Artificial intelligence is no longer a future idea. It is already changing how businesses operate, how employees do their jobs, and how countries compete. This change is not only about technology. It is also about people, skills, and long-term economic choices.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) recently warned that AI could create a “new great divergence” between countries if developing economies remain dependent on lower-value work while advanced economies build strong AI capabilities and infrastructure. For the Philippines, this is both a risk and an opportunity.
The country has strong assets: a young and adaptable workforce, good English proficiency, and a large services sector. At the same time, there are gaps in infrastructure, advanced skills, and long-term positioning in AI-driven industries. The key question is how the Philippines can move from a largely labor-driven model to a higher-value, AI-supported, people-centered economy.
This article brings together insights from French companies, HR experts, and ecosystem partners already experimenting in this space.
Building hybrid AI workforces
The clearest changes are emerging in customer experience and IT-enabled services, where the Philippines is a global hub. TP (formerly Teleperformance), one of the country’s largest employers, is combining people and AI through its TP.ai FAB platform. FAB Connect helps coordinate people, AI agents, and workflows. FAB Assist provides real-time support to front-line agents during calls and chats. FAB Growth supports sales teams, while FAB Collect helps manage collections through a combination of human expertise and AI recommendations.
Across different clients, TP.ai FAB is already delivering measurable results. For a global hospitality group, TP reported an 18 percent increase in sales conversions and a 44 percent reduction in attrition. For a leading automotive brand, service quality improved by 14 percent, while auto-renewal rates increased by 9 percent.
TP does not move directly to full automation. The company begins with internal and lower-risk functions such as recruitment, training, workforce management, and quality control. It then applies AI to back-office tasks such as claims processing and data management. Only after testing and learning does it increase autonomy in customer-facing interactions. At every stage, human oversight and clear performance metrics remain essential.
Elisabeth Laubel, Human Resources Specialist at CCI France Malaysia, also highlights how AI is changing the nature of work. In many cases, employees are shifting from being producers of work to supervisors who brief AI tools, verify quality, manage exceptions, and coordinate both people and AI agents. She also warns of a possible “learning debt”: if AI eliminates too many entry-level tasks, young professionals could lose opportunities to learn through experience. Companies will need to preserve some training responsibilities and redesign roles so junior employees can continue developing into experienced professionals.
Enterprise AI with governance
AI is also reshaping enterprise and shared services. At AXA Asian Markets Services Philippines, AI tools now support many stages of IT delivery and operations. They help teams clarify requirements, analyze solutions, estimate effort, prepare tests, resolve incidents, and search existing knowledge repositories. AXA Secure GPT provides a secure internal environment where employees can summarize, translate, draft documents, and support code-related work without exposing sensitive data to public AI platforms.
Practical applications are already showing results. Through its AMS Intelligent Recommender tool, AXA has seen improvements in incident resolution time, with an expected reduction of more than 20 percent. The company also expects to save several days on project specifications and requirement clarifications through its Requirement Analyzer.
Because AXA operates in a highly regulated industry, it views AI as a long-term transformation rather than simply another technology. Human oversight, governance, privacy, and security remain central. The objective is to improve productivity and quality while maintaining trust and accountability.
Moving up the value chain
For Patrick Franchinard, founder and CEO of EarthTone and a longtime leader in global business services, AI is forcing service hubs to rethink their role. In the past, the Philippines relied heavily on language proficiency and labor-cost advantages. As AI becomes increasingly capable across multiple languages, routine and repetitive work will become easier to automate. If the country remains concentrated in these activities, it risks losing competitiveness.
The alternative is to move up the value chain by focusing on complex customer experience, end-to-end process management, analytics, and specialized knowledge work. It also means investing in hybrid talent that understands both business operations and AI tools, while strengthening collaboration among industry, academia, and government. From this perspective, AI is not a threat but an opportunity to deliver more sophisticated, higher-value services from the Philippines.
AI is also transforming software development. iScale Solutions, a French company providing software development and IT services from the Philippines, already uses AI tools to assist with coding, testing, documentation, and cloud operations. Senior developers and architects use AI to accelerate routine tasks, but the quality of the output still depends on their expertise in architecture, security, scalability, and business context. As basic coding becomes easier to automate, the Philippines has an opportunity to expand into end-to-end software engineering, product management, cloud operations, cybersecurity, and AI integration instead of focusing primarily on entry-level development work.
Powering smarter industry
AI is not limited to digital services. It is also transforming energy management and industrial operations, areas where French companies have extensive experience. For Schneider Electric Philippines, AI and energy are closely connected. As AI workloads and data centers expand, electricity demand and reliability requirements also increase. Companies must improve efficiency to achieve both performance and sustainability.
At Schneider Electric’s Cavite Smart Factory, building management and power monitoring systems enable teams to track energy use in real time and respond quickly. These systems have supported efficiency gains of about 20 to 30 percent while reducing unplanned downtime. The modernization of RCBC Plaza’s building management system using EcoStruxure solutions is another example, demonstrating how existing Philippine buildings can be upgraded into smarter, more efficient facilities through digitalization.
These examples suggest that AI, combined with quality data and skilled teams, can help the country manage energy, costs, and operational resilience more intelligently.
Building a human-centered AI ecosystem
Across these examples, one message stands out: the objective is not to replace people but to help them work more effectively. Empathy, creativity, critical thinking, and sound judgment remain essential.
In this context, ecosystem organizations such as La French Tech Manila and CCI France Philippines are working to make AI more practical and accessible for the business community.
La French Tech Manila connects founders, French startups, local entrepreneurs, investors, and business leaders. Its Pitch and Socials Nights, founder panels, and networking events encourage the exchange of practical projects, including AI applications in customer experience, fintech, healthcare, and logistics. The community has grown to around 2,000 members and recently received a three-year official label from Mission French Tech, reflecting Manila’s growing importance within the network.
CCI France Philippines also serves as a bridge for businesses. The chamber recently hosted two AI-related events: “Deep Dive Into Artificial Intelligence Use Cases” at the Datawords office in partnership with La French Tech Manila, and “Inclusive Intelligence: Women Advancing AI for Social Development,” organized by its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee with ACTED Philippines and 3ZERO House Philippines at the TP office. More activities on AI and digital transformation are planned in the coming months, particularly on how AI and automation are reshaping global business services and workforce requirements.
During the LimitlessBiz National Policy Convening on AI for MSMEs, I said that AI adoption is not primarily a technology challenge but a collaboration challenge. The sooner businesses, policymakers, educators, and ecosystem organizations work together, the more the entire economy will benefit.
The examples highlighted in this article represent only a small part of what is already taking place. Taken together, however, they suggest that the Philippines has many of the ingredients needed to build an AI-enabled, human-centered future if the ecosystem continues to learn, experiment, and move forward together.