Converge, IBPAP team up on BPO AI upskilling

MANILA, PHILIPPINES — Converge ICT Solutions has joined IT & Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP) as a Platinum Member, establishing a connectivity and AI upskilling partnership aimed at preparing the Philippines’ 1.9 million business process outsourcing (BPO) workers for an AI-augmented sector that generates $40 billion in annual export revenues and contributes more than 8% of national GDP, Newsbytes.PH reports.

Converge-IBPAP Platinum membership targets BPO AI upskilling

The Platinum membership gives Converge a structural role in IBPAP’s AI readiness agenda — the association represents 400-plus companies across the Philippines’ IT-BPM sector and coordinates with six industry associations — as AI automation redefines which roles require human specialization rather than routine task execution.

Converge’s contribution to the partnership is infrastructure as enabler: the same connectivity that gave BPO operators distributed delivery capacity during the pandemic now underpins the AI upskilling programs designed to keep those distributed workers competitive as the task profile of BPO shifts toward knowledge-intensive work.

The Converge-IBPAP partnership frames AI upskilling as an infrastructure problem, not merely a training problem — connectivity that reaches distributed BPO workers across the Philippines’ regions is the prerequisite for any national-scale AI workforce transition.

“We need to level up the skills of our workers and transform our industries to enable us to capture AI opportunities,” said Dennis Anthony Uy, CEO and co-founder, Converge ICT Solutions.

260,000 pandemic jobs showed connectivity as IT-BPM foundation

IBPAP’s 400-plus member companies span the full Philippines IT-BPM delivery stack — from enterprise BPO operators to technology providers — making the Platinum membership a structural integration of Converge’s connectivity into the sector’s upskilling agenda rather than a sponsorship arrangement.

The Philippines’ IT-BPM sector statistics anchor the upskilling imperative: 1.9 million workers generating $40 billion in export revenues at more than 8% of GDP is a labor market large enough that even a partial AI-driven displacement of routine tasks creates a workforce transition challenge at national scale.

Uy’s framing — that AI handles ‘simple, repetitive tasks cheaper and faster’ — positions the upskilling program as a deliberate shift from routine execution toward the specialized, judgment-intensive roles that AI cannot economically replace, mirroring the KPO pivot strategy visible across other BPO markets.

For the Philippine IT-BPM sector, the Converge Platinum membership signals that AI upskilling is no longer an industry aspiration — it is an infrastructure investment, with the country’s connectivity layer enrolled as an active component of the workforce transition.

“During the pandemic, when the world was shutting down, the IT-BPM sector added 260,000 jobs and connectivity made that possible,” said Jack Madrid, President and CEO, IBPAP.

For BPO operators tracking the Philippines’ AI-readiness trajectory, the Converge-IBPAP partnership documents that the country’s infrastructure layer and its sector association are aligning behind a shared upskilling agenda — making the Philippines’ AI workforce transition a coordinated national-scale program rather than a company-by-company training initiative.