2 days ago
AI job threats – graduates at risk, not call centre agents
As it turns out, South Africa's call centres are not a bastion for John Connor's resistance against AI. Instead, Judgement Day is coming for our graduates and young professionals.
In the first three months of 2025 the graduate unemployment rate in South Africa increased by three percentage points over the final quarter of 2024. This means that, according to the latest statistics, 11.7% of university graduates are unemployed – just shy of the 11.8% peak in the same period in 2023 that Hannah MacGinty noted in a master's degree submission at Stellenbosch University.
The entry-level job market is currently the front line of a war between humans and machines. Young people are pouring out of tertiary institutions, waving their degrees proudly, and AI is the Maxim gun.
It's so bad that Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called Godfather of AI, told Steven Bartlett that mass job displacement is 'more probable than not,' advising young people to consider trades like plumbing on a recent episode of the Diary of a CEO podcast. Reports suggest that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next five years. Call centres remain on those high-risk lists, but are staging a fierce resistance.
Augmentation, not annihilation
Leaders in the country's R120-billion business process outsourcing (BPO) industry don't see AI as an existential threat, but as a tool that can make their companies more competitive and expand opportunities for young people if deployed with care.
'Our philosophy was never to say, oh, we see this as some massive disruptor that's going to turn the whole industry upside down,' says Mervyn Pretorius, group chief technology officer at CCI, the continent's biggest contact centre player. 'It should multiply your output. It should not be your output.'
That's the 'human-in-the-loop' philosophy CCI runs on. His local CTO colleague, Cobus Pretorius, explains from the company's in-country base in Umhlanga that while generative models are exciting, they're simply not robust enough for the messy reality of serving global clients across dozens of platforms.
'You can't just plug an AI into an airline account that has 27 different systems and expect it to work. It'll break very quickly,' he says.
'Most of our calls are high-emotion, high-complexity,' Mervyn explains. 'That's where humans matter most.'
Cobus adds that, far from cutting jobs, AI has been a 'net contributor' so far: 'It's creating demand for prompt engineers, reviewers, people building dashboards. We're training for roles that don't even exist yet.'
What this means for you
Youth looking to start studying or enter the job market need to review their skill set with an eye on the future.
According to ChatGPT, these are examples of skills that are likely to be in demand:
AI tools navigation: Understanding AI chatbots, speech analytics, and customer relationship management integrated AI tools.
Data interpretation: Using AI-generated insights to anticipate customer needs or identify trends.
Automation management: Knowing when to intervene when AI fails or escalates a query.
A growing force
Bruce von Maltitz, CEO of 1Stream, which builds customer experience (CX) technology for more than 100 local clients, echoes that view.
'I have not seen any decrease in volumes. None of our South African customers are cutting jobs because of AI,' he says.
That's because, in his experience, when things get personal or complex (think health issues, travel bookings or big purchases) people still want to talk to people. 'The complex work is still going to the agent.'
He points out that AI is not cheap to build. Large corporates are investing millions, and those projects 'are net creators of jobs because they need sophisticated teams of people.' His company is working to make those tools 'affordable in rands' so that South African firms can participate in the transformation.
Von Maltitz describes CX as the entire journey of interaction with a business, from discovery to after-sales service. AI allows businesses to anticipate and smooth that journey. 'South African consumers expect more from technology. They're pushing the boundaries all the time,' he says.
Arming young people
The global BPO market is growing strongly, from more than $300-billion this year to a projected $800-billion by 2034. Instead of decline, the sector is shifting from cheap labour arbitrage to higher-value, AI-enabled services.
South Africa is well placed. With 20 years of deliberate investment, the country has carved out a niche as a hub for complex, emotionally nuanced customer service. Industry leaders say that empathy, humour and cultural resonance give South African agents a premium edge over cheaper transactional markets.
Government incentives and programmes like CCI's CareerBox NGO, which recruits and trains unemployed young people, reinforce the industry's social licence.
So, if AI isn't the clear and present danger, what is?
The consensus from local leaders is that the Keep Call Centres in America Act of 2025 is a far bigger threat to South African jobs than AI itself.
The legislation, currently before US legislators, would:
Create a public blacklist of companies that offshore more than 30% of call centre work;
Penalise noncompliance with fines of up to $10,000 a day;
Restrict federal grants and loans for five years for any company on the list;
Require call centre agents to declare their location at the start of every call, with US customers entitled to demand a domestic transfer; and
Force companies to disclose when AI, rather than a human, is handling their service.
Von Maltitz says the impact could be profound, even if the law isn't fully enforceable. 'Americans and Europeans don't want to do these jobs. But if this passes, companies will have to retool and find an answer. Not because it's a better answer, just because they need an answer.'
The reputational risk is just as serious. A US bank listed as outsourcing to Cape Town could face consumer backlash, no matter the quality of the service.
Advanced strategy
The call centre industry's response to AI may serve as a template for how other sectors can navigate technological disruption. By focusing on human-AI collaboration rather than human-AI competition, these companies are not just surviving the AI revolution – they're leading it.
That makes the real question not whether AI will change the nature of work, because it already has. We should be asking whether other industries will follow the BPO sector's lead in treating that change as an opportunity for elevation rather than elimination.
For young South Africans entering the job market the takeaway is that while jobs of the future will still require humans, they will need different skills.
The key is ensuring that our education systems, our companies and our policies are aligned to make that future as inclusive as possible. DM
