Despite AI agents being promoted to replace customer service staff, the number of offshore call center workers has still grown significantly over the past several years.
Marc Benioff once stated that Salesforce cut 4,000 customer support positions in 2025 to deploy AI agents.
However, data from the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines shows that call center jobs in the Philippines nearly doubled between 2016 and 2025, reaching around 2 million workers.
The unemployment rate in the Philippines dropped from about 9% in 2021 to nearly 4% in March 2026, indicating that AI has not yet caused a major wave of job losses in the outsourcing market.
The Philippines surpassed India to become the world’s largest call center hub about 15 years ago, thanks to labor costs being much lower than those in the US.
Philippine call center employees earn about 15,000–120,000 pesos/month, equivalent to approximately 243–1,948 USD, which is lower than the US average of about 2,866 USD/month.
Chief Economist Torsten Slok suggests this is a modern example of the “Jevons paradox”: AI makes work cheaper and more efficient, so businesses end up utilizing it more rather than less.
A 2023 study by Erik Brynjolfsson showed that conversational AI helped over 5,000 customer service employees increase their productivity by an average of 14% per hour.
Some experts note that AI is currently still incapable of handling complex or emotional situations in customer care.
Many businesses are also expected to maintain real human staff as a brand advantage, as customers increasingly want to speak with humans rather than chatbots.
Conclusion: The wave of AI agents has not yet created a major unemployment shock as many predicted, especially in the offshore call center industry. Instead of disappearing, jobs in the Philippines continue to grow strongly to around 2 million people, as AI helps reduce costs and expand global demand for services. Economists view this as a modern version of the Jevons paradox: the more efficient the technology, the more labor and services businesses consume. Although AI is significantly boosting productivity, experts believe that the ability to handle emotions, complex situations, and the demand for human interaction will allow many customer care roles to persist for years to come.
