AI is actively displacing workers in the Philippine BPO industry, with employees reporting they were used to train the systems that ultimately made them redundant. The Philippines employs roughly 1.9 million people in outsourcing, generating $40 billion in annual revenue and accounting for about 10% of the national economy. That scale makes the disruption significant.
One former content writer, speaking anonymously to the BBC, described being made redundant eight months into a role, just one month before it was set to become permanent. In the period before her dismissal, she and her colleagues were asked to edit AI-generated material and effectively teach the system the company's writing style. "I feel like I dug my own grave," she said. "We were the ones who trained the artificial intelligence that replaced us."
