‘It’s like we’ve become robots’: AI is increasing work, stress at call centres in the Philippines

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

“Thank you for calling. … You’re speaking with Renzo. This call may be recorded for – uhm – this call may be re – ” Renzo Bahala, a customer service agent for a US credit card company, breaks his monologue. If he were at work, he would’ve earned a demerit.

“I have to say it straight. If I stutter, I have to do it again,” he told Rest of World as he rehearsed the script he uses as a trainee at Concentrix Corporation, a business process outsourcing, or BPO, firm that employs approximately 100,000 people in the Philippines.

Bahala says each of his calls at Concentrix is monitored by an artificial intelligence programme that checks his performance. He says his volume of calls has increased under the AI’s watch. At his previous call centre job, without an AI programme, he answered at most 30 calls per eight-hour shift. Now, he gets through that many before lunchtime. He gets help from an AI “co-pilot”, an assistant that pulls up caller information and makes suggestions in real time.

“The co-pilot is helpful,” he says. “But I have to please the AI. The average handling time for each call is five to seven minutes. I can’t go beyond that.”

“It’s like we’ve become the robots,” he said.

In the Philippines, advanced AI tools – including those with language recognition, emotion recognition, and generative intelligence – have made work more demanding, six BPO workers and a representative from a BPO worker’s association told Rest of World. They spoke of targets rising since 2022 and fears of industry layoffs and redundancies.

The Philippines, the second-largest BPO market in the world after India, has 1.84 million BPO workers. Although there is no official data for job losses due to AI, the Philippines’ labor secretary, Bienvenido Laguesma, told local media in June that some workers are already losing their jobs to AI. Industry estimates suggest that while 300,000 Filipinos could be out of work due to AI in the next five years, 100,000 new jobs could be created in roles like data curation.

The Philippines leads the world in AI adoption and 86% of Filipino white-collar workers already use AI to “boost productivity, efficiency and creativity”, according to the 2024 Work Trend Index created by LinkedIn and Microsoft. Two-thirds of BPO companies that are members of the IT & Business Process Association of the Philippines are already using AI or are piloting it, Dominic Ligot, the association’s head of AI and research told Rest of World.

Even companies that prioritise a human touch are forced to use the tech to satisfy clients who are demanding greater automation, Alex Peña, director of special projects at Boldr, a BPO firm recognised by the nonprofit B Lab Global for its social impact, told Rest of World.

The BPO Industry Employees Network, a worker’s association that has 4,000 members, has been consulting with members about the impacts of AI, Lean Porquia, the association’s founder, told Rest of World. He said members have complained of having fewer co-workers and more responsibilities.

“Ideally, AI would be helpful. But what’s happening is that companies are using it to justify adding more tasks,” Porquia said. “At once, one can do customer service, sales, and tech support.”

Porquia said Filipino BPO workers are at the lower end of the tech value chain, performing simple, repetitive tasks that can be automated.

Bahala, 21, began working at call centres in 2021 to pay for his education. But what he once viewed as a temp job became permanent in a nation with the second highest unemployment rate in Southeast Asia. Bahala doesn’t know how many years he’ll be answering calls.

At his previous employer, calls were screened at random by human quality control associates. Bahala said he could make an occasional error or talk to a caller for longer without always being noticed.

He moved to Concentrix in August to diversify his resume and get a small pay raise. Each call at this BPO is monitored by advanced AI programmes that decide if the customer is satisfied and the worker is productive, Bahala and another Concentrix employee, who requested anonymity due to a nondisclosure agreement, told Rest of World. A manager sometimes double-checks the AI’s judgment.

It works like this, the workers said: a sentiment analysis programme could be deployed in real time to detect the mood of a conversation. It could also work retroactively, as part of an advanced speech analysis programme that transcribes the conversation and judges the emotional state of the agent and caller.

Bahala said the programme scores him on his tone, his pitch, the mood of the call, his use of positive language, if he avoided interrupting or speaking over a caller, how long he put the caller on hold, and how quickly he resolved the issue. Bahala said he nudges customers toward high-scoring responses: “yes”, “perfect”, “great”. Every stutter, pause, mispronounced word, or deviation from a script earns him a demerit.

The programme grades Bahala, and, though his base pay remains fixed, continually underperforming could mean probation, no incentives, or even termination, he said.

“AI is supposed to make our lives easier, but I just see it as my boss,” he said.

Concentrix did not respond to requests for comment.

The BPO employees Rest of World spoke with said AI co-pilots made them more efficient. They said the program recognises what is said, swiftly pulls up the customer’s past concerns, and suggests solutions and follow-up questions in real time. The Concentrix employee who requested anonymity said the co-pilot even “tells me if I need to slow down, speed up, or deliver a statement with empathy”.

Paul Quintos, a political economist at the University of the Philippines who studies the BPO sector, told Rest of World that as AI technology develops, its benefits would accrue disproportionately to companies over workers.

“AI increases workers’ productivity with little to no improvement in terms of wages. It even intensifies the pressure on workers to perform like machines,” he told Rest of World.

Benjamin Velasco, a social scientist at the University of the Philippines, said AI is only the latest tool for the BPO industry to intensify the pace of work and cut costs. “Even before AI, BPO companies have been pushing their employees to be more productive,” he told Rest of World.

Another BPO employee in Manila, who requested anonymity due to a nondisclosure agreement, said she had already lost a job once to generative AI. At a BPO industry news firm in Manila, she went from writing one original article a week to 20 articles per week in 2023 with the use of ChatGPT. The articles often had inaccuracies that the writers struggled to fix.

“Backlogs would pile up, sometimes from the month before,” she told Rest of World. “Managers would keep reminding us to finish. It was never-ending.”

Eight of the 10-member team, including the employee, were laid off this March.

The employee is now a trust and safety analyst at Accenture, where she checks the accuracy of AI-generated data for Facebook’s parent company, Meta. She said she is working on an upcoming feature wherein Meta AI recognizes photos posted to Facebook and Instagram and displays relevant prompts next to them for the user to explore. She said she cross-checks the Meta AI’s response for accuracy, with the help of a Microsoft AI assistant. Another employee, who requested anonymity due to a nondisclosure agreement, said she works on a similar program for Instagram reels. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment.

The employee working on Facebook said that two months ago she was given 200 seconds per prompt.

This was revised to 170 seconds per prompt in October.

“[The managers] check our errors and say we can’t drop below a 90% accuracy,” she said. “It’s getting really tough; hardly anyone can keep up consistently. You see others in your team scoring just 60% and worry for them.”

Accenture did not respond to requests for comment.

The BPO Association’s Ligot sees a potential benefit in AI investments and says they may shift “resources towards training and upskilling employees for roles that AI cannot automate easily.”

The Philippines’ Department of Trade and Industry undersecretary Rafaelita Aldaba said at an industry conference in October that AI “is more about augmentation than replacement.”

Peña at Boldr, which is a smaller BPO, said the company uses open-source tech to keep up with larger competitors who have in-house AI capabilities, even as “the demand for AI-enabled customer support increases and becomes the expectation.”

“AI is not to replace people but to help people become more productive,” she said. “If you needed 10 team members before, maybe now you only need five.”

Michael Beltran is a labor x tech fellow based in Manila, Philippines.

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.