Business process outsourcing (BPO) leaders and technology experts have cautioned against the hype around artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential to disrupt and destroy jobs in the knowledge-based service industry. 

During the Outsource2LAC summit — the annual Latin American and Caribbean outsourcing event held in Montego Bay, Jamaica, on June 14–15 — attendees debated the opportunities and threats posed by generative AI (GenAI), which can produce various kinds of content like text and images when prompted. While automation and digital technologies have been used in the outsourcing industry for decades, the potential of GenAI chatbots such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT to provide better customer service than humans has made people take stock of its impact.

Rahul Dodhia, the deputy director of Microsoft’s AI for Good Research Lab, told fDi at Outsource2LAC that he has “mixed feelings” about whether GenAI will replace higher value jobs in the BPO sector today, but notes that it is moving quickly in that direction. 

“People think [AI] is a magic bullet,” he said. “If you think about it, really it is just statistics gone really big. But there is no denying the fact that it is accomplishing things that no one predicted.”

As AI’s ability to perform increasingly complex tasks and automate processes has increased, predictions around its long-term economic impact have proliferated. Goldman Sachs forecast in March 2023 that GenAI could expose as many as 300 million full-time jobs to automation. But outsourcing industry experts caution against these doom-and-gloom narratives, and stress that companies are at very different stages of their implementation of GenAI and robotic process automation.

“Even if there’s going to be a lot of automation replacing certain jobs that are automatable, you also need to create jobs to actually develop those automations,” said Fabiana Corredor, director of marketing at Auxis, a management consulting and outsourcing firm with operations in Costa Rica and the US.

But others are more worried about AI’s impact. Leslie Lee Fook, the director of AI, automation and analytics at Trinidad & Tobago-based Incus Services, predicts that the BPO industry will be “dead” in as little as a year due to GenAI being able to do “creative jobs” and provide higher value-added services. “In a year or two, the BPO industry will look very different,” he said.

Not all outsourcing industry veterans agree. Many leaders expect the technology to enable them to boost efficiency in their operations, cut costs and help agents provide better, more personalised services to customers. 

“There is a lot of hype about what it can do and will do,” said Yoni Epstein, the founder and CEO of Jamaica-based itel, which operates BPO facilities across seven countries in the region. He believes that “by no means is it a threat; it’s an opportunity”. He notes the potential for AI to help train his agents more quickly and boost efficiency.

“This [BPO] industry needs to learn to work with AI,” said Anupam Govil, the managing partner of Avasense, a management consulting firm focused on digital transformation, sourcing and globalisation services. 

“It will in many ways change the service industry and may impact in the short term the demand for large scale talent in certain sectors,” he said. “But eventually it is going to hyper-accelerate this. The companies that will succeed are the ones that leverage it and embed it in their services stack.” 

While the final impact of GenAI on jobs in the BPO sector remains to be seen, a growing number of experts are calling for clearer regulations. In May 2023, an open letter signed by tech leaders — including Bill Gates, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis — said “AI should be a global priority” alongside other risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

Mr Dodhia said it is critically important to put checks in place, such as informing consumers they are speaking to an AI when receiving customer service: “You can’t ethically let me think that I’m talking to a real person … We need certifying organisations that say AI is safe to use and within the standards we’ve created.”