TP wants all 500,000 staff AI-enabled by 2027
NEW YORK, UNITED STATES — TP (formerly Teleperformance), the world’s largest contact center operator by headcount, is targeting all of its approximately 500,000 employees using artificial intelligence (AI) tools by the end of 2026 or early 2027, accepting near-term revenue growth of just 0-2% this year as it absorbs the cost of reskilling its global workforce for an AI-native operating model.
According to a report from Bloomberg, TP Chief Executive Officer Jorge Amar framed the initiative not as a headcount reduction program but as the foundation for a ‘hybrid workforce that is both human and agentic’ — a model the company expects to become standard across the contact center industry within five years.
TP reskills 500K workers as revenue growth slows
The AI enablement push covers the full spectrum of Teleperformance’s global workforce, with AI tools currently deployed across administrative task automation and sales performance support — including negotiation assistance for agents in high-complexity customer interactions.
The investment is directly depressing short-term financial results: the 0-2% revenue growth guidance for the current year reflects reskilling costs and technology integration expenses that precede the productivity and margin gains the company expects once AI deployment reaches scale.
Teleperformance employs approximately 60,000 workers in the Philippines, making it one of the country’s largest private-sector employers and giving its AI adoption timeline direct implications for one of the world’s most BPO-dependent labor markets.
The company’s Philippines outsourcing operations will be among the largest single workforce cohorts affected by the reskilling program.
Teleperformance’s willingness to accept 0-2% revenue growth to fund a full-workforce AI enablement program signals that the company views AI-native delivery capability as the baseline for competitive positioning in the next phase of the contact center market — not a future option.
“Pretty much everyone is being touched by AI in some shape or form,” said Jorge Amar, Chief Executive Officer, Teleperformance.
Headcount becomes ‘just one number’ in a hybrid workforce model
Amar projects that the contact center industry will operate as a standard hybrid human-AI model within five years or less — not as a niche deployment at AI-forward operators, but as the baseline expectation for enterprise-scale outsourcing.
The shift reframes how operators and clients will measure delivery capacity: in a hybrid model where agentic AI agents handle high-volume transaction processing alongside human workers, total headcount stops being the primary metric for workforce capacity or contract pricing.
Amar’s 2027 target also signals that global operators are moving to standardize AI tooling across all employee roles simultaneously — not deploying AI selectively to high-productivity functions first — accepting the operational complexity of a workforce-wide transition in exchange for the scale benefits of full-platform digital transformation.
For BPO operators benchmarking their own AI transition timelines against Teleperformance’s pace, the company’s 0-2% growth guidance this year provides a concrete data point on what full-workforce AI enablement actually costs before the margin benefits materialize.
“In an era of a hybrid workforce, the human headcount will be just one number,” said Amar.
For offshore operators and global BPO buyers, Teleperformance’s 500,000-employee AI enablement program sets a new pace benchmark for the industry — and the short-term revenue compression it is accepting to get there will be the clearest signal yet of whether large-scale contact center operators are willing to trade near-term margin for long-term AI positioning.
