Can AI boost PHL call-center sector? Consultant says yes

By Rizal Raoul Reyes, Businessmirror, Dec 21, 2017

ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) is the way to go if the nearly three-decade-old business-process outsourcing (BPO) industry’s voice services want to grow.

Francis del Val, president and CEO of Cobena Business Analytics & Strategy Inc. (CBASI), said call centers can be enhanced by analytics and AI, as these will enable them to move one step higher on the value chain.

“Think of analytics as a spectrum and steering it, [one can run] algorithms and machine-learning to generate the business insight,” del Val said.

CBASI Chief Analytics Officer John Paul Vergara said the country’s BPO sector will feel the impact in the initial stages of the automation process. Nevertheless, he added, the BPO industry can now move to the creative side where automation is also a major element.

“Data science and digital innovation use algorithms into these things, which involves creativity,” Vergara said.

He added that on the business side, algorithms can guide fledgling entrepreneurs where to establish their business from the regional to the barangay level.

“For instance, I want to set up a business in the next fastest-growing urban centers, I can tap the very sophisticated algorithms work,” Vergara said.

CBASI’s proprietary flagship service it calls Gateway is a geospatial analytics system that leverages on location data. It uses a growing database with more than 100,000 establishments and over 250 data layers on socioeconomic and environmental collated from official government statistics and published sources. It helps spot potential growth areas—from regions and provinces all the way to municipalities and barangays.

Del Val said their 24 clients include companies in the property sector (34 percent), services, fast-moving consumer goods and retail. He added half of their clients are already using Gateway.

Del Val said they are also offering the use of that product to the government.

“Perhaps, we can collaborate on traffic issues like spotting the hot spots in the metropolis,” he said.

Gateway also helps in the study of economic trends that affect the performance of business and the economy. “Now is the time for enterprises and the government to embrace Big Data Analytics,” del Val said, adding that doing so can “help them take the right steps in growing their businesses and in turn contribute to the country’s positive economic performance.”