Call-center employment in the Philippines has risen every year from 2016 through 2025, nearly doubling to 2 million workers, according to data from the IT & Business Process Association of the Philippines cited by Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok.
The growth comes despite warnings that customer-service work is among the most exposed to artificial intelligence. The Brookings Institution has estimated that 86% of customer service representative tasks carry high automation potential.
Slok also found that unemployment in the Philippines fell from about 9% in 2021 to roughly 5% by July 2026, while India's rate dropped from around 7% to 6% over the same period. 'If AI were displacing white-collar work at scale, you would expect to see it first in the Philippines and India,' Slok wrote, noting the opposite has occurred.
The wage gap explains why the work moved offshore in the first place. Filipino call-center workers earn between 15,000 and over 120,000 Philippine pesos a month — roughly $243 to $1,948 — versus an average U.S. monthly wage near $2,866 for the same role, according to Indeed.
Slok attributes the pattern to Jevons paradox, the 1865 observation by economist William Stanley Jevons that cheaper, more efficient coal use drove consumption up rather than down after the Watt steam engine. 'As AI makes call center work cheaper and faster, companies are buying more of it, not less,' Slok wrote. 'Lower cost per interaction does not mean fewer interactions. It means more customers served, more channels opened and more markets worth reaching.'
The pattern is not confined to call centers. Christoph Herpfer, a business administration professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, told Fortune that U.S. radiologist headcount has grown 10% over the past decade despite predictions the specialty would be automated away. 'We actually have a huge shortage of radiologists,' he said.
Research backs the productivity angle. A 2023 study led by Stanford Digital Economy Lab director Erik Brynjolfsson found that an AI conversational assistant lifted productivity by an average of 14% per hour across more than 5,000 customer-support agents. Emma Harrington, a University of Virginia economics professor, said the mechanism echoes Brynjolfsson's earlier finding that AI translation on eBay boosted international exports by 17.5%: 'We can trade labor more easily across countries when language can be traded more seamlessly.'
This is what markets do when left to price capital, technology and labor without political interference. The alarm sounded by tech executives and commentators who predicted mass white-collar displacement has not matched what the employment data actually show in the Philippines or India — economies where outsourced service work is a dominant share of jobs.
What the numbers reveal instead is a familiar story: when a technology drives down the cost of a service, businesses do not shrink their appetite for it, they expand it. Capital moves toward efficiency, and workers on both sides of the Pacific benefit from lower unemployment, not fewer paychecks. The lesson for policymakers tempted to regulate AI out of fear is that the market has already been running this experiment for a decade, and the results argue for staying out of its way.
