The Philippines' big offshoring industry is growing despite AI

nnlpnerd about 4 hours ago 31 commentsRead Article on economist.com

HI version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

69% Positive

Analyzed from 691 words in the discussion.

Discussion (31 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

nlpnerd•about 3 hours ago

From a recent article in The Economist. It turns out that once again many of the jobs that people predicted would be eliminated by AI have instead received a boost, at least for now. This closely follows another recent report on how Indian BPO firms are surprisingly thriving due to AI.

"Moreover, AI is helping offshore workers in the Philippines do new, more complex jobs. They are picking up work training AI models or supervising AI agents. Hospitals in America are increasingly outsourcing the checking of insurance eligibility and filing of medical records to Filipinos packing AI tools. Mr Gallimore says more “high-value” work, such as accountancy or engineering, is going offshore in part because “AI is a leveller. You can now teach someone complex stuff quickly” and still get it done more cheaply than in America or Europe. Some of this is done at so-called global capability centres, captive back offices that are booming in India and also now growing in the Philippines."

It seems like AI has incidentally commoditized the complement (procedural knowledge), and in turn created greater demand for inputs like human judgement and "empathy".

ygouzerh•19 minutes ago

> It seems like AI has incidentally commoditized the complement (procedural knowledge), and in turn created greater demand for inputs like human judgement and "empathy".

I think as well there is currently the following: AI still needs an operator, in the same way than a bulldozer needs a bulldozer operator. And like with bulldozer, there are always something that business stakeholder wanna dig, now that digging is faster.

jesse_faden•about 1 hour ago

I visited India recently and when I saw just how many companies have a GCC there I was mindblown. Lots of cool offices, engineering and technical roles, great work life balance and generally a different vibe. Literally every company that I could recognise had a back office there.

eru•about 1 hour ago

What's a GCC?

bakraman•about 1 hour ago

Global capability centers where they basically do the business processes and work for US/EU companies for fraction the cost.

lmz•about 1 hour ago

> so-called global capability centres, captive back offices that are booming in India ...

watwut•22 minutes ago

> Hospitals in America are increasingly outsourcing the checking of insurance eligibility and filing of medical records to Filipinos packing AI tools

So, insurance claims are handled by people who operate in different legal system and by unaccountable undererministic system. And people are pressured to perform fast.

This is not about "automating complex task". This is about "create accountability sink for fraud we want them to do and create system that will perform said fraud".

dyauspitr•about 1 hour ago

Yeah, paradoxically Indian software outsourcing is growing. I guess the way the companies are thinking about this is we need some sort of human oversight for all the work the LLMs are doing, might as well pay someone the least amount possible to do that.

Ekaros•40 minutes ago

Don't understand why this should not have been obvious. If you have technology that allows expensive workers to do things cheaper why wouldn't same technology allow cheaper workers to do stuff even cheaper... And cheap is good...

intended•13 minutes ago

I’m not sure if this is true. I really want the hiring story to be true, but the responses I am getting from people on the ground vs industry generated reports isn’t meeting up.

The only report that I know of that is available is the ICRIER report.

I haven’t read the report itself, but it’s supposed to show modest hiring growth.

Conversely I know that most of the outsourcing vendors are seeing reductions in headcount when it comes to outsourced tech operations.

downrightmike•about 2 hours ago

Ooph, now the AI will be wrong and the human won't know it. And that's running our... let me see... life saving care. Cool. cool. cool.

decimalenough•about 2 hours ago

"Computer says no" has been a trope of terrible customer service long before AI.

kombookcha•about 1 hour ago

"Computer says no" is about unhelpful bureaucracy. Being knowingly locked to a specific procedure and unwilling to divert from it is a different thing from mistakes being made that you are blissfully unaware of. The problem is now invisible and the patient is dying for no reason anyone can discern.

seanmcdirmid•about 1 hour ago

Has anything really changed for transparency?

dyauspitr•about 1 hour ago

Your average devs are wrong more than the AI is at this point.

eru•about 1 hour ago

At a former job for a regional bank in South East Asia my boss used to joke that outsourcing is really great for the company, because now they can fail to deliver their software projects for cheaper.

MikeNotThePope•10 minutes ago

Personally I find AI simultaneously powerful and fatiguing. Hiring someone else to use AI is honestly pretty great.

MiroslavPokorny•about 2 hours ago

YT videos from Philippines would disagree.

nlpnerd•41 minutes ago

What YT videos?

sam_lowry_•28 minutes ago

About working conditions in Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs) also known as scamming centers?

flyingshelf•6 minutes ago

What does that have to do with the general state of the whole industry? "Scamming" rarely falls into proper "jobs" anyway.

eru•about 2 hours ago

People love to complain.

firasd•33 minutes ago

Overall it seems we don't have good intuitions for what kinda work AI 'displaces'. Years of hand-wringing about programmers being put out of a job and instead programmers are the ones paying $200/mo for LLMs

And on the flipside a lot of AI vendor ideas like helping doctors turn voice transcripts into notes has just been annoying for the prospective user--they feel they may as well type it up themselves if they then have to review and correct the AI notes