Artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in customer service is expected to raise productivity and broaden the role of Filipino business process outsourcing (BPO) workers rather than replace them, according to software company Genesys.

"I feel this is a plus, not a minus," Mao Gen Foo, vice-president for Asia at Genesys, told a news briefing on Wednesday. "This will level up the productivity of knowledge workers of the BPO [industry] in the Philippines."

Kulachart Ngernpermpoon, the company's country manager for the Philippines, said the country, a major exporter of customer experience services, could combine human expertise with AI tools to deliver services more efficiently.

Six in 10 Filipino customer experience leaders plan to deploy AI-powered tools to support agents, supervisors and employees over the next two years, according to the company's 2026 State of Customer Experience survey. That figure exceeds the Asia-Pacific average of % and the global average of 47%.

Consumer sentiment is also shifting. The survey found that 64% of Filipino consumers have become more positive about AI-powered customer service over the past two years, compared with 56% across the Asia-Pacific region and 50% globally.

Roughly 78% of respondents said they were indifferent to whether customer issues were resolved by a human agent or by AI, provided the matter was handled quickly and completely. Meanwhile, 73% said chatbots and virtual agents made it easier to resolve concerns on their own. For a national industry whose exports are built on handling customer interactions, those consumer attitudes form the demand-side backdrop to the sector's AI adoption plans.

Mr. Ngernpermpoon noted that AI deployment still requires experienced staff to oversee systems and operations.

"The deployment of AI could be much faster and much more scalable, but you need to have the right team head or the right co-worker or the right managers," he said.

Mr. Foo added that trust will be critical as companies expand their use of AI. "In the era of AI, I think the number one currency is trust," he said. "Without trust, nothing works."

The survey showed that Filipino customer experience leaders expect to allocate an average of 32% of their customer service budgets to AI-powered tools in the next 12 months, while about 49% expect agentic or semi-autonomous AI systems to take on a bigger role in handling customer concerns. With deployment plans set on a two-year horizon and budget shifts expected within 12 months, the figures lay out near-term checkpoints for how the country's AI transition in customer service takes shape.

The findings draw on responses from 5,811 consumers and 1,580 customer experience leaders across more than 20 countries, including 1,426 consumers and 508 business leaders in the Asia-Pacific region.

— with a report from Juliana Chloe A. Gonzales