PhI IT-BPM needs to step up

Despite the pernicious corruption that continues to plague the country, our economic growth has remained resilient due to two things — remittances from Filipinos living and working abroad and the country’s strength in business process outsourcing that has placed us among the top two in the world next to India.

- MARIANNE GO

At the recently concluded International IT-BPM Summit held last week at the Okada Hotel, the IT-Business Process Association of the Philippines (IT-BAP) and IIS 2025 president Jack Madrid issued a global wake-up call “to sharpen our edge, to deepen our partnerships, to move with urgency in a world transforming all around us.”

Disruption, Madrid stressed, “is everywhere — next-generation agents, geopolitics, rising costs, shifting customer expectations. These are not just challenges for the Philippines. They are global realities. Our strength lies not in avoiding them but in how we respond to them.”

In the Philippines, where the IT-BAP has a Roadmap 2028, he said, the industry has been able to create 450,000 new jobs and generate an additional $10.5 billion in revenues, with the Philippines leading in global IT-BPM growth at five percent this year.

The country, Madrid noted, stands at the forefront of two powerful opportunities: “the integration of agentic and artificial intelligence (AI) into global business services and customer experience (CX). By 2026, the industry is projected to reach $42 billion in revenues and employ 1.97 million Filipinos, reinforcing the country’s leadership as a global services hub.”

This year alone, he said, 80,000 new jobs were created, earning $2 billion in revenues, posting a growth of four and 5.3 percent. The Philippines, he said, has shown “steady, resilient growth, outpacing global growth of three percent. By 2026, we project $42 billion in revenues and close to two million jobs, with the IT-BPM industry contributing over eight percent of gross domestic product.”