Gengashree Nidhiban, 30, holds a BTech in information technology from the College of Engineering, Anna University, Chennai. She completed her internship at Qualcomm in Bengaluru before taking up a full-time job helping companies automate tasks using artificial intelligence.
From Agriculture to AI
Sathyashree A, 30, earned a BSc in agriculture from Annamalai University, Chidambaram, Cuddalore. She underwent intensive AI training on the job and now works on advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) for autonomous vehicles for a Europe-based automaker. Her colleague Harini M, who holds a BE in agriculture from Muthayammal College of Engineering, Rasipuram, also received AI training and helps ensure that auto-checkout stores at global retail outlets operate seamlessly.
Remote Work Revolution
None of these professionals work in major tech hubs like Bengaluru, Gurugram, or Hyderabad. Gengashree works from Virudhunagar, about an hour’s drive from Madurai in Tamil Nadu, for DesiCrew, a BPO firm specializing in remote centres. Sathyashree and Harini work in Mallasamudram and Salem respectively for NextWealth Entrepreneurs, another similar BPO.
For years, remote BPOs were considered low-cost support units handling basic data entry or back-office tasks for large urban centres. That perception is changing. As AI automates routine work in big city BPOs, smaller centres in India’s hinterland are finding a new role: enabling AI itself. JK Manivannan, CEO of DesiCrew Solutions, notes that the pandemic opened up the work-from-anywhere model, while AI created a level playing field for all.
AI-Driven Work
Today, remote talent annotates data, validates AI models, works on computer vision, trains language systems, processes voice datasets, tests AI outputs, and helps companies turn automation into real business workflows. Their customers include Google, Toyota, Pfizer, Disney Hotstar, and AT&T.
DesiCrew has around 2,000 employees across centres in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, with project-based work extending to nearly 20 states for language and voice datasets. Around 60% of its business comes from global clients and 40% from Indian customers. About 70% of its workforce is women. NextWealth Entrepreneurs, founded about 13 years ago, operates 11 centres including in Hubballi, Mysuru, Puducherry, Bhilai in Chhattisgarh, and Jaipur and Udaipur in Rajasthan.
Job Creation in the AI Era
Sridhar Mitta, chief mentor and founder of NextWealth Entrepreneurs, observes that AI replaces people but also creates new jobs. He states, “We are in the business of doing those new jobs.” Mitta, a tech veteran who was the first employee and CTO of Wipro, co-founded NextWealth to create wider social impact and offer opportunities for women in remote areas. Around 60% of employees are women, and nearly 80% of the work is now AI-related. Employees undergo three to four months of training on AI fundamentals, vertical-specific domains, and customer-specific processes before assignments.
Sathyashree joined NextWealth in December 2023 with no prior experience. Her first project involved creating training datasets for ADAS systems, requiring annotation of images and LiDAR data so autonomous vehicle models could better identify objects and driving conditions. She has since moved into the delivery excellence team as an auditor. Harini, who joined in March 2025, handles cases where the auto-checkout model fails to process transactions.
Gengashree helps automate client workflows in insurance and accounting processes. Her team identifies where AI can save time, extract data from PDFs, generate emails, create reports, and handle customer tickets faster. Manivannan notes that one insurance transaction that once took six hours was redesigned to close in 30 minutes. Gengashree joined the company part-time in 2019 while raising two daughters, managing home, and acquiring new skills through courses in prompt engineering and AWS and Google certifications. She is now a full-time employee, a team leader, and has participated in AI hackathons to explore automation applications for client processes.
Shrinidhi Bhat, an associate manager at DesiCrew based in Kapu, Karnataka, has been with the company for 12 years. A commerce graduate from Mangalore University, Bhat is helping transition manual operations for a global retailer to automated ones. She has a six-year-old daughter and her husband is a bank employee.
Technology Enabling Inclusion
Newer technologies like accent conversion tools are making it easier for talent in remote areas to engage with global clients. Accent conversion adjusts pronunciation and intonation so the agent is easier to understand. Agents speak as they would, and the output is optimized for clarity. Vimal Nair, chief growth officer at Bengaluru-based voice AI solutions company Krisp, says accent conversion removes the need for traditional accent training and allows agents to focus on problem solving instead of worrying about their accents.
Accent conversion, along with traditional cost advantages, is turning the tide in favour of remote centres. Mitta says costs are around 50% lower than in large cities, while attrition is about 10% annually, compared with roughly 50% in urban BPO centres.
Ethical Considerations
A recent Netflix series highlighted centres in India handling data annotation for pornographic content, impacting small-town households. However, Manivannan states that DesiCrew does not do such work. “And I believe India is not tuned to handle such tasks. If it happens, it’s below the radar, in small fly-by-night operations,” he says.
Future Outlook
The future is no longer about being a cheaper extension of a city centre. It is about being closer to distributed talent, languages, dialects, and stable workforces, solving for the world. NextWealth plans to double its headcount to 10,000 in the next few years, with more AI-related work. DesiCrew is expanding its capabilities in data, automation, and AI.
