In the vast, uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

They also think that the physical location of their employees is a matter of profound strategic importance.

For decades, these creatures have engaged in a corporate ritual known as “off-shoring,” a process of flinging their most tedious tasks to the furthest possible point on their globe, primarily India and the Philippines, because it was cheap. Then came a period of mild panic and a new ritual called “near-shoring,” which involved flinging the same tasks to a slightly closer point, like Poland or Romania. This was done not because it was significantly better, but because it allowed managers to tell the board they were fostering “cultural alignment” and “geopolitical stability,” phrases which, when translated from corporate jargon, mean “the plane ticket is shorter.”

The problem, of course, is that this is all a magnificent illusion. You may well be paying a premium for a team of developers in a lovely, GDPR-compliant office block in Sofia, but the universe has a talent for connecting everything to everything else. The uncomfortable truth is that there’s a 99% chance your Bulgarian “near-shore” team is simply the friendly, English-proficient front end for a team of actual developers in Vietnam, who are the true global masters of AI and blockchain. The near-shore has become a pricey, glorified post-box. You’re paying EU prices for Asian efficiency, a marvelous new form of economic alchemy that benefits absolutely everyone except your company’s bottom line.

But this whole geographical shell game is about to be rendered obsolete by the final, logical conclusion to the outsourcing saga: Artificial Intelligence.

AI is the new, ultimate off-shore. It has no location. It exists in that wonderfully vague place called “The Cloud,” which for all intents and purposes, could be orbiting Betelgeuse. It works 24/7, requires no healthcare plan, and its only cultural quirk is a tendency to occasionally hallucinate that it’s a pirate.

And yet, we clutch our pearls at the thought of an AI making a mistake. This is a species that has perfected the art of human error on a truly biblical scale. We build aeroplanes that can cross continents in hours, only for them to fall out of the sky because a pilot, a highly trained and well-rested human, flicked the wrong switch. As every business knows, we have created entire digital ecosystems that can be brought to their knees by a single code commit that was missed by the developer, the tester, the project manager, and the entire business team. An AI hallucinating that it’s a pirate is a quaint eccentricity; a team of humans overlooking a single misplaced semicolon is a multi-million-pound catastrophe. Frankly, it’s probably time to replace the bloody government with an AI; the error rate could only go down.

And here we arrive at the central, delicious irony. The great corporate fear, the one whispered in hushed tones in risk-assessment meetings, is that these far-flung offshore and near-shore teams will start feeding all your sensitive company data—your product roadmaps, your customer lists, your secret sauce—into public AI models to speed up their work.

The punchline, which is so obvious that almost everyone has missed it, is that your loyal, UK-based staff in the office right next to you are already doing the exact same thing.

The geographical location of the keyboard has become utterly, profoundly irrelevant. Whether the person typing is in Mumbai, Bucharest, or Milton Keynes, the intellectual property is all making the same pilgrimage to the same digital Mecca. The great offshoring destination isn’t a country anymore; it’s the AI model itself. We have spent decades worrying about where our data is going, only to discover that everyone, everywhere, is voluntarily putting it in the same leaky, stateless bucket. The security breach isn’t coming from across the ocean; it’s coming from every single desk, mobile phone or tablet.