Philippines BPO sector grows 4% to 1.68M despite AI fears

CEBU, Philippines — The Philippine contact center and business process management industry added more than 60,000 jobs in 2025 despite the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence, challenging concerns that automation would lead to widespread workforce reductions.

Data from the Customer Experience Association of the Philippines (CXAP), formerly the Contact Center Association of the Philippines, showed the sector’s workforce expanded 4 percent to 1.68 million employees in 2025 from 1.62 million a year earlier. Employment is projected to rise further to 1.73 million in 2026.

The contact center-business process management (CC-BPM) segment accounted for nearly 89 percent of the country’s broader information technology-business process management workforce, which grew 3.7 percent to 1.89 million employees in 2025.

Industry employment is expected to increase another 2.6 percent next year.

Revenue growth also remained resilient. The CC-BPM sector generated $33.9 billion in revenue in 2025, up 6.9 percent from $31.7 billion a year earlier, according to CXAP Chairman Mitch Locsin’s report presented during the 10th Contact Islands conference in Cebu.

Revenue is forecast to climb to $35.7 billion in 2026 as companies continue integrating AI into business processes.

The industry’s expansion comes amid geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, shifting regulatory policies in Western markets and domestic political uncertainties that have clouded the global business outlook.

Industry leaders said AI is increasingly being deployed to augment rather than replace workers, enabling firms to move into higher-value services while creating demand for new skills and specialized roles.

“The employment growth in the CC-BPM sector and even the entire IT-BPM industry in 2025 counters the common notion that AI brings about job displacement,” said Haidee Enriquez, chief executive officer of Microsourcing and Beepo and president of CXAP.

The sector is targeting $49 billion in annual revenue and 2.3 million employees by 2028, accounting for the bulk of the IT-BPM industry’s broader roadmap goals of $59 billion in revenue and 2.5 million workers.

AI-driven services are emerging across customer experience consulting, customer journey mapping, marketing, procurement and supply chain operations, while traditional segments such as contact centers, finance and accounting, human resources, and industry-specific BPM continue to expand. New roles including AI trainers, prompt engineers, AI maintenance specialists, customer experience AI architects and AI ethicists are also gaining traction.

A CXAP executive survey showed AI adoption ranked as the third-largest growth driver for the industry in 2025, behind expansion of existing client accounts and new customer acquisitions.

Generative AI emerged as the most widely adopted technology, followed by predictive analytics, conversational AI, agentic AI and robotic process automation.

The survey also identified talent readiness as the biggest challenge to scaling AI adoption, ahead of cost, data quality, organizational change management and client demand. AI and automation expertise ranked as the most sought-after skills among employers.

Locsin said the Philippines is well-positioned to capture higher-value work as global companies seek customer experience partners capable of combining human expertise with AI-enabled operations.

“The Philippines has established strong maturity in core contact center and transactional BPM services, with significant opportunities to accelerate growth in higher-value BPM and emerging customer experience capabilities,” he said. “Traditional high-volume services are evolving toward more specialized, domain-driven support for customer interactions.”