TWO weeks ago, I wrote about Ethel de Borja, a Filipino freelance writer whose paid work dried up after clients moved to AI and who later found AI tools screening her job applications before any person read them. The piece left a question I could not answer: Was she an outlier or the first sign of something wider? The clearest answer comes from a study of our own labor market, and it cuts against the industry’s reassurances.
In a working paper last year, International Monetary Fund researchers mapped which Philippine jobs are most exposed to AI. Business process outsourcing (BPO), especially the call center sector, has the highest share of jobs at risk of displacement, and the most exposed workers are women in well-paid service roles. The same paper adds a caveat the industry likes to cite: Firms that adopt automation have tended to hire rather than lay off workers. Both can be true at once, and the sector can keep growing while the entry-level work that brings people in shrinks.
Why that matters is a question of arithmetic. The contact center and business process sector is the core of Philippine outsourcing and one of the country’s largest private-sector employers. By its own count, it employed 1.68 million people in 2025, nearly 89 percent of the industry’s workforce, and hired more than 60,000 agents that year. Many of those jobs are the entry-level, customer-facing roles the IMF flags as most exposed, and they are how young Filipinos get their first jobs. The country produces about 850,000 fresh graduates a year who need somewhere to start.
The industry’s answer is that AI is reshaping work toward higher-value activities. In late May, the Contact Center Association of the Philippines rebranded as the Customer Xperience Association of the Philippines, or CXAP, to mark its shift to AI-enabled customer experience. Its president, Haidee Enriquez, said Filipino workers are “no longer simply handling transactions.” The sector grew in 2025, with revenue reaching $33.9 billion, and CXAP says AI is opening new roles such as AI trainers and AI ethicists. Its survey found that just over half of firms were at a moderate stage of AI adoption.
But the United States, where employment data are broken down by age, shows what “reshaping” can mean for young workers. Stanford University’s 2026 AI Index Report found employment among software developers ages 22 to 25 had fallen by nearly 20 percent from its 2022 peak, while headcount among older developers continued to rise. Customer support shows the same age-based split, and the report describes early-career workers in exposed fields as the “canaries in the coal mine.” The report also notes a complication: the least experienced agents gained the most from AI assistance. The tool that lifts a beginner’s output can still be tied to a thinner bottom rung.
No one has published Philippine BPO employment data by age, but a worker I will call Jose, who signed a nondisclosure agreement and asked not to be named, suggests why. Jose spent more than a decade at a large outsourcing firm where, beginning around 2022, repetitive operational reports tracking agent and team performance were steadily automated. By last year, half his department had been eliminated. The company never formally blamed automation, Jose said, and the losses were recorded as redundancies. His point was that the Department of Labor and Employment would not see the real reason because no company would write “due to AI” on a redundancy filing. If that labeling is common, the displacement leaves little trace in official statistics. The losses are real, just recorded under another name.
Jose’s account also shows the quieter mechanism. While the reports were being automated, he said, the firm froze external hiring and moved people between departments. After the layoffs, the work that could not yet be automated fell to those who remained, and no replacements were hired. Mylene Cabalona, who heads the BPO Industry Employees’ Network, puts it bluntly: customer care is “the first to be displaced by AI.”
The industry’s plan rests on everyone moving up. The 2022 roadmap says automation will reduce transactional tasks and free people for higher-value work, and the upskilling argument follows. The IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines, the industry’s umbrella group, said this month that those projections are under review because technology is changing faster than expected. The plan can still be right. But it assumes a worker already has a foot on the ladder.
For someone like de Borja, the gap between the plan and the evidence is the whole story. She is retraining in digital marketing, and she may succeed. But she learned to write for pay one assignment at a time, the way every beginner does. The hiring freeze Jose observed from the inside is the same closed door she faces from the outside. The new name on the industry’s door, and the roadmap behind it, both assume the worker can climb. Neither explains what happens to the fresh graduate who never gets the first seat from which to climb.
