Don't bot against the human touch — why AI won't replace Africa's call centre jobs

Daily Maverick

06-07-2025

Contact centres are booming on the continent despite the rise of artificial intelligence. As it turns out, people want the human touch.
When I was in my second year of varsity I spent six months working the night shift in a call centre in the Cape Town CBD.
It sounded like a great idea on paper: I would be answering incoming phone calls for a large German airline (in German). How exciting, I thought somewhat naively, I'm going to help people to book their holidays all over the world.
It was only after I started the job that I realised the truth about call centres and the people who phone them. No happy Germans were going to call me to book flights for them. The people who were phoning were the ones who had run into a problem they couldn't solve. They couldn't reschedule a return flight, or their luggage had been lost, or their connecting flight had been cancelled.
In most instances, these were problems that I, a 19-year-old student sitting in an office in Cape Town, could not solve. Instead, my job was to de-escalate the situation as much as possible.
People phoned in an absolute rage and I explained to them, as nicely as possible, why the airline couldn't help them, until they resigned themselves to their fate and hung up. If I did my job well enough they would end the call slightly less angry.
I thought about this story when the City of Cape Town announced the opening of a brand-new call centre by TP Group (formerly Teleperformance), one of the largest business process outsourcing (BPO) firms in the world. The centre will seat 3,500 staff and there are plans to grow this to 10,000 by the end of 2025.
This is not a one-off success story either. In Cape Town alone, nearly 100,000 people work in call centres. The industry poured R23-billion into the city's economy in 2024. That's a lot of people earning a living by telling people they can't solve their problems.
Africa's moment is here
South Africa has become Africa's crown jewel of customer service, consistently ranking as a top destination globally for BPO. But Kenya, Egypt, Ghana, Ethiopia and Rwanda are quickly coming up behind.
Africa's BPO workforce stands at about 1.2 million full-time equivalent roles, according to research from CCI Global and the Everest Group. By 2030 this number is expected to more than double, with up to 1.5 million new jobs created. So what's driving the boom?
Start with cost: African markets offer labour cost savings of up to 80% compared with Western markets. Then there's the continent's demographic edge. Africa is home to the world's youngest population, brimming with digitally savvy, multilingual talent.
Governments are helping too by offering tax incentives, training programmes and infrastructure that make cities like Cape Town, Nairobi and Kigali more attractive by the year. Add to that a favourable time zone, and all the stars are aligning.
Global companies want quality service at lower cost. African countries want jobs. And in between, a huge, untapped workforce is saying 'let's go'.
But what about the robots?
Of course, no conversation about customer service jobs in 2025 is complete without bringing artificial intelligence (AI) into the room (preferably with a name like Claire or Ava and a polite British accent).
The fear about AI disruption in the BPO space is real. What if all these shiny new call centre jobs are just a temporary stopgap before conversational AI replaces the need for human agents altogether?
On its LinkedIn page, Phonely AI (a company offering 'natural, human-like conversations with 100+ AI voices, voice cloning and seamless turn-taking') proudly announced that one of its clients had replaced 350 call centre workers with a single subscription. Some experts estimate that AI could handle 70% to 80% of customer interactions in the next two to three years.
Many of the companies that tout the virtues of AI talk about its efficiency. But most people don't call a support line because they want efficiency. They call because something has gone wrong and they need help. They want empathy. Nuance. Someone who knows the difference between 'I'm locked out of my account' and 'I'm about to lose my mind'. And no matter how much data you feed a virtual agent, emotional intelligence doesn't come standard.
A total of 70% of contact centre managers, in a study by Calabrio, said they believe AI will lead to more human agents, not fewer. That's because the human touch is moving up the value chain. Agents are increasingly seen as brand guardians, trusted to manage the emotionally complex, reputationally risky or high-stakes interactions that AI simply can't handle.
Think of it as a collaboration: AI handles the grunt work and human agents step into the conversations that actually matter. The future isn't AI instead of people. It's probably more like AI plus people.
What this means for Africa
Africa is perfectly positioned to thrive in this hybrid model. The BPO jobs being created now aren't the dead-end, headset-in-a-booth clichés. Increasingly, they're pathways into tech, training and long-term careers. As the role of the agent becomes more complex and valuable, so does the need for upskilling, and that's where African talent can shine.
Many of the call centre workers of today will be the AI supervisors, customer experience designers and data interpreters of tomorrow. And the infrastructure being built (both physical and digital) will serve as a launchpad for broader tech industry growth across the continent.
Cape Town's newest call centre isn't just a building. It's a bet on people. On empathy. On the idea that, in a world obsessed with automation, being able to connect with another human is still one of the most valuable skills around. DM