Combining Automation, AI Offshore Staffing – with Wayne Macartney of Bricoleur Technologies

In this week’s episode of the Outsource Accelerator Podcast, Derek catches up with Wayne Macartney. Wayne is the Managing Director and President of Bricoleur Technologies, as well as Bricoleur People. 

They discuss the complementary nature of professional tech services with people solutions and the onset of new AI technologies in the staffing industry. 

Bricoleur Technologies 

It’s been quite some time since Wayne’s last visit on the podcast.  

For those yet unaware of the company, he starts by explaining what Bricoleur Technologies does. 

“Bricoleur Technologies is a Salesforce partner. So we do CRM implementation, service implementations, field service marketing, a whole range of stuff on the Salesforce platform.

We also have an ERP that we developed over time. It’s called NAO ERP.”

Wayne says that a lot of their work involves finding use cases in the ERP space and how it can be integrated with software platforms, automation, outsourcing, and AI as a tool.

“The AI thing is maturing now. It’s now useful in a business context.” 

Additionally, he also heads Bricoleur People, their offshore staffing arm. 

“It’s across technical teams, marketing and social teams, and sales and customer support. We’re a boutique agency, but we have a model where we’ll go out and we’ll source the best person for a client to meet their job description.” 

Augmenting offshore staffing with technology solutions

Wayne finds a lot of crossover when it comes to offshore staffing and the technology solutions that Bricoleur offers.

If a problem cannot be more practically solved with technology, they’ll bring up their offshore teams as another answer. 

“They’re very complementary products. There are times where we’ll say, ‘Look, I’m not sure that’s something you would solve with technology. 

If you want to do it cost-effectively, you could look at devolving some of this to an offshore team.” 

He highlights one of the most prominent reasons that businesses find offshore talent. 

“You’ve got global talent there with global experience. And it’s a great way for small businesses, and SMEs in Australia particularly, to tap into that.” 

He sees a variance of competencies among Bricoleur’s clients regarding the Salesforce platform. But typically, he finds it best to strategically map out current capabilities first. 

“If you try to automate, you’ve either got something that’s too simplistic or you drive yourself nuts trying to cover every possible use case. 

We actually advise [our clients] to start reasonably manually until they’ve actually embedded in the process, [to get] a deeper understanding of the touch points you would automate.” 

Once that’s been firmly established and running smoothly for a while, then Bricoleur examines the next level of automations that can be built out. 

Again, he points out he brings the same mentality in his offshore staffing methods. 

“It’s kind of the same thought process. You peel off the stuff that just doesn’t add any value. You automate that to the degree that you can.” 

Agentforce and AI staffing

As with many leaders in the outsourcing industry, Wayne is highly open to the introduction of new AI tools. 

He brings up Agentforce, a Salesforce tool that creates autonomous agents. 

“It works on a whole lot of levels effectively. It’s a way of communicating with systems that can surface and process data without needing rigid programming associated with it.” 

The end product is essentially an “intuitive chat,” which Wayne says can allow users to “trigger an entirely complex process or retrieve information that would [normally] take you hours to find [otherwise].” 

Wayne thinks that AI technology is proving more useful than other technology trends of recent years, noting that real improvement is being made to process data. 

“The capability of AI is heading so that the AI can make sense of [the data], do all that heavy lifting, if it’s comfortable and you’ve set guardrails.” 

He reflects on how opinion on it has evolved as well.

“We’re right at that sort of inflection point where people are going from ‘Why would I need AI?’ to ‘You know, maybe we should look at this.” 

You can find more information on Bricoleur Technology and Bricoleur People through their respective websites. 

You may also reach out to Wayne directly via his LinkedIn profile or by emailing [email protected].