YouTube hosts 5.1 billion videos and adds more than 360 hours of new content every minute. Behind the scenes, a $600–700 million vendor operation provides a global outsourced workforce to support viewers, creators, and the platform itself in 80 languages, across 100 countries. These external teams deliver technical support, moderate content, and ensure all content meets legal compliance standards. Until recently, this global workforce was planned and managed in spreadsheets.
Today, thanks to Anaplan and its partner, Keyrus, YouTube has a connected planning system that has allowed them to reduce labor costs and speed up business process outsourcing (BPO) vendor payments, all while retaining the high levels of service that YouTube viewers and content creators expect.
What it takes to keep YouTube running
At YouTube, vendor operations span four main divisions:
- Support Operations manages consumer subscriptions such as YouTube TV and NFL Sunday Ticket
- Creator Support helps millions of content creators
- Tech Service Delivery maintains smooth services and copyright compliance
- Trust & Safety — the largest and most complex — oversees content moderation across 18 workflows in 80 languages and 100 countries
Behind YouTube’s four divisions sits a set of operational teams that make the whole system work. The data science team forecasts demand, the workforce planning team turns that into staffing needs and vendor allocations, and the vendor management team ensures quality. The real-time management team steps in during outages — such as the sudden loss of a major site— to reroute work and protect service levels. And the invoicing team consolidates all processes into one streamlined system.
Together, these teams provide the engine that powers YouTube’s global support at scale.
The limits of inflexible, manual processes
Back in 2022, YouTube was managing labor capacity for its vendor operations on Google Sheets. Each division had its own version of the truth and reconciling those differences meant endless debates about whose numbers were correct. The options were clear: hire more planning staff, build and reconcile even more spreadsheets, or find a platform that could scale.
The complications behind these inflexible, manual processes extended beyond the spreadsheets:
- Rigid contracts: Agreements with vendors were structured strictly by headcount. For example, 300 agents retained for six months, regardless of how demand shifts, left little room to flex with changing demand.
- Granular needs: Pivoting to contracts by hours of activity (such as 20 hours for password resets, 40 hours for content review, and 60 hours for policy questions) necessitated a much more granular and precise planning process.
- Cumbersome invoicing: Each vendor used its own invoice templates, creating up to seven different versions of the same process. Reconciliation could take as long as 22 days.
The BPO vendors themselves flagged these inefficiencies, saying it felt like they were dealing with “seven different YouTubes.”
How Anaplan reshaped vendor operations
Working with Keyrus, YouTube became the first product area within Google to transition from headcount-based billing to outcome-based contracts, enabled by Anaplan. Within months, the Support Operations and Trust & Safety divisions replaced hundreds of spreadsheets with a single, centralized model for all forecasting, vendor allocation, and invoicing.
Vendor agreements now specify hours contracted to different types of work, such as content moderation, technical troubleshooting, or subscriber support.
Forecasts created in Anaplan determine the labor capacity required, while allocations take into account vendor performance, costs, and specialization. These allocations then flow into reporting dashboards, where managers have visibility into performance, costs, and service levels in real-time. Just as importantly, changes are applied instantly, recalculating costs in seconds.
Invoicing has also been reinvented. Vendors now log into Anaplan, where their invoices are generated automatically from logged hours. Reconciliation dropped from 22 days to 10 — and in many cases now happens within the same week.
Planning with precision
Anaplan has provided YouTube with a predictable planning rhythm. One example is NFL Sunday Ticket, for which capacity planning begins 90 days before kick-off to ensure the correct number of agents are in place across languages and regions. At 60 days out, allocations are locked — each vendor’s share of volumes and how many hours are committed.
Inevitably, disruption happens. Outages, spikes, or global events can throw off plans. With Anaplan, adjustments are logged directly in the model, so everyone immediately sees the operational and financial impact.
Within the first year of Anaplan’s implementation, YouTube reduced BPO labor spend by 12% across Support Operations and Trust & Safety — far exceeding the 2% savings expected initially. For a $600 to 700 million spend category, that’s tens of millions saved.
A win-win for YouTube and its vendors
The benefits for YouTube extend well beyond cost savings. For its vendors, Anaplan delivers one consistent process, visibility into upcoming demand, and faster payment. For YouTube, it means tighter cost control and forecasts aligned to outcomes and better predictability.
These changes have strengthened relationships between YouTube and its partners. Vendor managers have more time to focus on strategy and performance, rather than chasing spreadsheets or reconciling invoices.
Next stop: AI and “what-if” planning
Next, YouTube is planning to use Anaplan for handle-time forecasting — modeling how long cases take as AI shifts routine tasks to automation. With chatbots and classifiers handling more routine issues, human agents are left with more nuanced cases, requiring better forecasting of expert labor hours and skills requirements.
Scaling for 2026 and beyond
By 2026, both Support Operations and Trust & Safety will be fully operating on Anaplan, enabling end-to-end workforce and BPO vendor planning in a single, connected ecosystem.
For YouTube, the leap from spreadsheets to Anaplan represents more than an efficiency gain. It’s a recognition that global operations require global and scalable solutions — and that vendors are not just service providers, but critical partners in delivering safe, seamless experiences for YouTube users worldwide.
The cost of not investing in scalable, enterprise workforce planning tools is too high to ignore. Rising customer expectations and tighter budgets demand better visibility, scalable and adaptable planning, and stronger collaboration. Anaplan delivers on all fronts.
