Philippines faces ‘urgent challenge’ to upskill workforce to compete with AI

The Philippines should start upskilling its workforce to be able to compete with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) as services continue to drive the country’s economy, an expert in the field said

According to McCormick Foundation associate dean for digital innovation and professor of technology Dr. Mohanbir Sawhney, the country should start taking steps to upskill the Filipino workforce.

“I think that the Philippines faces a very urgent challenge that it has created a very successful industry in customer services and customer care, but a lot of the work is voice work and it is fairly low-level customer interactions which are prime targets for AI-based automation,” he said on the sidelines of the AI for Business Leaders seminar in Makati City.

“The question that the government, the university, educational institutions need to think about is how do we prepare our people to be prompt engineers, to be data scientists, to be, you know, creative people who are, you know, one step ahead and one step above simply providing voice-based customer support,” he added.

Services continue to be a major economic growth driver in the country, posting the highest sectoral growth of 8.4% in the first quarter of the year, followed by agriculture up 2.2%, and industry with 3.9%.

The country also plays host to major business process outsourcing (BPO) firms, with the information technology and business process management (IT-BPM) sector recording a 1.57-million headcount in 2022.

“In that voice-based customer support, the question will be how do you combine the inputs of AI with your human judgment to provide superior outputs, but I think that net, it is going to be a challenge because fewer people are going to be needed,” Sawhney said.

“Those fewer people will be doing higher-level jobs, but lower-level jobs will be displaced and that is a challenge that the education system, the government, needs to start thinking about today cause if you don’t upgrade the quality of your workforce, the talent, it will get replaced by AI,” he added.

Sawhney noted, however, that while AI is more of a tool to enhance processes, it would still work best hand in hand with human judgment, given the nature of having empathy.

“I absolutely believe that some of the most promising use cases for generative AI will be where humans and morals and machines work together to create superior outcomes because fundamentally, human beings have different skills than algorithms,” he said.

“Algorithms crunch lots of data, they are able to look at and see patterns from data very quickly, but human beings have creativity, they have empathy, they have judgment, they have morals and ethics,” he added.

Monday’s event was co-presented by GMA Network Inc. through its international arm GMA International, John Clements Consultants (JCC), and the Northwestern University/Kellogg School of Management Alumni Association of the Philippines.

“Ngayon natutunan natin na malaking bagay pala ang dapat gampanan ng ating mga pinuno, ng mga kumpanya, ng gobyerno, upang lalo pang maging mabuti ang ating mga trabaho sa iba’t ibang larangan sa tulong ng AI,” GMA International First Vice President and Head of Operations Joseph Jerome Francia said.

“’Yung ating mga pangamba na ito ay makakawala ng trabaho ay maibsan at mapalitan ng mas mabuting pangunawa kung ano ang ikabubuti ng AI para sa ating bansa,” he added.

(Now we learned the role that our leaders, companies, and the government must play to improve our jobs with the assistance of AI, and the fears that this would lead to the loss of jobs would be allayed and replaced with a better understanding of how AI would improve the country.)

To recall, Senator Imee Marcos in May filed a resolution seeking an inquiry into the possible effects of AI on BPOs, as she cited an Oxford Economics and Cisco study predicting at least 1.1 million jobs in the Philippines would disappear by 2028.

This comes as the Philippines recorded a mismatch in the workforce skills and the jobs available in the country.

A number of government agencies have since been directed to collaborate with the private sector to reduce the mismatch in priority sectors. — DVM, GMA Integrated News