Balisacan says the forecast that AI takes 1 million BPO jobs by 2030 is exaggerated
A London research firm warned this week that about 1 million Philippine outsourcing jobs could be automated by 2030. The government's chief economic planner says the industry is still growing.
Arsenio Balisacan, secretary of the Department of Economy, Planning and Development, said Friday that fears of the Philippines losing a large part of its outsourcing industry to artificial intelligence look exaggerated. His reason is simple: the sector is still expanding, even while companies inside it adopt AI quickly.
He was answering a report from Capital Economics, a research firm based in London, published earlier this week. It said around 1 million Philippine business process outsourcing jobs, meaning call center and back office work, could be automated by 2030. The same report placed the Philippines 43rd out of 47 economies on its AI Economic Impact Index, with a score of 21 out of 100.
The numbers underneath the argument are large. The industry employs roughly 1.8 million Filipinos, earns about 40 billion dollars a year in export revenue, and makes up 7 to 8 percent of the country's total economic output.
Why it matters
If you or someone in your family works a night shift on a headset, this is an argument about your job, held in public, between a foreign research firm and the official who plans the national economy. The forecast says one in three of those jobs is at risk in four years. The government says the headcount has not actually fallen yet. Both cannot be equally right, and the gap between them is where your planning happens.
The catch to watch
Balisacan's evidence is that the sector is still growing today. That is a fact about the present, not a prediction about 2030, and a headcount can hold steady right up until it does not. Note also what he did not dispute: the 43rd of 47 ranking on AI readiness, which is a separate finding about how prepared the country is, not about how many jobs disappear.
The more useful thing to watch is not either forecast but the monthly hiring numbers from the industry itself. Those are published, they are specific, and they will show the turn before any report does.