According to a report by Saritha Rai for Bloomberg News, the Philippines is already confronting the reality of AI’s impact on jobs, particularly within its vast business process outsourcing (BPO) sector. This industry, which includes call centers and various other back-office operations, is expected to generate over $38 billion in revenue this year. The rapid integration of AI tools across the sector is being driven by the same cost-cutting pressures that initially led to the outsourcing of jobs to the Philippines, and it is beginning to reshape the industry in profound ways.
Per the report, AI “copilots” have become a common feature in many BPO firms over the past several months, particularly in call centers. These AI tools assist human agents by performing tasks such as summarizing customer interactions, processing content, and analyzing sentiments in real-time. This technology, while primarily used in customer service roles, is indicative of broader changes across the entire BPO industry.
However, Bloomberg highlights that the speed of this transformation has been unsettling for some workers. Christopher Bautista, a 47-year-old veteran of the call center industry, shared with Bloomberg that after nearly two decades in tech support, he was put on “floating status”—a state of employment without pay—after his company lost a contract, a situation he attributes to the rise of AI. Bautista eventually left the industry and found work in sales, but he remains convinced that AI will soon replace many jobs across the BPO sector.
While stories like Bautista’s are currently isolated, experts warn that they may become more common. Avasant, an outsourcing advisory firm cited by Bloomberg, estimates that up to 300,000 BPO jobs in the Philippines, many of which are in call centers, could be lost to AI within the next five years. Yet, the same analysis suggests that AI could also create around 100,000 new jobs in areas such as algorithm training and data curation. This dual impact presents both a risk and an opportunity for the Philippine BPO sector as a whole.
Bloomberg underscores the importance of the BPO industry, particularly call centers, to the Philippine economy, serving as the largest private sector employer and a significant contributor to the country’s gross domestic product. For many Filipinos and Filipinas, BPO jobs offer a decent income without requiring a university degree or the need to work abroad. Bloomberg notes that the government’s hope was that this industry would help lift more citizens into the middle class and stimulate the creation of other white-collar jobs. However, the advent of AI threatens to disrupt this plan.
Despite these challenges, Bloomberg reports that the Philippines is not shying away from AI. The country is already a testing ground for many new AI tools, and apparently, the government has established an AI research center and launched various training initiatives to improve the skills of the industry’s 1.7 million employees.
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