The US$30 billion outsourcing sector is fighting to adapt, leaving millions of workers with a stark choice: upskill or be left behind
Renso Bajala didn’t expect a machine to help decide whether he kept his job.
The AI analysed his tone, delivery and keyword usage, scoring each interaction for sentiment and customer experience. No one had mentioned it during training.
“I was a new hire, and nothing in our training curriculum said that AI would be used to measure our performances,” Bajala told This Week in Asia. “Then the trainer informed us that the outcome from the AI software would be part of our metrics.”
At first, he didn’t resist the idea of being evaluated by AI. What wore him down was the way the scoring felt fixed and context-blind, as if the system couldn’t see what a human listener might understand about a difficult call.
“If it [the score] was low, you’d start overthinking what you did wrong, even if you felt you did your best,” he said, adding that the process felt “unfair”.
Source: News - South China Morning Post
