The AI boom hasn’t stopped U.S. companies from hiring cheap offshore labor, and overseas call center employment is still skyrocketing

In September 2025, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the company slashed 4,000 customer service roles :“I need less heads,” Benioff said at the time.

But as more companies adopt agentic AI in hopes of replacing or making human workers more efficient, one top economist has noted customer service roles—particularly those overseas—are only growing.

Citing data from the IT & Business Process Association of the Philippines, Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok noted in a recent blog post that from 2016 through 2025, call center employment in the Philippines has risen each year, nearly doubling to 2 million over the 10-year span.

He also found from 2021 to July 2026, unemployment rates in the Philippines have decreased from 9% to about 5%, and in India decreased from around 7% to 6%, suggesting AI has not displaced offshore workers.

“If AI were displacing white-collar work at scale, you would expect to see it first in the Philippines and India, where business process outsourcing (call centers, IT support, back-office processing) accounts for a large share of employment,” Slok wrote last week.

“Instead, the unemployment rate in both countries has continued to trend lower.” The Philippines dethroned India as the largest call center employer about 15 years ago.

Offshore call center jobs began booming in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a cost-cutting measure.

The labor is considerably cheaper overseas than in the U.S., with Filipino call center workers earning wages of 15,000 to over 120,000 Philippine pesos per month, or about $243 to $1,948.

In the U.S., the average monthly wage for call center workers is about $2,866 , according to Indeed.

But these jobs are also among the most susceptible to AI displacement.

The Brookings Institution estimated 86% of customer service representative tasks had high automation potential.

The apparent contradiction of the job’s potential to be automated alongside rising employment points to a centuries-old economic paradox reflected across labor more broadly, according to Slok.

“This is Jevons paradox in action,” he wrote.

“As AI makes call center work cheaper and faster, companies are buying more of it, not less.” Jevons paradox in the 21st century Jevons paradox refers to an observation made by English economist William Stanley Jevons in 1865: The invention of the Watt steam engine made coal a more efficient energy source.