The future of IT-BPO: Boom or doom?
Philippine Star’s Andrew Masigan recently wrote a two-part opinion piece on the current and predicted state of the country’s Information Technology-Business Process Outsourcing (IT-BPO) industry.
Masigan noted that the industry’s road ahead “is fraught with uncertainty.” With the rise of chatbots and artificial intelligence, the Philippines “stands to lose hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in revenues in the voice-based segment if we do not respond quickly.”
In the second part of the piece, Outsource Accelerator CEO Derek Gallimore shared his disagreement with Masigan’s piece. Gallimore asserted the industry’s future, saying that it lies in servicing small to medium enterprises (SMEs) in the West.
The IT-BPO champion said that the pandemic accelerated the need for SMEs to outsource their operations. It is only a matter of time before businesses like barber shops, restaurants, retail stores and small traders “outsource their simple but time consuming backroom office tasks.”
In 20 years, Gallimore predicts that 80 per cent of all Western SMEs will outsource their backroom functions – adding 30 million jobs to employ the young workforce.
