Lisa (not her real name) spent 15 years building a career in content writing. She started freelancing straight out of college, then followed the path taken by millions of young Filipinos into the booming business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, joining a multinational company in Manila.

"I can say that I am able to do my job, I meet deadlines. In my opinion, there is no need for AI," she told the BBC.

Eight months into her latest role — and just one month before the position was due to become permanent — she was made redundant.

In the months before, Lisa says a public relations agency had been tasked with producing AI-generated material that she and her colleagues were asked to edit. Her writing skills, her judgment, her sense of style — all of it was being used to train the AI on the company's writing voice.

"I feel like I dug my own grave," she says. "We were the ones who trained the artificial intelligence that replaced us."

Lisa is one of several former outsourcing employees the BBC spoke to who asked to remain anonymous. They signed confidentiality agreements in return for severance pay, and fear that speaking publicly could hurt their chances of finding work in an industry with a small professional network.

The Philippines' outsourcing industry employs roughly 1.9 million people and generates $40 billion in revenue — about 10% of the country's economy. But the International Labour Organization estimates that 12.7 million Filipinos — more than one in four workers — are employed in occupations exposed to generative AI, the highest share in Southeast Asia.

Mary, another former content writer whose name was also changed, says her employer encouraged the use of AI as a productivity tool. Instead of making her job easier, it created additional responsibilities.

"We had to edit more, fact-check more because the data AI produced was inaccurate," she says. "Technically it was more work for us."

Like Lisa, she was later made redundant.

Companies are under tremendous pressure to implement AI to reduce costs. Teleperformance, the world's largest call center operator and one of the Philippines' biggest private employers, has said AI offers an opportunity to augment rather than replace its workforce — but workers on the ground are seeing their roles shrink regardless.

Paul Quintos from the University of the Philippines-Diliman says some Filipino managers are uneasy about AI and want to slow adoption, but "there's tremendous pressure from foreign clients to adopt AI."

Quintos also coined the term "AI washing" — when layoffs are presented as being driven by AI when companies are in fact responding to weaker demand or slowing economic conditions. Attributing redundancies to AI, he adds, can make restructuring appear like technological progress rather than a response to market conditions.

For Lisa and Mary, the labels don't matter. What matters is that after building careers over 15 years, they're suddenly out — and the industry that lifted millions into the middle class may be running out of runway.