AI Boom Fails to Halt Offshore Call Center Hiring

In September 2025, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced a reduction of 4,000 customer service roles, stating a need for "less heads." This move aligns with a broader corporate trend of adopting agentic artificial intelligence to enhance efficiency or replace human workers. However, contrary to expectations of widespread job displacement due to AI, a top economist has observed a significant increase in customer service roles, especially in offshore locations. Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo, highlighted in a recent blog post that call center employment in the Philippines has grown annually from 2016 through 2025, nearly doubling to reach 2 million workers over this decade. Concurrently, unemployment rates in the Philippines have declined from 9% to approximately 5% between 2021 and July 2026. Similarly, India has seen its unemployment rate decrease from around 7% to 6% during the same period. Slok noted that if AI were displacing white-collar work on a large scale, this impact would be most evident in countries like the Philippines and India, where business process outsourcing, including call centers, IT support, and back-office processing, constitutes a substantial portion of employment. The continued downward trend in unemployment rates in these nations suggests that AI has not yet led to significant job losses among offshore workers. The Philippines surpassed India as the leading global employer of call center staff approximately 15 years ago. The growth of offshore call center jobs began in the late 1990s and early 2000s, driven by companies seeking cost-saving measures. Labor costs are considerably lower overseas compared to the United States. Filipino call center employees earn monthly wages ranging from 15,000 to over 120,000 Philippine pesos, which translates to approximately $243 to $1,948 USD. In contrast, the average monthly wage for call center workers in the U.S. is about $2,866, according to data from Indeed. These offshore customer service positions are recognized as being highly susceptible to AI-driven automation. A report by the Brookings Institution estimated that 86% of tasks performed by customer service representatives have a high potential for automation. The apparent paradox of rising employment in a sector with high automation potential points to a long-standing economic dynamic where technological advancements do not always result in immediate or widespread job losses, especially when labor arbitrage remains a significant factor.