Emapta is a full-service outsourcing company that helps businesses lower labor costs, and scale fast. "Robots" are here, and they are here to stay. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is silently taking its roots in the modern world. It has created smart homes and offices, boosted security with facial recognition technology, assisted drivers in navigating rush hour traffic, and made people like or buy things through behaviour-reading predictive algorithms. While AI is making a lot of things easier, some people fear that these "robots" will take over their jobs.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already doing great by automating the processes. Today, it has presented the world with so much creativity and innovations that will leave your mouth wide open with surprise. While it is accelerating now with a massive impact, it also plays a grand role in the BPO industry. Citing the magnifying functions of AI systems, we've compiled this editorial focusing on its apt functionality in business process outsourcing (BPO). But before diving into depth, let's understand the operations of machine learning and Artificial intelligence and how it extends its hand in the business functions taking it to a whole new level.

A new trend emerges in every industry yearly. In the BPO industry, for instance, the artificial intelligence or AI got the center stage. Experts even believed that it is going to be the next big thing -- and it is quickly happening in the present. For this year, there are also trends in the call center industry. Most of them talk about the different ways to appease consumers and clients. What we are going to list down is more on the technology side.

MANILA - The use of artificial intelligence in the business process outsourcing will hit "harder" in the "next 3 to 5 years," Socioeconomic Planning Sec. Ernesto Pernia said Wednesday, as he urged the industry to upgrade the skills of its workers. Voice-based services "is not not going to be necessary anymore when you have machines to do it," Pernia told ANC's Headstart. "In the next 3-5 years it will really be hitting harder. It will be there, it will be a reality, this AI," he said.

The biggest and most important trend in 2018 will be the transformation of machine learning practice from a hand-crafted ad hoc operation to a more systematic and automated process. Data preparation, exploratory analysis, and model fitting will all be done using visual platforms that will reduce the importance of coding, and place more emphasis on the ability to formulate business problems and the understanding of techniques. The adoption of comprehensive data science platforms and the reduced importance of coding will mean that domain experts, rather than professional data scientists, will be able to do a lot of sophisticated analysis. The role of machine learning engineers will change, and they will work in a team with domain experts where they will function less as end-to-end developers, and more as technical consultants. Deep learning will continue to be the most important machine learning technology in 2018.

THIS is part of my ongoing series on technology and real estate. The focus is on artificial intelligence (AI), which has been casting a dark shadow on the Philippine business-process outsourcing (BPO) industry. According to the Oxford dictionary, AI is "the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making and translation between languages." Artificial intelligence has great potential to disrupt existing industries and traditional work practices across the world. And the Philippines is no exception.

The outsourcing industry in the Philippines, which has dethroned India as the country with the most call centres in the world, is worried that the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) will eat into the $23 billion sector. AI-powered translators could dilute the biggest advantage the Philippines has, the wide use of English, an industry meeting was told this week. Other AI applications could take over process-driven jobs. The Philippines' business process outsourcing (BPO) industry is an economic lifeline for the Southeast Asian nation of 100 million people. It employs about 1.15 million people and, along with remittances from overseas workers, remains one of the top two earners of foreign exchange.

MANILA (Reuters) - The outsourcing industry in the Philippines, which has dethroned India as the country with the most call centers in the world, is worried that the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) will eat into the $23 billion sector. AI-powered translators could dilute the biggest advantage the Philippines has, the wide use of English, an industry meeting was told this week. Other AI applications could take over process-driven jobs. The Philippines' business process outsourcing (BPO) industry is an economic lifeline for the Southeast Asian nation of 100 million people. It employs about 1.15 million people and, along with remittances from overseas workers, remains one of the top two earners of foreign exchange.

Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, September 6) -- The Trade Department is sounding the alarm on the threat posed by artificial intelligence (AI) on hundreds of thousands of jobs in the country's $25-billion business process outsourcing (BPO) industry. "AI has presented itself more than just as a new technology, but as a threat to the current employees servicing the service export industry and the BPO, including the contact centers," the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) said in a statement Wednesday. It warned that AI can "potentially diminish 45 to 50 percent of the approximately 1.2 million Filipino employees of the BPO industry." Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez called on the academe, business, and technology sectors to step up the retraining in higher value-added skills of BPO employees. "Let us retool and reposition the nature of the current jobs in the industry," he said in the statement.

BANGALORE: Advancement in robotics, autonomous transport, AI and machine learning could impact more than 5 million people's jobs by 2020, according to World Economic Forum's recent study. 'The Future of Jobs' study states that over 5 million people's jobs are estimated to get impacted by technology advancement across verticals and some 2 million new highly-skilled jobs will be created by 2020. This study is one more indicator of how the wave of automation is expected to sweep across industries. And the global BPO (business process outsourcing) sector is too under its impact with the rise of AI, machine learning and RPA (robotic process automation) technology led automated services. Though, the automation wave is at its early stage, some of the Indian BPO firms led by their CIOs (Chief Information Officers) are already embracing it openly as a way to move forward by adopting new technology and enhancing employees' skills.