Mindsprint Says Philippine BPO Needs Agentic AI Platforms by 2027

The Philippine outsourcing industry has until roughly 2027 to change how it sells its services, according to Suresh Sundararajan, chief executive of digital transformation company Mindsprint. In comments reported by BusinessWorld and summarised by Outsource Accelerator on October 6, he urged IT and business process management (IT-BPM) providers to adopt specialised AI agent platforms to protect the country’s position as a global outsourcing hub.

The stakes are large. BusinessWorld put the industry’s value at $40 billion to $42 billion, making the Philippines the second-largest BPO hub after India. Mindsprint said the industry association has already revised its revenue targets down by 15 to 27 percent, a sign of the pressure AI is putting on the traditional model.

Sundararajan described the shift in concrete terms. Scaling outsourced work has meant adding staff in line with volume, for example 100 workers to process one million invoices. Customers now talk about invoice volumes and cost per invoice instead of headcount. Success by 2027, in his view, would mean Philippine providers offering sector-specific services in banking, insurance, health sciences and telecoms, delivered through AI agents and priced on outcomes or consumption.

What it means in practice

For workers, his advice was to move up the value chain: deepen domain expertise, shift from execution to strategic partnership, strengthen customer-facing work and broaden technical skills. He cited Microsoft’s Work Trend Index finding that 25 percent of Philippine workers qualify as “frontier professionals”, against a global average of 16 percent, but also the Oxford Government AI Readiness Index, which ranks the Philippines 56th of 69 countries. He called it a “high-usage, low-readiness environment”, a framing that adds to the recent dispute over where the country really ranks on AI.

He also urged companies to tie AI deployments to existing cybersecurity frameworks, keep human oversight for mission-critical operations and reassure staff that the aim is new roles rather than job cuts. Hiring is already changing at the front door, as Jobstreet’s AI voice pre-screening shows, and Balisacan has argued that reskilling must go hand in hand with infrastructure upgrades.

Mindsprint sells transformation services, so its timetable is also a sales pitch. What to watch: whether major Philippine providers announce outcome-based contracts, and how the industry association updates its targets over the coming year.