AI is making the Philippines' offshoring industry stronger
The Philippines' big offshoring industry is growing despite AI
Despite fears that AI would decimate the Philippines' offshoring industry, it's actually growing. Workers like Trizza, who calls US lawyers from Manila, now use tools like ChatGPT to polish their emails, making their jobs easier. The industry's resilience suggests that AI is augmenting rather than replacing human workers, at least for now.
But one thing has recently made her job easier: these days she dictates her emails to Chat GPT, which quickly rewrites them in a “professional” tone.
- nlpnerd
From a recent article in The Economist. It turns out that once again many of the jobs that people predicted would be eliminated by AI have instead received a boost, at least for now. This closely follows another recent report on how Indian BPO firms are surprisingly thriving due to AI.
"Moreover, AI is helping offshore workers in the Philippines do new, more complex jobs. They are picking up work training AI models or supervising AI agents. Hospitals in America are increasingly outsourcing the checking of insurance eligibility and filing of medical records to Filipinos packing AI tools. Mr Gallimore says more “high-value” work, such as accountancy or engineering, is going offshore in part because “AI is a leveller. You can now teach someone complex stuff quickly” and still get it done more cheaply than in America or Europe. Some of this is done at so-called global capability centres, captive back offices that are booming in India and also now growing in the Philippines."
It seems like AI has incidentally commoditized the complement (procedural knowledge), and in turn created greater demand for inputs like human judgement and "empathy".
- ajb
People have a bad intuition about economic mechanisms, but that does not mean that AI won't cause huge regressive effects.
The transition from independent artisans to factory work didn't cause massive unemployment. But it cause the former artisans to lose out, because they no longer had the bargaining power they had before - their work was now a commodity. This resulted in "Engel's pause", a period in which wages stagnated, and so conditions got worse because prices also increased.
But AI also isn't just automation. It's the automation of automation. You may think that you will just level up and learn the new skill set of managing AIs, but the AI companies will be collecting the data to automate that too. Often by watching you.
- MikeNotThePope
Personally I find AI simultaneously powerful and fatiguing. Hiring someone else to use AI is honestly pretty great.
- zjaffee
Why wouldn't it? The Philippines has a large talent pool of English-speaking workers who can do tons of different IT-related functions that AI can't remotely replace.
If you have a globally distributed sales team with no single office for example with people throughout APAC, the Philippines is the unquestionable place to hire for IT support roles for that region.
- bandrami
Somebody's got to actually operate those robots, after all