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The Philippines' big offshoring industry is growing despite AI

economist.com

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Re: The Philippines' big offshoring industry is growing despite AI

#22
post #2

From a recent article in The Economist. It turns out that once again many of the jobs that people predicted would be eliminated by AI have instead received a boost, at least for now. This closely follows another recent report on how Indian BPO firms are surprisingly thriving due to AI. "Moreover, AI is helping offshore workers in the Philippines do new, more complex jobs. They are picking up work training AI models o…

Yeah, paradoxically Indian software outsourcing is growing. I guess the way the companies are thinking about this is we need some sort of human oversight for all the work the LLMs are doing, might as well pay someone the least amount possible to do that.

Don't understand why this should not have been obvious. If you have technology that allows expensive workers to do things cheaper why wouldn't same technology allow cheaper workers to do stuff even cheaper... And cheap is good...

Re: The Philippines' big offshoring industry is growing despite AI

#23
Overall it seems we don't have good intuitions for what kinda work AI 'displaces'. Years of hand-wringing about programmers being put out of a job and instead programmers are the ones paying $200/mo for LLMs

And on the flipside a lot of AI vendor ideas like helping doctors turn voice transcripts into notes has just been annoying for the prospective user--they feel they may as well type it up themselves if they then have to review and correct the AI notes

Re: The Philippines' big offshoring industry is growing despite AI

#26
post #2

From a recent article in The Economist. It turns out that once again many of the jobs that people predicted would be eliminated by AI have instead received a boost, at least for now. This closely follows another recent report on how Indian BPO firms are surprisingly thriving due to AI. "Moreover, AI is helping offshore workers in the Philippines do new, more complex jobs. They are picking up work training AI models o…

> Hospitals in America are increasingly outsourcing the checking of insurance eligibility and filing of medical records to Filipinos packing AI tools

So, insurance claims are handled by people who operate in different legal system and by unaccountable undererministic system. And people are pressured to perform fast.

This is not about "automating complex task". This is about "create accountability sink for fraud we want them to do and create system that will perform said fraud".

Re: The Philippines' big offshoring industry is growing despite AI

#27
post #2

From a recent article in The Economist. It turns out that once again many of the jobs that people predicted would be eliminated by AI have instead received a boost, at least for now. This closely follows another recent report on how Indian BPO firms are surprisingly thriving due to AI. "Moreover, AI is helping offshore workers in the Philippines do new, more complex jobs. They are picking up work training AI models o…

> It seems like AI has incidentally commoditized the complement (procedural knowledge), and in turn created greater demand for inputs like human judgement and "empathy".

I think as well there is currently the following: AI still needs an operator, in the same way than a bulldozer needs a bulldozer operator. And like with bulldozer, there are always something that business stakeholder wanna dig, now that digging is faster.

Re: The Philippines' big offshoring industry is growing despite AI

#28
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a GCC?

Global capability centers where they basically do the business processes and work for US/EU companies for fraction the cost.

So basically like ghost kitchens for white-collar work, with an extra timezone difference?

Re: The Philippines' big offshoring industry is growing despite AI

#29
post #2

From a recent article in The Economist. It turns out that once again many of the jobs that people predicted would be eliminated by AI have instead received a boost, at least for now. This closely follows another recent report on how Indian BPO firms are surprisingly thriving due to AI. "Moreover, AI is helping offshore workers in the Philippines do new, more complex jobs. They are picking up work training AI models o…

Yeah, paradoxically Indian software outsourcing is growing. I guess the way the companies are thinking about this is we need some sort of human oversight for all the work the LLMs are doing, might as well pay someone the least amount possible to do that.

I’m not sure if this is true. I really want the hiring story to be true, but the responses I am getting from people on the ground vs industry generated reports isn’t meeting up.

The only report that I know of that is available is the ICRIER report.

I haven’t read the report itself, but it’s supposed to show modest hiring growth.

Conversely I know that most of the outsourcing vendors are seeing reductions in headcount when it comes to outsourced tech operations.

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