AI was supposed to kill Philippine call centers. They added 80,000 jobs.
The Economist reports that Philippine offshoring is still growing. Revenue is on track for 42.3 billion dollars this year, up from 40 billion in 2025.
OpenAI chief Sam Altman said last year that customer service jobs would soon be totally gone. In the Philippines, where call centers and back office work employ close to two million people and account for more than 8 percent of the economy, that sounded like a countdown clock. A year on, the industry is bigger, not smaller.
Philippine offshoring revenue is projected to reach 42.3 billion dollars in 2026, up from 40 billion dollars in 2025, according to a report by The Economist published August 6 and summarized by local outlet BitPinas. Headcount is still climbing toward 1.96 million full time workers. The industry group IBPAP says the sector added roughly 80,000 jobs in 2025 alone.
Why the collapse did not happen
Chatbots are good at easy questions. They are bad at billing disputes, broken equipment and angry people. Companies that handle hospital records or expensive medical machines are not willing to leave those calls to software with no person behind it. At the same time, agents in Manila now use tools like ChatGPT to draft clean emails in seconds and close tickets in minutes instead of hours, so providers can bill more per hour for the same seat.
The work coming in is also changing shape. Beyond answering phones, Filipino teams are taking on contract summaries, medical insurance checks, accounting and even reviewing the output of AI systems. A lot of that growth comes from Global Capability Centers, which are offices a foreign bank or hospital chain sets up here and staffs itself instead of hiring an outsourcing firm.
We never imagined the transition timeframe where AI would be just good enough to augment humans, instead of completely replacing them. Luis Buenaventura, chief strategy officer of Talino Fintech Foundry
The catch to watch
The bottom rung is disappearing. Basic data entry and simple call routing, the jobs that took millions of Filipinos from minimum wage into the middle class, are the ones software handles well, and IBPAP has already trimmed its long range target to 2.14 million AI enabled professionals. Anyone starting out now faces a higher skill bar to get in at all. For those already inside, the same tools grade them: BPO firms are running AI over calls in real time to score every interaction and push productivity targets up.