At 8pm every weekday Trizza files into a lift with other workers, sits at her desk in Manila, the capital of the Philippines, and starts calling personal-injury lawyers in northern Virginia. Her job involves finding new business for an American chiropractic firm; it teams up with lawyers to treat their injured clients. Like many offshore staff in the Philippines, Trizza works long hours late at night in a language that is not her native tongue. But one thing has recently made her job easier: these days she dictates her emails to ChatGPT, which quickly rewrites them in a “professional” tone.
Trizza is surprisingly enthusiastic about a technology that some have predicted will crush her industry. Artificial intelligence is, in theory, increasingly capable of doing much of the offshore services industry’s traditional work, such as transcribing notes or resolving customer queries. In July last year Sam Altman, OpenAI’s boss, declared that customer-support jobs would soon be “totally, totally gone” because of AI.
