeper truth. When organisations attempted to move work beyond their walls, they discovered they didn’t actually understand how that work got done. Processes lived in people’s heads. Decisions relied on proximity. Exceptions were handled by habit rather than design. Basically, the first wave of globalisation forced organisations to confront the fact that they didn’t truly know themselves.
Business Process Outsourcing and Offshoring was supposed to be about labour arbitrage. Lower wages. Time zone leverage and scale. Large banks were among the earliest adopters, not out of experimentation but necessity. When margins are defended at the second decimal place and operational efficiency compounds at scale, even small reductions in unit cost become strategically meaningful.
What it became instead was a forced confrontation with organisational reality. Processes that lived in people’s heads had to be written down. Exceptions had to be named. Decisions had to be justified. Handoffs had to be explained to someone who wasn’t sitting three desks away. And for a while, progress was slow. Painfully slow.
Executives underestimated the sheer volume of documentation required. BPM diagrams multiplied. SOPs sprawled. Edge cases turned out to be the rule rather than the exception. And there was a deeper discomfort too. Not just with process discipline, but with trust. Trusting distant teams. Trusting unfamiliar cultures. Trusting companies most leaders had never even heard of.
Even as late as 2005-06, there was still a surprising lack of clarity about what was unfolding. At IBM’s Australia–New Zealand Sales Kick-Off on the Gold Coast, I was asked to stand in front of more than 300 sales and account executives and explain who the “Indian outsourcers” were and why they mattered. But then, almost without warning, the floodgates opened.
Once processes were explicit, portable, and measurable, they stopped being local. Work that had once been anchored to physical offices began to flow. Entire delivery models shifted. Cities like Bangalore, Pune, and Hyderabad didn’t rise because of cheap labour alone. They rose because execution itself had become transportable.
The result was profound. A generation of global technology firms emerged. Economies rebalanced. New talent ecosystems formed. The centre of gravity shifted and it never fully shifted back.
I saw that transition up close. In 2004, I travelled to Manila to close the local META Group office near Makati City. At the time, Bonifacio Global City literally did not exist. Other than in developer brochures. The land between Makati and the old military reservation was sparse, quiet, and largely undeveloped. It was a place passed by, not a place you went to.
Less than a decade later, that same ground was unrecognisable. Where there had been open land, there were now dense clusters of glass and steel high-rise offices, residential towers, and global delivery centres operating around the clock. Bonifacio had become a city in its own right and one of Asia’s most important hubs for global outsourced execution. That is the scale of change BPO set in motion.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that period lately and am increasingly convinced that while the delivery platform has changed, we are otherwise watching the same tectonic shift occur all over again.
Last time, the logic of optimisation drove execution to the only places where cheap labour at scale still existed, and entire cities rose to serve that demand. This time, the same logic applies, but the city won’t be physical.
Agentic AI is currently in its “this looks promising but feels messy” phase. A lot of early pilots have stalled. Proofs of concept have struggled to scale. Leaders have complained that the tools are impressive but unreliable. Teams have quietly discovered that their processes aren’t nearly as clean as they thought they were. Decisions that felt obvious have turned out to be contextual. Exceptions have exploded.
I think the disconnect is less about technology and more about readiness. Many vendors are aggressively marketing Level 5–6 agentic capabilities to organisations that are still struggling to define their Level 1–2 foundations. The result is that sales and delivery organisations end up aligned to the pace of marketing rather than the maturity of the customer. And while the two can coexist, operations cannot move at the speed of marketing. That was never the intent.
But this hasn’t been a failure of AI. It’s exactly the same organisational reckoning we saw during the first BPO and offshoring wave. In the same way that you can’t outsource chaos, you can’t delegate incoherence to an agent.
Before anything meaningful can happen, work has to be made legible. Inputs defined. Outcomes bounded. Authority clarified. Escalation paths designed. Controls articulated. Metrics agreed. The real work, once again, isn’t automation. It’s self-knowledge. That’s something we’re all impatient for.
That’s why progress feels slower than the headlines suggest. The technology has been ahead of the organisations adopting it. Exactly as it was twenty years ago. But history suggests this phase doesn’t last forever.
That was the hidden force behind offshoring. Documentation didn’t just enable delivery. It shifted the centre of execution. Once work could move, it did. Talent followed. Capital followed. Capability clustered.
Agentic AI creates the same condition, but with a far more radical implication. Execution itself is becoming abstract. That is not hyperbolic. Let’s ponder that for a minute. Agents literally don’t sit in buildings. They don’t sleep. They don’t resign. They don’t require visas or commute times. They consume tokens, operate within guardrails, and escalate when designed to do so. They can also be insourced, outsourced, federated, shared, or rented. Geography becomes optional. Time becomes elastic.
But this is also where the analogy with BPO stops being clever and starts being uncomfortable. In the 2000s, organisations had to decide whether to build captive centres offshore or outsource to third parties. Some did both.
Today, the choice reappears in a new form. Do you run agents internally, tightly coupled to your data, architecture, and governance? Or do you consume agentic capacity as a service, trusting external platforms to execute parts of your organisation on your behalf? If the decision feels tactical, that is a mistake. It isn’t. Because just as before, the early choices will harden into operating models that last decades.
Contemporary BPO cities and offshore delivery hubs came into existence because of density. Skills, services, capital, and coordination concentrated until something self-reinforcing emerged. Once enough capability clustered, those cities stopped being back offices and began to function as innovation engines.
Over time, some went further still. As talent deepened and decision-making followed execution, these centres began to assume strategic importance, shaping roadmaps, influencing investment, and increasingly determining where growth would come from. What started as delivery hubs evolved into centres of gravity in their own right. We’re seeing this occur today in the way large global technology vendors are balancing India as a strategic execution and innovation centre, with Singapore increasingly acting as a regional coordination and administrative hub.
Agentic ecosystems are already showing the same tendencies. Common agent frameworks. Shared orchestration layers. Specialised agent roles. Reusable process patterns. Governance primitives. Observability tooling. Token optimisation. Cost-to-serve models. These are the streets, utilities, and institutions of a new kind of city.
It won’t have a skyline. It won’t appear on a map. But it will concentrate execution, capability, and influence in ways that are no less real for being invisible. We’re already seeing early versions of this in the wild. Platforms like ServiceNow describe it as a control tower. The place where work, agents, workflows, and decisions are orchestrated rather than directly executed. Accenture talks about agent-led delivery factories embedded inside client operating models. IBM, drawing on decades of systems integration and automation, frames it as cognitive operations.
The language differs, but the struggle is the same. That is, to become the de facto regulatory authority for digital workforces setting the rules, enforcing the controls, and deciding how autonomous execution is allowed to become.
Digital agentic cities won’t live entirely in the cloud or inside legacy systems. They will span them coordinating execution across environments that were never designed to be seen as a single place. For that to work, they must be interoperable by design and capable of managing multiple digital labour forces within a single, regulated operating environment. Not one workforce, not one platform, but many (human, automated, and agentic) governed together inside the complexity of a contemporary enterprise.
Organisations that align themselves early will find execution cheaper, faster, and more adaptable. Those that don’t will struggle to compete with firms whose workforce can scale at machine speed. The uncomfortable truth is that these cities are being built regardless, and without a central authority, what emerges isn’t innovation, but sprawl.
Much of the public debate about AI has to this point fixated on human displacement. That’s understandable, but I also think it misses the deeper pattern.
BPO didn’t eliminate work. It reorganised it. Yes, it did hollow out organisations that couldn’t define themselves clearly but it also elevated those that could orchestrate complexity across distance. Agentic AI will do the same.
It will punish organisations that rely on tacit knowledge, heroics, and informal coordination. It will expose unclear decision rights. It will surface governance gaps that have been tolerated for years. It will make ambiguity very expensive. But it will also reward those that understand their own architecture, both technical and organisational.
This is why AI strategies that start with tools and finish with dashboards feel fundamentally incomplete. The challenge isn’t intelligence or automation. It’s whether an organisation can describe itself clearly enough to be executed by something other than habit. That’s why this is a leadership moment. CEOs don’t need to understand AI, but they absolutely need to understand the organisational consequences of deploying it.
What is undeniable is that the offshoring boom reshaped global technology dominance because it changed where execution lived. Agentic AI will reshape it again by changing what execution is.
The slow burn we’re seeing now, the frustration, the false starts, the documentation fatigue, is not a sign that this moment is overhyped. It’s a sign that we’re still early. Confidence should come though from the knowledge we have lived through it before. And we came out stronger. For those early in their careers, that means experiencing a period of uncertainty where the rules are shifting faster than the narratives explaining them. Because the very shape of work is changing underneath us all.
But once the legibility problem is solved at scale, and once agents become trusted participants in organisational workflows rather than novelties, the shift will feel sudden. It always does. And by the time it’s obvious to everyone, the agentic city will already exist.
And perhaps that is the quiet unease sitting underneath all of this. Not that we are entering a simulation, but that we are finally seeing how simulated our organisations already were. Roles, approvals, escalation paths, and incentives are all abstractions we agreed to treat as real because humans were inside them.
Agentic AI doesn’t invent a new world. It just removes the camouflage that humna-in-the-loop has always provided. And when execution no longer requires presence, belief, or habit, what remains is structure. Some organisations will recognise themselves in that reflection. Others will discover that what they thought was a living system was mostly theatre.
The city of digital agents will keep growing either way. The only real questions left will be who will govern it, whether you helped build it, and whether your work quietly moved there without you.
Above all else, there is a quiet irony here. The captive centres and offshore providers that industrialised execution during the BPO era are likely to be among the first organisations forced to confront an agentic future. I don’t think it is a case that what made them indispensable last time makes them replaceable first this time.
Rather, after spending two decades breaking human work into repeatable systems and delivering it at scale, it is that they now find themselves confronting the same optimisation logic they once helped their clients apply, only this time where that same work can be executed by something else entirely.
For them, the change may be as great, where the implications of agentic execution are not theoretical. They are immediate, unavoidable, and impossible to ignore. Paid subscribers can read on for a closer look at the ten Australian organisations and five technology vendors I’ll be watching in 2026 as they shape the early contours of the agentic decade.