Humans and AI Bots Blur in the World's Call Center Capital | Big Take Asia

Bloomberg audio Studios podcasts radio news 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 SAS hello thank you for calling sis Airline my name is Melle how can I assist you today hi I'm Rebecca um I'm trying to can my flights to Singapore but I'm having problems okay I'm sorry to hear that Rebecca and for ask to proceed can I have your ticket number please it sounds like a typical conversation you might have with a customer rep but here's the thing the sound of luil 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 luzel and I'm from the Philippines and this is my normal voice and accent wow 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 not a problem so very you go the S is app is started on now so hi Rebecca nice meeting you wow that's just wild the AI company luil works for SAS calls this technology accent translation it's says it eliminates background noise and enhances the clarity of voice and speech while making sure it still sounds natural and luil who runs demos for SAS 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 12 years she worked as a customer service rep for example if we answer the call they actually look for a US Representative uh right away instead of trying us to talk to us uh there's already a doubt that if we are equipped or capable of answering their questions or or resolving their concern and queries s says its AI tools quote eliminate communication barriers and allow agents to resolve issues faster which means shorter wait times for customers and sis 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 B work as new AI tools get launched every month they're bringing in a lot lot more efficiency Bloomberg stha Ry covers AI in Asia from India and she says if you want to see this threat up close the Philippines where luil is is a good place to look that's because it's considered the world's capital for bpos particularly voice bpos the industry employs about 1.7 million people and accounts for about 8% of Philippines GDP and Sia says what's happening with the industry over in the Philippines is being closely watched by the rest of the world entire countries economists experts are watching the Philippines to see how it will play out in this country of about 100 million people and that could well show a signal as to how these technologies will move to other countries and other Industries and disrupt or enhance workers lives [Music] 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 color workers around the [Music] world a few decades ago major Global corporations began Outsourcing a lot of their back-end work think HR accounting auditing and customer service to countries with lower labor costs and Bloomberg s the r says one of the top places these tasks were outsourced to was the Philippines and part of the reason for that she says is because of the way people there speak 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 of the BPO work has increasingly moved towards Philippines and made it really the Center capital of the world Sia tells me the Philippines started growing its back office industry in the 2000s and today call centers are the country's biggest source of private sector jobs the industry is forecast to hit $38 billion in Revenue this year and this industry boom has created the kind of jobs that have helped transform people's lives these are well-being jobs these are jobs where you can actually be socially upwardly mobile you can actually get paid decently and make a change in your lifestyle buy a home buy a car set up a small business on the side set up your family but sitha 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 bpos 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 live calls training the agents sometimes even making outbound calls to sell something one of the call centers in the middle of adapting to this AI transition is 24/7 AI sitha was given rare access to their call center in Manila where they were using a chat GPT like tool to train customer service agents in the test run that Sia saw the AI tool generated different scenarios and took on a range of personas to help the human agent role play with different types of callers they might get for example Pleasant irate tough hard bargainer or the sentiment can be tense distressed irritated or calm so for example some somebody can choose a scenario which is a genzi male IR rate churned customer or a female a millennial who is calm but has a real problem what does an Irate gen Z AI customer sound like very difficult for the agent to deal with I can assure you 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 sitha 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 Sara 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 all 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 tradeoffs Sera spoke to a few people whose jobs came under threat from the AI Revolution in the BP industry one of them is 47-year-old Christopher Batista he's worked in the BPO industry for nearly two decades Christopher told stha 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 rooting calls to human agents and then last November he and others at the B company serving a multinational Tech Giant were put on floating status floating status means no work no pay but still on the roles 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 [Music] break over the past year most of the major players in the Philippines vast B industry have introduced some form of AI co-pilot having algorithms run alongside human operators to make their work much more efficient all in real time and Bloomberg stha Ry says with these new AI tools something that used to give the Philippines an advantage in this industry its cultural closeness to America may not matter anymore these AI tools will make it possible for bpos to set up anywhere because accent will not be a problem Sia says that could open doors for foreign owned companies to move their call center operations to places in Africa like Ghana 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 10 12 years ago Manila was a different city now most of these slick sky scrapers these luxurious homes these big malls all of this has been majorly on account of BP Industries boom but now one estimate says that up to 300,000 contact center jobs could be lost in the Philippines to AI in the next 5 years there is a recognition that you know that there is change coming that there will be job losses there 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 stha 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 B industry to help Propel its economy we ask stha 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 initiatives or training initiatives that the government has initiated last month the government launched an AI Research Center aimed at helping turn the Philippines into a regional front runner in the AI space but Sera 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 impact Rebecca what you're doing and what I'm doing I keep looking over my shoulder to see what uh different technology are doing in terms of writing and in terms of Journalism I know that there are AI anchors now there are AI podcaster what does that mean for your job and mine there's always that little bit of niggling anxiety at the back of my head as I look at this technology and I've never felt that before maybe it'll be a cheerful Rebecca British accented AI Avatar podcast host it definitely feels like this story perhaps more than some of the other stories that we reported on we have a little bit more skin in the game here um 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 uh job displacement tools um that this kind of AI 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 Chung Wilkins this episode was produced by naom yyang and Alex sugura who also mixed it it was edited by Caitlyn Kenny and Emily kman it was fat checked by Alex sugura our senior editor is Elizabeth Pono Nicole beamster is our executive producer and Sage Balman is Bloomberg's head of podcast if you like our show please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcast or tell your friends it makes a difference thank you and see you next time