MANILA — Lisa spent 15 years building a career in content writing, moving from freelance work straight out of college into the Philippines' outsourcing industry, eventually joining a multinational firm. Eight months into her latest role, one month before her position was due to become permanent, she was made redundant.
"I feel like I dug my own grave," she told the BBC. "We were the ones who trained the artificial intelligence that replaced us."
Her account describes a process that has become familiar across Manila's high-rise office districts: in the months before her dismissal, a public relations agency was hired to produce AI-generated content, and Lisa and her colleagues were asked to edit it. Their edits trained the AI on the company's house writing style. Once that training was complete, the writers were cut.
Lisa, whose real name was withheld because she signed a confidentiality agreement in exchange for severance pay, is one of several former outsourcing employees who spoke anonymously, citing fears that disclosure would cost them future work in an industry with a tight professional network.
The Philippines' business process outsourcing sector — known in the industry as BPO — employs roughly 1.9 million people and generates $40 billion in annual revenues, equal to about 10 percent of the country's entire economy. Global firms including Accenture, Concentrix and Teleperformance built large campuses across Manila and other cities starting in the early 2000s, when successive Philippine governments promoted the country as an English-speaking alternative to India for outsourced services. Tax incentives and infrastructure investment followed, and the industry grew to cover call centers, accounting, software development and marketing copy work for clients thousands of miles away.
Every evening around 5 p.m. workers in company lanyards stream out of office towers in Cubao, one of several Manila districts where multinationals maintain operations. The foot traffic reflects how deeply the sector is woven into the capital's economy and how much is at stake.
The International Labour Organization estimates that 12.7 million Filipinos — more than one in four workers across the entire country — hold jobs in occupations exposed to generative AI. That is the highest share in Southeast Asia. The ILO expects many of those roles to change rather than disappear outright, but analysts say the composition of Philippine outsourcing work — heavy on repetitive, text-based and rules-driven tasks that AI handles most readily — leaves the country particularly exposed compared with regional peers.
Investment decisions reflect that uncertainty. Industry observers point to a slowdown in offshore hiring commitments as global companies pause to assess how they will ultimately deploy AI across their operations. The hesitation is not a collapse in demand but a recalibration: companies that would previously have expanded headcount are now waiting to see which functions automation absorbs and which require human judgment.
Despite that caution, headline numbers continue to rise. Industry projections place annual revenues near $42 billion in 2026, up from the current $40 billion figure, as demand for higher-complexity outsourced work — problem-solving, relationship management, strategic analysis — offsets declines in simpler, automatable tasks. Industry leaders describe the shift as a move up the value chain rather than a contraction.
The pattern mirrors what happened to manufacturing outsourcing in earlier decades: as automation removed the lowest-skill assembly work, the jobs that remained demanded more training and commanded higher wages, but there were fewer of them. For the Philippines, where the BPO sector has been a primary route into the middle class for a generation of workers, the distribution of those gains matters as much as the aggregate revenue figure.
Lisa's experience illustrates that distribution problem directly. Her skills were used to improve the AI that took her job, and her confidentiality agreement means she cannot speak publicly about which company was involved or seek public recourse. Others in similar positions face the same constraint: severance in exchange for silence, in an industry small enough that breaking the agreement carries professional consequences.
The broader workforce question confronting the Philippines is one that other emerging economies dependent on service-sector outsourcing — India, Vietnam, Kenya — are watching closely. What happens when the jobs that lifted millions into stable employment are the first ones AI automates at scale is a question governments, the ILO and industry groups have not yet answered with policy. For the 1.9 million Filipinos whose livelihoods run through those high-rise offices in Cubao and across Manila, the answer is not abstract.
