The Philippines runs a $40B outsourcing industry employing 1.9M people, and AI is now taking the jobs it was built on. BBC published a piece. That trade was built in the early 2000s on one advantage, because the country could supply English-speaking staff more cheaply than India. Governments handed out tax breaks and infrastructure, so Accenture, Concentrix and Teleperformance filled Manila with campuses holding hundreds of thousands of workers. That worked while buyers wanted a person at a desk for less. Now those same clients expect suppliers to run automation as well, which changes what a headcount contract is worth. More than two-thirds of the industry association's members are already running AI pilots, and its president concedes a layer of jobs has gone. He says most of them moved into other roles. The mechanics are less reassuring, since the first stage of automation shows up as extra work rather than less. --- bbc .com/news/articles/cgr7nxve05go