Ivan worked as a quality analyst at a major call center in Manila. For years, he listened to recorded calls, graded agent performance, and wrote feedback templates. It was stable work — the kind of job that built the Philippine BPO industry into a $40 billion powerhouse employing 2 million people.
Then the company rolled out an AI system. Ivan and his team were tasked with training it — listening to calls, correcting its responses, feeding it examples of how to handle customer complaints, billing questions, and technical issues.
"We thought we were just improving the tools we already used," he said in the CNA Insider documentary. "Nobody told us we were training our replacement."
The AI got better fast. What started as a suggestion tool — offering draft responses for agents to edit — graduated to handling full conversations autonomously. First simple queries, then medium-complexity ones. Every week, the AI handled more volume, and Ivan's team had less to review.
Then came the layoffs. More than 70 quality analysts in his office were let go in a single round. Ivan was among them.
"I helped improve the work of the AI, and now the AI replaced my job," he said. The line has since been quoted across industry reports and labor advocacy groups as a defining soundbite of the AI automation era in offshore services.
His situation is far from unique. Industry analysts project that 2 to 3 million BPO workers across India and the Philippines face disruption from generative AI, with roughly 1 million jobs forecast to vanish entirely as AI agents scale. Oracle cut 12,000 jobs in India. TCS executed its largest workforce reduction in history. India's top IT firms added a net of just 17 employees in nine months — down from tens of thousands in previous years.
The Philippine government has responded with training programs for 340,000 BPO workers, but critics say the courses are expensive, hard to schedule around full-time jobs, and vague about what exactly the "new jobs" will be.
For Ivan, the transition has been harder than he expected. He's applying for roles in higher-value BPO services — the kind that still need human judgment — but competition is fierce. "Twenty years we built this industry," he said. "And now it feels like the ladder got pulled up from under us."