Great BPO reskilling: Can human call centre agents evolve fast enough for AI

Indian IT services giant TCS’ managing director and chief executive officer K Krithivasan, in a conversation with Financial Times in April, said that "artificial intelligence will kill the call centre industry in India;" he further predicted that Asia, a hub of the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, will soon have only a ‘minimal’ need for these contact centres.

A month before, industry body Nasscom’s chairman Rajesh Nambiar voiced a similar opinion. People working in the BPO industry run the risk of getting replaced by AI "quickly," said Nambiar — who is also the chairman and managing director of Cognizant India.

The trend of outsourcing gained much steam in the 90s with globalisation and corresponding technological advancement which made working from anywhere easier. India, in particular, gained much from the BPO boom. India's BPO industry handles nearly 60% of the world's business process outsourcing market and employs around 4.15 million workers.

Despite the projected growth of the industry, employment here is a cause of much worry amid advancing technology and generative AI. In the last two years, especially after the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, AI chatbots have gotten better at serving customer queries. These language models, which form the base of the chatbots, can analyse a large number of data points in record time to provide solutions to the customer; this phenomenon is particularly true for what is referred to as L1 or level 1 servicing, which is the initial user assistance point. With evolving capabilities, which include multimodality, it is expected that these AI models will be able to solve more complex customer problems.

"It’s anticipated that approximately 25-28% of these jobs may be automated or replaced by AI within the next two years, necessitating the creation of new roles," said Krishna Vij, Business Head — IT Staffing, TeamLease Digital.

Growing demand for AI solutions

BPM company WNS has deployed AI-based solutions for data extraction, content creation, research, translation, and summarisation, "enabling our people to focus on strategic tasks." Another BPM major, France-based Teleperformance, uses AI to augment the skills of its human agents, the CTO Amit Vohra told TechCircle in an email statement. 

Notably, last year Teleperformance’s shares plunged to a seven-year low in February due to concerns around AI’s impact on the company. The French company dismissed the concerns of such negative influence on its business.

Further, US-based AI-based customer service solutions provider Yellow.ai’s co-founder and chief product officer (CPO) Rashid Khan said that "the number of conversations on their platform has doubled from a billion to four billion on quarterly basis in the last two years." He added, "While this is also the result of customer acquisition on our part, it is also indicative of the fact that there is a growing acceptance of AI-based customer servicing." Yellow.ai has enterprise clients such as Sony, Domino's, Hyundai, Randstad, Volkswagen, and Bajaj Finserv.

Cloud and AI-based contact centre solutions provider Ozonetel’s CPO Prashanth Kancherla claims that the company has managed to automate "20% of mundane and repetitive manual processes across sales, services, and customer support." He explained, "Tasks such as routine queries, scheduling appointments, sending reminders, order processing, status updates, and feedback collection can easily be automated across voice and digital channels."

Cutting through AI doomerism

Teamlease Digital’s Vij quoted above believes that roles such as data entry operators, customer support representatives, IT help desk support, and insurance processing agents would give way to newer roles such as chatbot trainers, specialised support agents, content moderation policy analysts, AI financial analysts, and AI system managers. “To mitigate the effects of job displacement, the industry must prioritise upskilling and reskilling initiatives, empowering workers to transition into these emerging roles. While AI streamlines routine tasks, it concurrently amplifies human capabilities, enabling employees to focus on more intricate and value-driven responsibilities,” she further added. 

Yellow.ai’s Khan said that the AI disruption on BPOs will be a multiyear phenomenon. He even predicts that the demand for customer care executives, albeit with advanced skills, will increase with the need for customisation and a growing number of customer touchpoints. 

“I think a lot of the specialisation will have to happen and looking at the world the way things are, the demand is surging. Of course, AI will disrupt but it is not going to be as dire or as commonly expected. It will be more systematic with customer agents becoming more specialised in their skillsets.”