BPOAI News / Government & AI Policy

Philippines AI Strategy: What BPO Must Know

The Philippines approved its National AI Strategy in 2025, shaping policy for BPO companies, workers, and AI vendors through 2028.

By BPO AI Editorial Team· Last updated: November 6, 2026

Photo: Pexels

In May 2025, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. approved the National AI Strategy for the Philippines (NAIS-PH), the country's most comprehensive government commitment to artificial intelligence to date. The strategy covers the period through 2028 and replaces the earlier NAISR 1.0 roadmap launched in 2021, which had focused narrowly on industrial competitiveness.

The shift matters. Generative AI forced a faster rethink, producing an interim NAISR 2.0 in 2024 before the full presidential strategy was signed. The current framework is broader in scope and more explicit about who benefits and who could be left behind.

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A National AI Strategy Takes Shape

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Five Pillars That Affect the BPO Sector

NAIS-PH is built on five pillars: infrastructure development, workforce capacity building, an innovation ecosystem, ethical policy frameworks, and strategic deployment in priority sectors such as healthcare and agriculture. For the BPO industry news audience, the workforce pillar is the most immediate. The government has directly acknowledged the scale of the Philippine BPO industry, which employed about 1.9 million people in 2025 according to IBPAP, and it has made protecting those workers from unregulated automation an explicit policy goal.

Infrastructure: expanding compute and connectivity to support AI workloads
Workforce: reskilling programs targeting AI-adjacent roles in services and operations
Innovation: supporting research through institutions like the Center for AI Research (CAIR)
Ethics: human-centric principles aligned with human rights and social equity
Deployment: priority sectors include health, agriculture, and digital services

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Regulatory Approach: Soft Law With a Hard Floor

The current regulatory posture is a hybrid model. At the national level, AI governance is largely soft law: strategic roadmaps, ethical guidelines, and voluntary frameworks that encourage responsible adoption without blocking innovation. There are no rigid licensing requirements for most AI applications yet.

The hard floor is the Data Privacy Act of 2012 (Republic Act 10173), which applies to any AI system that processes personal data. The National Privacy Commission enforces this, and it is already relevant to call centers, virtual assistant platforms, and offshore staffing operations that handle customer data for foreign clients.

A comprehensive AI Development Act is still under legislative review. If passed, it would centralize oversight and likely impose binding obligations across sectors, including BPO. Companies operating in the Philippines should track this bill closely, as it could formalize rules that are currently discretionary. The full regulatory overview is available at Regulations.AI.

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What This Means for BPO Companies and AI Vendors

The strategy is integrated into the Philippine Development Plan 2023-2028, which positions the country as a regional hub for high-value AI services and research. That framing is a direct signal to enterprise buyers considering outsourcing to the Philippines: the government is actively building the conditions for AI-capable BPO delivery, not just reacting to it.

For AI vendors entering the market, the existence of CAIR and the ethical policy pillar suggests a government that wants local research capacity, not just imported tools. Vendors who can demonstrate alignment with NAIS-PH priorities, particularly on workforce impact, are better positioned for public-sector and regulated-industry contracts.

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A National AI Strategy Takes Shape

Five Pillars That Affect the BPO Sector

Regulatory Approach: Soft Law With a Hard Floor

What This Means for BPO Companies and AI Vendors

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