Based on observations from recent industry events, particularly XDS last year, this session reflects on a trend that has been building for some time: as “co-development” becomes the industry’s aspirational standard, “outsourcing” has increasingly fallen out of favor as a term, even though most production partnerships don’t fully align with either model.
In practice, many collaborations begin as traditional outsourcing and evolve into more integrated, process-aware relationships involving shared pipelines, benchmark definition, and deeper production involvement, without ever becoming full co-dev.
This session challenges the false binary between outsourcing and co-development and proposes a clearer way to describe the collaborations that live in between. Rather than presenting a fixed conclusion, it is intended as a starting point for discussion, an opportunity to gather peer perspectives on terminology, collaboration models, and expectations around partnerships in an industry where the way we work together continues to evolve.