Humans and AI Bots Blur in the World's Call Center Capital

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I recently had a conversation that really changed the way I think about AI, its power, and how it might be used in our day to day interactions. It started with a phone call to a company called Sannas.

Hello, thank you for calling Sanas Airline. My name is Mozielle. How can I assist you today?

Hi, I'm Rebecca. I'm trying to cancel my flights to Singapore, but I'm having problems.

Okay, I'm sorry to hear that, Rebecca, and for us to proceed, can I have your pickup number?

Please?

It sounds like a typical conversation you might have with a customer rep. But here's the thing. The sound of Luzille, the person I'm speaking with, is actually being modified quite dramatically with AI. Without the AI, here's what our conversation would actually sound like.

Hi, Rebecca, this is Lucille and I'm from the Philippines and this is my normal voice and accent.

Wow, raziel that is a wild transformation, both in accent and in that clarity of that noise. Yeah right, wait, can you turn on the app again?

Okay, that's a problem, So there you go. The Sanus appistored on now So Hi Rebecca, nice meeting you.

Wow, that's just wild. The AI company Luzille works for, Sanas causes technology accent translation. It says it eliminates background noise and enhances the clarity of voice and speech while making sure it still sounds natural. And Luzille, who runs demos for Sanas, says the technology helps call reps when they use it, fewer customers asked to be transferred to a different agent that used to happen all the time during the twelve years she worked as a customer service rep.

For example, if we answer the call, they actually look for us represent that they right away instead of trying us to talk to us. There's already a doubt that if we are equipped or capable of answering their questions or resolving their concern and queries.

Sanas says it's AI tools quote eliminate communication barriers and allow agents to resolve issues faster, which means shorter wait times for customers. And Sanas is just one of the many AI companies that are blurring the line between where the tech starts and the human ends. And while these tools might make things easier on customer reps. They are a potential danger to the jobs of those working in the customer service industry or what's known as the BPO sector business process outsourcing.

We will see shrinking in the core of BPO work as new AI tools get launched every month, they're bringing in a lot more efficiency.

Bloomberg Sertha Raye covers AI in Asia from India, and she says, if you want to see this threat up close, the Philippines, where lou Zille is is a good place to look. That's because it's considered the world's capital for BPOs, particularly voice BPOs.

The industry employee is about one point seven million people and accounts for about eight percent of Philippines GDP.

And Soesa says what's happening with the industry over in the Philippines is being closely watched by the rest of the world.

Entire countries. Economis experts are watching Philippines to see how it will play out in this country of about one hundred million people, and that could well show a signal as to how these technologies move to other countries and other industries and disrupt or enhance workers' lives.

Welcome to the Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm Rebecca Chung Wilkins. Every week we take you inside some of the world's biggest and most powerful economies and the markets, tycoons, and businesses that drive this ever shifting region. Today on the show, the Philippines is at the forefront of AI's job displacement, and what happens there will say a lot about what's ahead for white collar workers around the world.

So the Philippines is really one of those countries which is culturally very aligned with the United States, and people speak in an accent that is much closer to the American accent, much more than pretty much most of Asia. So that is the reason why a lot the BPO work has increasingly moved towards Philippines and made it really the call center capital of.

The world, SOESA tells me. The Philippines started growing it's back office industry in the two thousands, and today call centers are the country's biggest source of private sector jobs. The industry is forecast hit thirty eight billion dollars in revenue this year, and this industry boom has created the kind of jobs that have helped transform people's lives.

These are well tamed jobs. These are jobs where you can actually be socially upwardly mobile. You can actually get paid recently and make a change in your lifestyle by a home, by a car, set up a small business on the side, set up your family.

But Ciisa says, in the last eight months or so, there have been big changes in these jobs that are raising questions about whether or not they will continue to be a stable source of income and employment for millions of Filipinos.

The largest vPOS in the Philippines have rolled out a variety of AI tools pretty extensively. These AI tools do all kinds of things, such as assisting agents while they're on life calls, training the agents, sometimes even making our bound calls to sell something.

One of the call centers in the middle of adapting to this AI transition is twenty four seven. AI Serisa was given rare access to their call center in Manila where they using a chat GPT like tool to train customer service agents. In the test run that Saritha saw, the AI tool generated different scenarios and took on a range of personas to help the human agent roleplay with different types of callers they might get.

For example, pleasant, irate, tough, hard bargainer, or treat. The sentiment can be tense, distressed, irritated, or calm. So for example, somebody can choose a scenario which is a gen z male irate churned customer or a female a millennial who is calm but has a real problem.

What does an irate gen Zai customers sound like?

Very difficult to deal with? I can char I overheard some of those calls and it was not easy, but it was tremendous how calmly these agents were dealing with really annoyed and tough customers.

At the other end, the idea, Saitha says, is to prepare the agents to deal with as many different scenarios and customer personalities as possible. It's also to help train them to give the most appropriate response and Soretha says the company told her that the kind of work the AI is doing to train human agents would take much longer if it were being done by an actual human trainer.

You cannot have the trainers go from pleasant to irate, to a tough bargainer to a distressed customer or within seconds, whereas the AI can easily do that, which is why what used to take three times the number of days to train an agent has now come down to about a month.

But with productivity gains and workflow improvements come trade offs. Soretha spoke to a few people whose jobs came under threat from the AI revolution in the BAO industry. One of them is forty seven year old Christopher Bautista.

He's worked in the BPO industry for nearly two decades.

Christopher told Saifa that for months he'd watched as AI took on more responsibility where he worked, The AI took care of customers questions such as general inquiries about products, what the problem was, and more, before routing calls to human agents. And then last November, he and others at the BPO company serving a multinational tech giant were put on floating status.

Floating status means no work, no pay, but still on the roads. So you are not jobless, but you are not getting paid. So that went on for about four or five months before Christopher quit the company and then has found a job in an entirely different company.

So just how many jobs in the BPO industry are going to come under threat because of this transition and what will that mean for the Philippine economy which is heavily dependent on this sector that's coming up after the break. Over the past year, most of the major players in the Philippines vast BPO industry have introduced some form of AI copilot, having algorithms run alongside human operators to make

These AI tools will make it possible for BPOs to set up anywhere because accent will not be a problem.

So Refa says that could open doors for foreign owned companies to move their call center operations to places in Africa like Garana, where it's cheaper to recruit agents and where the BPO industry is starting to expand, and that has big implications for the Philippine economy, which has been transformed by the sector.

Some ten twelve years ago, money law was a different city. Now most of these slick sky scrapers, these luxurious homes, these big malls, all of this has been majorly on encounter BPO industries boom.

But now one estimate says that up to three hundred thousand contact center jobs could be lost in the Philippines to AI in the next five years.

There is a recognition that you know that there is change coming, that there will be job losses, they will be less hiring, and you do not see the kind of frenzy that used to be the hallmark of the BPO industry even a decade ago.

Now, Soaretha says, some of the executives in the industry she spoke to don't see the changes as all about job losses. They say AI will create different types of roles, jobs like training algorithms or curating data. As for the Philippine government, who had been banking on the BPO industry to help propel its economy, we are Soaretha how they've responded to the growing presence of AI in the industry.

There is a recognition that AI can really upend the industry. The government has been talking about reskilling and training their workforce, but there is very little yet on the ground that I see in terms of real skilling initiators or training initiatives that the government has initiated.

Last month, the government launched an AI research center aimed at helping her the Philippines into a regional front runner in the AI space, But so Resa says the government has yet to put a figure on how much it's planning to spend.

There is no real dollars set aside for retraining.

I suppose every technological revolution has ultimately led to some job cuts, and I wonder if this is any different, or is this just another one of those key technological turning points in history.

In my coverage of the technology industry, I've covered a variety of disruptions, the latter part of the Internet disruption, the mobile disruption, or the cloud disruption, all of these disruptions. But this is different. This is a technology that could, in fact Rebecca, what you're doing and what I'm doing. I keep looking over my shoulder to see what different technologies are doing in terms of writing and in terms of journalism. I know that there are AI anchors, now

Maybe it will be a cheerful Rebecca British accented AI Avata podcast host. It definitely feels like this story, perhaps more than some of the other stories that we've brought it on, we have a little bit more skin in the game here. I agree to that point. I wonder does what happens with AI in the Philippines affect the rest of the world.

I think the world over governments are challenged with how to deal with what is called a job displacement tools that this VIA is bringing in. There is an awareness that this is happening, but governments around the world are doing really very little to deal with it. So this is a bullet train that is really moving very fast, and does the government have the speed to catch up? That is a question that I would leave open ended.

This is the big take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm Rebecca Cheung Wilkins. This episode was produced by Naomi Young Young and Alex Sugura, who also mixed it. It was edited by Caitlin Kenny and Emily Cappan. It was fact checked by Alex Sugura. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso, Nicole Beemstabor is our executive producer, and Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. If you like our show, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts, or