When Andrew D’Ambrosio and Jared Buncombe founded Voxworks in Sydney in early 2025, they set out to solve what seemed to be a simple problem, and in the process uncovered an industry that has the potential to stem a mass leakage of local jobs to offshore operators. 

When they founded the business, Voice AI technology was gaining traction in other markets but fundamentally didn’t connect in the Australian context. Every system routed through offshore endpoints, oblivious to the latency penalty Australia pays for its distance from the major cloud regions, together with the compliance and security implications of phone call data crossing international borders.

A year later, the company is being called the “Australian ElevenLabs” by industry operators, and the founders argue the real story isn’t about voice synthesis at all. It’s about a $300 billion global outsourcing industry that’s about to be unbundled, and the Australian businesses positioned to lead the shift.

A founder pairing built for this problem

D’Ambrosio spent 14 years in investment banking, while Buncombe brought 15 years in automation and control systems engineering. It’s an unusual combination for an AI startup – a corporate strategist and a systems engineer rather than two ex-Google researchers. 

The numbers that turn the tide on the offshoring arbitrage

For a 250-seat contact centre, Voxworks estimates replacing 50% of call minutes with AI saves up to $4.6 million per year against using offshore staff. Even against the cheapest offshore providers, AI voice delivers 23-65% cost reduction per minute. That’s before accounting for the hidden costs of offshore: longer average handle times, lower first-call resolution, the escalation tax of calls bouncing back onshore.

The BPO death spiral

The implications for the global business process outsourcing industry are structural. The ISG Index for 2025 showed global BPO annual contract value fell 14% to $7.3 billion — the lowest since 2020 — with financial services BPO down 25%, the worst result since 2017. ISG attributed the decline directly to automation and AI absorbing task-centric work.

In February 2026, Vinod Khosla, one of the world’s most successful venture investors, told the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi that IT and BPO services would “disappear, almost certainly within the next five years.” Khosla argued that the work that gets outsourced is, by definition, the work most amenable to automation.

Why Australia matters in the APAC picture

The shift creates an opening for Australian and broader APAC enterprises. For decades, the offshore BPO model meant customer service quality was always a compromise: cheap and patchy, or expensive and onshore. AI voice collapses that trade-off, but only if the technology actually works.

This is where global platforms struggle. Voice AI built for American English mishears Australian place names, terminology and idioms. The same problems appear in Singaporean English, in New Zealand vernacular, in the multilingual mix of Southeast Asian markets.

“Most voice AI vendors selling into Australia have built American products with a configuration option for ‘Australian English,'” Buncombe says. “That’s not how this works. The accent is the easy part. The hard part is the entire stack of decisions about how a system handles local nuance, and that stack has to be built for the market you’re serving. For example, we spent an entire week figuring how to get an LLM to understand what “yeah, nah” means. It sounds trivial but it’s devilishly hard to get this stuff right.”

What the next twelve months look like

D’Ambrosio’s forecast for the contact centre operating model is unsentimental. AI takes over the work human agents like least: appointment booking, account inquiries, after-hours calls, payment reminders, first-level triage. That’s 40-60% of typical call volume and is the work that drives the 29% attrition rate by burning agents out on tasks beneath their skill level.

What humans keep is the work that builds brand loyalty: denied claims, complex billing disputes, sensitive medical conversations, high-value customer escalations. The interactions that require human judgment and empathy. 

“The best human agents currently spend maybe 30-40% of their day on those calls because the rest of their time is consumed by routine work that AI handles faster and cheaper,” D’Ambrosio says. “Strip that away, and you have a smaller, more skilled workforce handling the conversations that matter. The job becomes more interesting, attrition drops, and the customers who need a human get one immediately. And ultimately those jobs are better off being done in Australia.”

In addition, AI brings the promise of an entirely new job category of agentic engineering, the teams that will be managing these automated systems deployed in the real world. 

The Sydney bet

Voxworks operates from Sydney with infrastructure hosted on Australian soil, in partnership with sovereign cloud provider ResetData and through the NVIDIA Inception program. 

What the founders are quietly building toward is something more ambitious than an Australian alternative to ElevenLabs. The thesis underneath the product is that the next wave of AI infrastructure will be regional, not global. That sovereign data, local accents, and jurisdictional compliance are design principles you build the whole system around. 

“We built this because Australia deserved a premium AI voice provider built directly for Australian businesses,” D’Ambrosio says. “We’re fundamentally an onshoring company. We want Australia to create jobs for the industries of the future, which is designing and managing AI systems built for our society.”