On the verge of the agentic artificial intelligence (AI) era, is business process outsourcing (BPO) facing an existential threat or a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?
The sector has always reflected global shifts: explosive growth in the era of hyperglobalisation, optimisation through robotic process automation in the wake of the global financial crisis and remote operations following the Covid-19 pandemic.
Since being founded in 1978, Teleperformance (TP) has been at the coal face of this all. The French BPO giant now employs about 490,000 people in close to 100 countries. The major BPO disruption of today is artificial intelligence (AI). TP plans to invest up to €100m in AI partnerships in 2025 alone.
Thomas Mackenbrock, the company’s deputy CEO, sat down with fDi to discuss how AI is shifting its thinking about capital expenditure, its workforce and leading TP to explore new business models.
Q: How will the use of AI change the way TP operates?
So far, we have deployed AI more as an augmentation or assistant to our current workforce. If we look into the future, this notion of humans assisted by AI is changing a bit.
You have more like a triad. Now you have human work, which I think will still be essential. You have the work of AI as a co-pilot, assisting work. And you will have agentic AI, so AI working autonomously. The metaphor is not that AI is an assistant to a human, but a co-worker to a human. I think this is almost inevitable, not just for us, but for the world. As a global business-to-business services company, our job will be to orchestrate this, because it’s complex.
My deep conviction is that in a world of AI, the world will become more conversational. Sometimes it will be a human talking to a human, sometimes a human to an AI, even an AI to another AI. In a world that is so complex and penetrated by AI, having the empathy of a human will be crucially important.
Q: If you are investing more into AI, do you have fewer resources to increase your workforce?
It’s not a static picture. If you look back 10 years ago, a lot of the work we did in the past as an organisation has been automated, or replaced by an app or self-service portal. The question for TP is how to adapt to this changing landscape. There will be new business lines coming on top of what we currently do.
For example, about €1bn, or 10% of our revenue today, comes from ‘trust and safety’, meaning content moderation, data labeling, data annotation. This is something that hadn’t existed 10 years ago. Going forward, training AI needs human support. The jury is out about how the landscape will evolve.
Q: How has your investment strategy changed in this new AI age?
Due to Covid-19, we have a more virtualised business model. We don’t necessarily need to open up physical centres. But we can also increase our presence, it depends on the client and the location. Capex is affected by whether you can offer services in a work from home [set-up] or you need to build a physical centre.
On the AI side, the world is changing so rapidly, and there are so many new developments, so we need to be open to all kinds of developments. Having access to a portfolio of different AI companies gives us an advantage for our clients. We will not be a pure AI company, but if an AI company wants to scale leveraging us, we have the platform and distribution.
fDi
