![]() ![]() In early May, Philippine senator Imee Marcos filed a resolution calling for an inquiry into the potential displacement of workers from the BPO and manufacturing industries. With the leap to generative AI, however, that risk has reduced. Often, their responses lacked empathy and sparked frustration among customers, even while they sped up queries. “That’s when workers might lose their jobs.”īPO companies began experimenting with AI tools like chatbots in 2018, he said, mainly for repetitive and rules-based interactions. “But if the government won’t do something to capacitate workers to use AI in the next five years, then I think it will leave a huge impact,” Ibrahim told Rest of World. With the multibillion-dollar industry accounting for 7.5% of the Philippine economy, political and business leaders are pushing to form a plan - often in different directions.Īccording to Mon Ibrahim, a former official with the information and communications technology agency that helped pioneer the Philippines’ BPO sector in the early 2000s, an official plan needs to deal with the technological shift.ħ.5% Percentage of the Philippine economy that business process outsourcing represents. Thanks to the explosion in generative AI, the industry is scrambling to find a balance between automating its roughly 1.6 million workers out of a job and losing its clients to other outsourcing centers that can offer generative AI-powered services at cheaper costs. The Philippines is one of the world’s biggest centers for business process outsourcing (BPO), an industry dedicated to outsourcing entire business operations - such as customer helplines and content moderation - to other companies. Yet, his workplace - a U.S.-based, publicly listed “customer experience” giant with employees across more than 40 countries - forbids its agents from using generative AI, according to Bernie. It’s doubled the number of customer complaints he can handle in a day. Though he thinks he isn’t the only tech support worker using AI for this purpose, he said the “other agents have tended to be completely dependent on the AI responses, and they sometimes end up giving a response that is inappropriate to the customer’s concerns.”īernie now uses ChatGPT and Bing to compile all the technical information he needs for a query in less than five minutes. ![]() ![]() It can give you that, depending on the prompt that you input,” Bernie told Rest of World. I can even get ideas on how to approach certain complaints, making appear engaging, persuasive, empathetic. Since 2022, as tools like ChatGPT and Bing exploded in popularity, Bernie has been quietly using them in the background to generate responses. His customers are English speakers, often irritated and short on patience as they reach out to him while battling a malfunctioning program or network issues. ![]() His bosses don’t know, either - and he would be in trouble if they did.īernie, who requested to be identified only by his first name as he feared retribution from his employer, works as a technical support agent in a massive IT call center in the Philippines. Bernie’s customers don’t know it, but the diplomatic charm of generative artificial intelligence has been smoothing out all of their exchanges. ![]()
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