FOR three years, Kartikeya Kumar hesitated before picking up the phone, anticipating another difficult conversation with another frustrated customer. The call center agent, now 29, had tried everything to eliminate what a colleague called the “Indian-ism” in his accent. He mimicked the dialogue from Marvel movies and belted out songs by Metallica and Pink Floyd. Relief finally arrived in the form of artificial intelligence.
In 2023, Kumar’s employer, the Paris-based outsourcing giant Teleperformance, rolled out an accent-altering software at his office in Gurgaon, on the outskirts of New Delhi. In real time, the AI smooths out Kumar’s accent - and those of at least 42,000 other Indian call centre agents - making their speech more understandable to American clients on the other end of the line. “Now the customer doesn’t know where I am located,” Kumar said. “If it makes the caller happy, it makes me happy, too.”
Those who use the software are engaging in “digital whitewashing,” critics say, which helps explain why the industry prefers the term “accent translation” over “accent neutralization.” But companies say it’s delivering results: happier customers, satisfied agents, faster calls.
Many are not convinced. Whatever short-term gains automation may offer to workers, they say, it will ultimately eliminate far more jobs than it creates.
“AI is going to crush entry-level white-collar hiring over the next 24 to 36 months,” said Mark Serdar, who has spent his career helping Fortune 500 companies expand their global workforce. “And it’s happening faster than most people realize.”
‘A rapid wave’
To understand how AI will reshape the future of work, there are few better places to start than India’s $280 billion business process outsourcing, or BPO, sector.
The stakes for India couldn’t be higher. It is the world’s largest destination for offshoring, which has remained among the few drivers of job creation at a time of deepening unemployment. An estimated 3 million Indians provide customer support, software development, accounting, marketing and other back-office operations for the likes of Verizon, JPMorgan, Microsoft, Walmart, HSBC and Shell.
Some Indian companies are already bracing for a crisis. “Areas like BPO and coding are in trouble and will get replaced by generative AI,” said Ajai Chowdhry, co-founder of one of the country’s largest IT consulting firms, Hindustan Computers Limited. “India needs to altogether shift to designing and making products instead of services,” he said.
Already, chatbots, or “virtual agents,” are handling basic tasks like password resets or balance updates. AI systems are writing code, translating emails, onboarding patients, and analyzing applications for credit cards, mortgages and insurance.
“There is a rapid wave coming,” said Pratyush Kumar, co-founder of Sarvam, a leading Indian AI firm, which recently helped a major insurance provider make 40 million automated phone calls informing enrollees that their insurance program was expiring. He said corporate clients are all asking him to help reduce headcount. “You can’t hide from a trend like this,” Kumar said.
The tremors are also being felt at Indian universities, which produce more than a million engineering graduates each year. Placement rates are falling at leading IT firms; salaries have stagnated. “The entire hope for four years of college that ‘I will get a job in the IT industry’ - that’s dashed, at least for the short term,” said Kris Gopalakrishnan, a co-founder of Infosys. “That story, in India, is life-changing.”
The human edge
While AI may be phasing out certain jobs, its defenders say it is also creating different kinds of opportunities. Teleperformance, along with hundreds of other companies, has hired thousands of data annotators in India - many of them women in small towns and rural areas - to label training images and videos for AI systems. Prompt engineers, data scientists, AI trainers and speech scientists are all newly in demand.
Industry experts say “re-skilling” must emphasize not just AI training but also human connection - helping workers get better at building trust, communicating clearly and showing empathy. “AI might stunt the growth rates of jobs that are manual and predictable, but it will not eliminate human-to-human interaction on the whole,” Narayana said.
“A customer may still want to talk to somebody and get some reassurance,” said Prasanth, the Teleperformance executive. “That human emotion is not going to go away.”
Back at the company’s call center in Gurgaon, that sentiment was echoed by Sagar Rana, a 23-year-old customer service agent. “AI can never have the human touch,” he said. And if AI keeps advancing? “I will evolve accordingly,” Rana said. “It’s human nature to evolve.”