- In today’s CEO Daily: Peter Vanham talks to Thomas Mackenbrock, CEO-designate of Teleperformance, about AI and job creation.
- The big story: U.S. pushes for Ukraine mineral deal; Zelenskyy pushes back.
- The markets: Low drama so far.
- Analyst notes from Apollo (on taxes vs tariffs), Wedbush (on Anduril), and EY (on inflation and the Fed).
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. It’s a tale told often: the customer service sector is undergoing a major transformation thanks to AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants, and will be one of the first and hardest hit when AI replaces human jobs.
But when I spoke to Thomas Mackenbrock, deputy CEO and CEO-designate of Teleperformance (No.399 on the Fortune 500 Europe), one of the world’s largest business process outsourcing firms—and the largest historically focusing on call centers—he told me a different story.
“Of course you automate,” he told me. “That’s the name of the game. AI microservices are now part of many of our clients and services. But it’s a misconception that this is a curse. It is a blessing.”
As the adoption of AI took hold, the business portfolio of Teleperformance has changed along with it, he said. The result is that the company’s global workforce is now roughly 500,000, up from 410,000 two years ago.
How did this happen?
First, some of the company’s most successful AI applications favor more employment, Mockenbrock said, as they allow for better and faster “resolutions” and a higher emotional connection between caller and agent.
One AI application Teleperformance has adopted, for example, is a “speech understanding” tool, which the company says increases chances of better human connections. “If you talk to a [foreign] call center agent, it’s sometimes hard to understand them, and that may make it harder to create empathy,” he said. (Indeed Sharath Keshava Narayana, a co-founder of the company that developed the tool in question, said previously that his motivation for the software dated back to when he started working at a call center in Bangalore, and faced discrimination for his Indian accent.)
The second force driving more employment is that the kinds of services “business process outsourcing” companies can offer thanks to AI have vastly expanded. “When we started, there was a telephone line and a person,” Mackenbrock said. Today, thanks to the “triad” (humans, AI copilots that augment human work, and AI agents that replace human work), the company can replace ever more complex front and back-office tasks. Will the trend of increasing employment at call centers continue, then, as AI adoption increases? “I honestly don’t know,” Mackenbrock said. “But it doesn’t really matter. What matters is driving outcomes for the client.” — Peter Vanham
More news below.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady, diane.brady@fortune.com, LinkedIn.
