In May 2024, I issued a stark warning in this column: Jamaica was standing directly in the pathway of a technology-driven economic tremor. I cautioned that our heavy national reliance on outsourced North American call-centre jobs left our economy acutely vulnerable. Just over two years later, the tremors are at our shores, and the signs aren’t confined to international headlines.
Sector Leaders Under Pressure
Before dissecting the new market realities, it is essential to acknowledge the immense pressure bearing down on sector leadership. For over two decades, as the island’s telecommunications infrastructure matured and local outsourcing shifted from garment-manufacturing free zones, business process outsourcing (BPO) emerged as the golden child of the economy. It was a primary growth driver, job-creation powerhouse, and crown jewel of foreign direct investment. At its peak, the sector employed 62,000 Jamaican, while generating US$1 billion annually in economic receipts, circulated through wages, transportation, food, housing, and other domestic expenditure. Billions of dollars in private capital were deployed, master-planned commercial real estate was developed, and thousands of young Jamaicans found their first foothold in the formal economy. We are not talking about a marginal industry but rather one of Jamaica’s largest sources of formal employment and foreign-exchange earnings, with entire commercial districts and household incomes built around the expectation of its continued growth.
Any industry carrying such heavy expectations, which suddenly faces sustained and severe contraction, must responsibly move to maintain the confidence of institutional financiers and equity partners, preserve relationships with global clients, and protect the morale of thousands of workers. Aggressively pushing back against the “AI doomsday rhetoric” is a rational corporate defence strategy in the circumstances. But rational corporate reassurance isn’t a substitute for economic truth.
Investor interest may overlap with that of the wider Jamaican economy, but they are certainly not identical. Protecting confidence is as important as giving workers, educational institutions, and policymakers enough truthful and complete information to prepare and avoid dangerous delays in national planning for structural change.
The Physical Footprint of a Sector Squeeze
A recent report in the Financial Gleaner revealed that over 245,000 square feet of large-format commercial office and BPO-oriented space is currently being offered across Kingston and Montego Bay. And while not every property marketed or configured for large-scale outsourcing operations accounts for that inventory, the concentration of large volumes of BPO-oriented space on the market, while sector employment declines, can’t be dismissed as an ordinary property cycle. Government figures reported by the Jamaica Observer indicate that estimated spending by the Global Digital Services sector fell from approximately US$1 billion to US$780 million in the fiscal year ended March 2026. A whopping US$220-million contraction.
Also, current employment estimates show a decline from approximately 62,000 workers to under 50,000 in two years. Industry leaders attribute the decline to weak per-agent productivity, high energy and operating costs, labour constraints, geopolitical shifts, and Hurricane Melissa, among others. They also note that some contracts leaving Jamaica are moving to human agents in Guatemala, Colombia, or the Philippines. Humans replaced humans, but that does not remove AI from the analysis. Leading global tech research and consulting firm Gartner projected that conversational AI would reduce global contact-centre labour costs by US$80 billion by 2026. AI is driving this squeeze. It reduced or reorganised the human-support budgets for which Jamaica competes, exposing weaknesses in our operating model. Salesforce reported that AI-agent adoption among surveyed service organisations rose from 39 per cent to 66 per cent in one year.
However, there could be a reprieve as Gartner has also warned that some generative AI resolutions could eventually cost more than offshore human agents, making complete automation neither inevitable nor universally economical. In fact, a hybrid market is emerging where AI handles repetitive queries and assists human agents, enabling more work with fewer people. As corporate buyers automate, the remaining human work is concentrated in locations offering the best combination of cost, productivity, resilience, and quality.
Key Considerations in Transition Up The Value Chain
Transitioning up the value chain is the correct strategic vision, and industry stakeholders and government policy teams are actively steering the sector towards Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO), seeking to shift the local industry mix from an 80:20 BPO-to-KPO ratio to a 60:40 split. The objective is to move away from low-tier, repetitive voice handling into higher-value digital roles, including accounting, legal-process support, specialised financial processing, software administration, and data analytics. Some considerations are:
Executing the strategy without harming current investments or abandoning displaced workers. Revenue growth, profitability, and mass employment aren’t the same policy objective.
KPO operations are inherently talent-dense and headcount-light. Higher-tier knowledge work can generate greater margins and higher wages per employee but won’t necessarily absorb mass entry-level labour at the volume traditional call centres did.
The workforce needs rapid, large-scale educational infrastructure to move thousands of workers from transactional call scripts into technical, financial or software-driven analysis, etc, tied to actual employer demand.
Jamaica needs a published occupational transition map showing which BPO roles are declining, which adjacent roles are growing, what qualifications are required — and what salaries those jobs are likely to pay.
Employers benefiting from public support should be required to participate in curriculum design, apprenticeships, and placement commitments.
Entry-level KPO tasks, such as routine data collation, document review, and baseline reporting, are themselves prime targets for generative AI tools. A successful pivot, therefore, requires skipping basic back-office processing and training workers directly in AI-assisted, complex problem-solving, quality control, regulatory compliance, client management, and human judgement.
Thousands of workers must survive the period between losing one category of employment and becoming qualified for another. Retraining is a cost not an immediate substitute for income. Workers still have rent, mortgages, school fees, transportation costs, consumer debt, and family obligations. A transition strategy that protects buildings, lenders, and investors while leaving displaced workers to finance their own reinvention would not be balanced. In fact, it transfers the cost of industrial change to those least able to absorb it.
Commercial property diversification is an imperative. Looking beyond single-tenant call centres — not every former office facility can automatically become a logistics hub, light-manufacturing plant, or fulfilment centre. We need a national asset-conversion audit, property by property, to determine which facilities can be re-engineered for logistics, light manufacturing, regional fulfilment, education, healthcare administration, domestic technology firms, and specialised service exporters.
Constructive public-private alignment is needed. Rather than using public platforms to fight over whether AI, operating costs, reshoring or Hurricane Melissa deserves primary blame, industry operators and government agencies must quantify the contribution of each then focus joint resources accordingly. Energy problems require energy solutions. Productivity problems require management and workforce interventions. Hurricane vulnerability requires stronger business continuity systems.
Finally, progress must be publicly measured. The country should know how many workers have been displaced, how many entered retraining, how many completed it, how many secured new work, what they are earning, and how many remain employed one year later.
The sector will continue to employ thousands of people, generate foreign exchange, and support valuable commercial investments. But it will take a balanced approach that protects capital investments while adapting to global shifts to reproduce a new model on which its past success was built.
One love,
Yaneek Page is the program lead for Market Entry USA and a certified trainer in Entrepreneurship.
