AI is not replacing people. It is widening the distance between them.

The gap I see is not in the output, it is in what the person is able to spend their day thinking about. A rep who knows how to work with AI shows up to a call already knowing the company, the market they are in, what changed for them last quarter, and the same rep without it spends that hour building a list. Same person, same skill, but one of them is doing the work and the other one is preparing to do the work.

What I have not seen is AI making an average person good. It compounds whatever judgment is already there, and if someone does not know what a good discovery call sounds like, the tool will help them produce more of the wrong thing, faster. So my honest answer is that AI is not replacing people, it is widening the distance between the ones who were already curious and the ones who were waiting to be told what to do.

Cost is the reason most companies call, but it is rarely the reason they stay. The capability that actually changes how a company operates is speed of access to talent, being able to test a function before committing an entity, a headcount plan and a year of payroll to it. If a founder wants to know whether outbound works for their product, they can find that out in weeks instead of quarters, and if the answer is no, they have not damaged anyone's career to learn it.

The second capability is time zone, which sounds small until you have lived without it. A team that shares your working day can be corrected the same afternoon, not the next morning, and that is the difference between coaching someone and receiving a report about what already happened. And the third is language and cultural proximity, because a bilingual professional who understands how a US client thinks does not need a script, they need context. Cost savings is the entry point. What people keep is the ability to move.

The obvious ones are already crowded, since everyone is comfortable putting support and virtual assistants nearshore. Where I think companies are leaving the most on the table is revenue operations and the analytical side of sales. There is an enormous amount of work in cleaning a CRM, building the reporting a leader actually looks at, researching accounts properly, and companies keep asking a US account executive to do it at the highest hourly cost in the building, or they simply do not do it at all.

The other one is anything with a real process behind it that leaders assume must sit locally out of habit, things like bookkeeping, project coordination, HR coordination and onboarding. And I would add sales enablement, which is my own background, because the material that makes a team better rarely gets written when the person responsible for writing it is also carrying a number. Those functions do not need to be in the room. They need to be owned by someone accountable.

Three things, and none of them are technology. The first is that the role has to be defined before the person arrives, what success looks like in thirty days, who they report to, what they are allowed to decide without asking. Most of the failures I have seen were not talent failures, they were a company outsourcing a problem it had never written down.

The second is that the person is treated as part of the team and not as a vendor. If they are not in the standup, not in the channel, not mentioned when something goes well, they will behave exactly like the outside contractor you told them they were. The third is a manager on the client side who is willing to manage. Nearshore does not remove leadership work, it relocates it.

And I will say the uncomfortable part, if a company has quality and control problems internally, distributing the team will not create discipline, it will only make the existing disorder visible.

I have not held the title, but I have run the operations side of this, leading SDR and BDR teams, and nearshore operations across tech, renewable energy, cybersecurity and property management, so I have watched this decision get made well and badly.

The clearest signal is when your most expensive people are spending their week on work that does not require them. When an account executive is building lists, or an operations lead is reconciling spreadsheets, the company does not have a capacity problem, it has an allocation problem, and hiring another senior person locally will only make it more expensive.

The second signal is a role you have tried to fill twice and failed, or filled and lost within the year, and that usually means the local market does not price that role the way you do. And the third is when growth is being held back by something you already know how to do. If the process exists and the only missing piece is hands, that is the moment to look outside instead of waiting for a budget cycle.

Yes, and I think it is the more interesting question than whether AI replaces anyone. What is happening is that roles are being separated into judgment and execution, and those two parts do not need to sit in the same place or cost the same. The relationship with the client, the decision on pricing, the accountability for the number, all of that stays close. The research, the preparation, the follow up, the documentation, the first draft of everything, all of that can be supported nearshore, and increasingly it is a person working with AI rather than a person doing it by hand.

What I would warn against is the assumption that because AI can produce the first draft, nobody needs to own it. Someone still has to know when the output is wrong. My view is that the strongest structure is a smaller local core making decisions, supported by nearshore professionals who are genuinely good with these tools, working in the same hours so the correction happens the same day.

I think it will look less like a headcount plan and more like a design decision. Companies will keep a small internal core that holds the strategy, the client relationships and the accountability, they will automate whatever is genuinely repetitive, and they will build the layer in between with nearshore professionals who work in their time zone and know how to use these tools, not as cheaper labor, but as the people who actually run the operation day to day.

The mistake I expect many will make is to treat that middle layer as disposable, hiring by the hour, replacing constantly, never investing in anyone. That model produces exactly the quality people are afraid of, and then they blame the region.

I am building in El Salvador rather than somewhere cheaper because I want the opposite of that. My philosophy has not changed, take care of my client so I can take care of my people, and that way they can take care of me. Whatever the technology does, that part is still the whole business.