Teleperformance is opening its first Vietnam site. 60,000 Filipinos work for it here.
The call center giant will open a Vietnam site by the end of 2026, aimed at AI data work. Weeks earlier, the Philippine industry group cut its own 2028 job forecast.
Teleperformance will open its first site in Vietnam by the end of 2026, chief executive Jorge Amar told Nikkei Asia. The site is built for data services, the work of collecting, labeling and cleaning the information that AI systems are trained on, for both local and multinational clients.
That name matters here more than most. Teleperformance is one of the biggest private employers in the country. As of late 2025, InsiderPH reported it had around 60,000 workers across 27 Philippine sites, making the Philippines its second-largest operations hub after India, out of roughly 500,000 employees worldwide.
Why it matters
Call centers and back office work are not a side industry here. The sector ended 2025 with about 1.9 million Filipino workers and 40 billion dollars in export earnings, according to the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines. On July 14 this year, the group cut its 2028 targets. The 2022 plan aimed for 59 billion dollars and 2.5 million jobs. The new best case is 50.5 billion dollars and 2.14 million jobs. The downside case is 43.3 billion dollars and 1.85 million jobs. The group named AI, changing client demands and global competition among the reasons.
We need to review where we are and be honest about what we can achieve realistically, and those are the numbers today.
Those were the words of Jack Madrid, the group's president and chief executive, at the Taguig briefing. Read the two numbers next to each other and the point sharpens. The downside case for 2028, 1.85 million jobs, is smaller than the 1.9 million people already working in the industry in 2025. The bad scenario is no longer slower growth. It is fewer jobs than today.
The catch to watch
A new site in Vietnam is not the same as Philippine work being moved there, and nobody has said it is. Teleperformance has announced no job cuts here. Asked directly about AI and layoffs in November, group deputy chief executive Thomas Mackenbrock did not answer, saying only that the company looks step by step and process by process at how to set itself up for the future. The best case still has the industry adding a quarter of a million jobs by 2028. The thing worth watching is not whether the work disappears. It is which country the next batch of AI related work gets built in.