Philippine IT-BPM cuts its growth targets on AI
MANILA, PHILIPPINES — The Information Technology and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP) has revised its 2028 industry roadmap targets downward, citing rapid AI adoption, buyer behavior shifts, and heightened global competition, while projecting that 2026 will still close with $42.3 billion in revenue and 1.96 million employees, BusinessWorld reports.
IBPAP revises 2028 targets to $50.5Bn ceiling, down from $59Bn
The original targets — set in IBPAP’s six-year roadmap launched in 2022 — projected $59 billion in revenues and 2.5 million workers by 2028, benchmarks the association now describes as requiring revision to reflect a more honest assessment of where AI adoption, competitive dynamics, and buyer behavior changes are taking the sector’s growth trajectory over the remaining two years of the planning window.
The 2026 outlook remains positive: IBPAP projects $42.3 billion in revenues and 1.96 million workers by year-end, up from $40 billion and 1.89 million recorded in 2025, confirming that near-term growth continues even as the 2028 ceiling has been substantially cut.
The revision range reflects genuine uncertainty about how quickly AI-driven demand displacement will outpace AI-enabled growth across service lines, with the gap large enough to distinguish between a sector that absorbs AI and one that is absorbed by it.
“These projections reflect a more honest assessment of where the industry is headed,” said Jack Madrid, President and CEO, IBPAP, citing rapid AI adoption, changes in buyer behavior, and heightened global competition as the forces driving the revision.
“AI-enabled” workforce reframes the metric beyond headcount
The best-case 2028 scenario of $50.5 billion and 2.14 million workers represents an industry that has successfully integrated AI across delivery models — with the downside scenario of $43.3 billion and 1.85 million workers framing that outcome as conditional on effective AI adoption at scale across the sector’s current 1.96 million projected-year workforce.
The revised roadmap reframes the sector’s labor metric: the target is not 2.5 million workers but 2 million AI-enabled workers, a distinction that accepts a smaller absolute headcount while measuring success on depth of AI integration rather than quantity of positions filled.
The same three forces IBPAP cites — AI adoption, buyer behavior changes, and global competition — have simultaneously driven the 46% Indian IT market-cap correction and HCLTech’s $1.14 billion AI-execution mandate this week, framing the Philippine revision as a sector-wide structural recalibration rather than a country-specific setback.
For BPO operators and global buyers tracking the Philippine sector’s AI trajectory, the $59B→$50.5B revision is the industry’s formal acknowledgment that AI is restructuring service demand faster than the 2022 roadmap anticipated — and “AI-enabled” is now the qualifier that separates a job the sector can defend from one it cannot.
“Our vision is a Philippine IT-BPM industry powered by 2 million AI-enabled digital Filipino workers — the most important word there is AI-enabled. It is not so much the number; we are not just talking about jobs or workers, but workers equipped with AI capabilities,” said Madrid.
For offshore operators and global buyers tracking the Philippine IT-BPM market, IBPAP’s revised roadmap signals that the sector’s competitive position in the AI era will be determined by the depth of AI capability across its workforce, not the scale of its headcount.
