The way organisations have long approached outsourcing contracts is no longer fit for purpose in an AI-driven business environment.
For years, legal teams negotiated pricing, tightened service level agreements, allocated risk, collected signatures, and moved on to the next deal without a second thought.
That transactional model is now breaking down as artificial intelligence accelerates change inside outsourcing relationships faster than most organisations can realistically adapt.
Irina Beschieriu, senior counsel for deals and operations at ATOS US, works across complex outsourcing and technology transactions within global vendor ecosystems and has observed this shift firsthand.
She argues that the contract is no longer simply documenting the business relationship but is increasingly functioning as the operating system for it.
The framing of outsourcing as a cost-reduction exercise has also become outdated, with the strategic purpose of these arrangements expanding considerably in recent years.
“Today, outsourcing is much more than lowering your costs,” Beschieriu explained. “It’s really gathering capabilities and adding human workforce and AI capabilities now to your organization.”
Companies are no longer simply purchasing labour through outsourcing agreements but are instead acquiring infrastructure, automation, AI capabilities, and long-term operational resilience from their vendors.
Beschieriu noted that the US outsourcing market alone is projected to reach roughly $1 trillion, with global IT outsourcing expected to approach $600 billion this year.
At that scale, a vendor sitting inside a company’s operational core transforms the agreement from a peripheral document into something genuinely foundational to how the business functions.
One of Beschieriu’s most pointed observations concerned not contractual language but the governance structures that surround these agreements after they are signed.
“Most deals now fail because there are bad assumptions,” she said. “There’s due diligence that was not done correctly. There is weak governance. There are poor change mechanisms that don’t keep up with the contract.”
Legal teams often invest enormous energy optimising contract wording while underinvesting in the operational systems required to make the vendor relationship actually work over time.
Outsourcing agreements increasingly behave like living systems, with technology, data flows, AI capabilities, and vendor dependencies all shifting well after the ink has dried.
Beschieriu described effective governance as the mechanism that allows parties to evolve a relationship without reopening and renegotiating the entire contract every time circumstances change.
“The simplest test,” she said, “is can the parties adapt the relationship through governance or do they have to reopen the whole contract every time and renegotiate every tiny thing?”
AI is also quietly reshaping the balance of power between buyers and vendors during negotiations themselves, adding a layer of complexity that in-house counsel must now account for.
Vendors now use AI to generate faster and more polished responses to requests for proposals, while buyers use AI to compare vendors and evaluate bids at previously impossible scale.
Beschieriu was clear, however, that AI itself is not the differentiator in these increasingly machine-assisted negotiations between sophisticated commercial parties.
“The winner,” she explained, “is the party that knows how to use the data, knows how to use governance, and knows how to use this AI advantage.”
That competitive advantage is shifting legal practice away from access to information and toward the ability to build operational systems around the intelligence AI generates.
When asked what practical advice she would offer in-house counsel handling complex technology deals, Beschieriu’s answer was direct and immediate.
“Really understand the technical offering,” she said. “Ask all the questions. Sit down with your technical teams. Understand what’s being delivered.”
Lawyers who do not understand how the underlying technology works cannot meaningfully structure governance around it, properly allocate risk, or identify where the relationship will fracture under real operational pressure.
The outsourcing lawyer of the future is not simply negotiating terms but translating operational systems into contractual frameworks, a fundamentally different role than most legal departments were originally designed to perform.