The French outsourcing giant Teleperformance is going all in on AI. The company that runs customer-service call centers for a huge range of businesses wants every single one of its roughly half-a-million employees using artificial-intelligence tools in their daily work by the end of 2026 or the beginning of 2027.
That is a massive shift for a company built on human workers handling phone calls, chats, and back-office tasks. CEO Jorge Amar says the push is about survival as much as opportunity. AI is already changing the game for business-process-outsourcing (BPO) firms, and Teleperformance wants to be ahead of the curve.
"Pretty much everyone is being touched by AI in some shape or form," Amar said.
Teleperformance operates in multiple countries and handles customer service for major brands across industries. The Philippines alone accounts for 60,000 employees, and the industry there employs 1.9 million people, highlighting the stakes of this technological shift.
Amar is not new to this kind of thinking. He used to lead the digital customer care practice at McKinsey & Co. before taking over at Teleperformance.
Get the market news that matters in a five-minute read with Market Briefs, our free daily newsletter
The CEO says AI tools are already handling automated administrative tasks. They are also helping sales agents with "negotiation tricks" to boost performance. But the bigger picture is where it gets interesting.
"We are moving into a world of hybrid workforce that is both human and agentic," Amar said.
A shift this big at Teleperformance sends a signal through the entire sector.
The catch: Revenue is not exactly booming right now. That is partly because the company is spending heavily on retraining workers and upgrading technology. Those costs are eating into the short-term numbers, even as the long-term strategy takes shape.
Amar is blunt about where this is heading. "In an era of a hybrid workforce, the human headcount will be just one number," he said. That matters for anyone who owns BPO stocks or works in the industry.
The slow growth this year is a hint that this transition is expensive. Teleperformance is making significant investments in reskilling, and those costs will show up in earnings reports for a while. But the bet is that a workforce that uses AI well will be more productive and more valuable than one that ignores it.
For investors, the question is whether the payoff arrives before the disruption hurts the business. A company spending to train half-a-million people on new tools is a company that believes the old way of doing things does not have much longer to run.
The numbers are small now. But if Amar is right about the hybrid workforce becoming standard in every contact center within five years, the companies that make that leap first could have a real edge. The ones that wait could find themselves behind.
Join Market Briefs, our free daily newsletter, for a quick daily rundown of the markets
