- Jamaica's outsourcing sector has shed roughly 20,000 jobs in two years, from 60,000 workers to 40,000, and GSAJ president Yoni Epstein says AI is not one of the causes.
- Digicel's Ruby assistant, built on technology from Canadian AI firm Ada, resolved 55% of more than 535,000 Jamaican customer conversations without a human agent, per Digicel's 2026 Sustainability Report, and is rolling out to more of the company's 25 Caribbean markets by March 2027.
- Annual BPO receipts fell from close to $1 billion to $780 million in the year to March 2026, and Kingston and Montego Bay now have over 245,000 square feet of former BPO office space on the market.
- Trade consultant Yaneek Page's 6 September Gleaner column calls for shifting the sector's BPO-to-KPO mix from 80:20 to 60:40, backed by published occupational transition mapping and public tracking of displaced workers.
- The industry is right that AI did not cause the last 20,000 job losses. Ruby is proof it is already capable of causing the next round, inside a company operating from Jamaica right now.
Digicel's 2026 Sustainability Report, released last month, included a customer service number worth sitting with: Ruby, the company's AI assistant, has now handled more than 535,000 conversations in Jamaica and closed 55% of them without a human agent joining the chat. Three weeks before that report landed, the newly elected president of the Global Services Association of Jamaica told the Gleaner that the 20,000 outsourcing jobs the island had shed in two years had nothing to do with artificial intelligence. Both claims are accurate. They describe two different moments in the same industry, a few months apart.
Did artificial intelligence cause Jamaica's 20,000 lost outsourcing jobs? The industry's own trade body says no, pointing instead to low productivity, Hurricane Melissa, and client reshoring. But Digicel's Ruby assistant just resolved 55% of over 535,000 Jamaican customer conversations without a human agent, proof the same function is already automatable at scale.
The Twenty Thousand Jobs Jamaica Says AI Didn't Take
Yoni Epstein, GSAJ's newly elected president, told the Gleaner in July: "The job loss has been caused by a few things, but artificial intelligence isn't one of them." He named low productivity that made Jamaican operations globally uncompetitive, the disruption of Hurricane Melissa in October 2025, a labour market too tight to staff at the old scale, and companies relocating to jurisdictions offering sharper incentives. Employment fell from about 60,000 workers to 40,000 over two years by GSAJ's count, a loss of roughly 20,000 jobs. Jamaica's own government data put the figure at a smaller but still steep drop, from 62,000 to under 50,000 workers, over the same period.
The money moved with the people. Annual sector receipts sat close to $1 billion at their peak and fell to $780 million in the financial year to March 2026, a decline of about $220 million, trade consultant Yaneek Page reported in the Gleaner's business section on 6 September. Kingston and Montego Bay now have more than 245,000 square feet of former BPO office space on the market, real floor space that used to hold seats and headsets.
Page's answer, published the day before this piece, is a shift in the sector's own mix: move the ratio of BPO to knowledge process outsourcing work from about 80:20 to 60:40, toward accounting, legal-process support, specialised financial processing, software administration, and data analytics, the higher-value roles a script-reading assistant cannot yet handle end to end. She backed the recommendation with four concrete asks: published mapping of which occupations are shrinking and which are growing, and what qualifications each requires; a rule that any employer taking public support helps design the curriculum and apprenticeships that follow; a property-by-property audit of the office space now sitting empty; and public reporting of how many displaced workers actually get retrained and rehired, rather than simply counted as gone.
Ruby Didn't Wait for the Debate to Settle
Ruby is not a chatbot bolted onto a support page as an afterthought. It runs across WhatsApp, voice calls, the open web, and the MyDigicel app, built on a platform from the Canadian AI firm Ada, and it handles the actual transactional load of a telecom's customer base: balance checks, plan activation, bill payment, technical troubleshooting. Digicel rolled the upgraded version out in Jamaica first, during the financial year to March 2026. In that window it supported more than 535,000 conversations and closed 55% of them without routing to a person, according to the company's own sustainability disclosure. Group chief executive Marcelo Cataldo's team is now planning the same rollout across more of Digicel's 25 Caribbean and Central American markets before March 2027.
This is the same category of work Jamaica's outsourcing sector sells to the rest of the world: someone, or something, answering a phone call, a chat, or a WhatsApp message on behalf of a company that would rather not staff the function directly. Digicel just ran that exact function through an AI system, inside Jamaica, at national telecom scale, and got more than half of it resolved without a human. That is not a pilot with a few thousand test conversations. It is a production system with over half a million logged interactions behind it.
The pattern is not local to Jamaica. Gartner had projected years ago that conversational AI would cut global contact-centre labour costs by $80 billion in 2026, and this is the year that projection was aimed at. Salesforce's own research found the share of service organisations using AI agents rose from 39% to 66% in a single year. Neither figure is a Caribbean statistic. Both describe the market Jamaica's outsourcing clients already sit inside, and it is moving in one direction.
What Epstein Got Right, and What It Doesn't Cover
I built StarApple AI in Kingston in 2023, the Caribbean's first AI company, working on customer-facing systems for exactly the sectors this argument is about: banking, insurance, telecom. Epstein's diagnosis of the last two years is probably right. A contact centre running at low productivity, hit by a hurricane, competing against jurisdictions offering sharper incentives, does not need artificial intelligence to explain a 20,000-job contraction. Those are ordinary, well-documented business pressures, and blaming AI for them would let the sector avoid fixing what is actually broken in its cost structure.
A diagnosis of the last two years is not a forecast for the next two, though. Ruby's 55% resolution rate did not require Jamaica's outsourcing sector to fail first. It required a telecom with the capital to license Ada's platform, wire it into WhatsApp and a mobile app, and run it against the exact query volume a BPO seat would otherwise handle. Every client currently paying a Jamaican BPO to answer calls now has visible, public proof that the same category of technology works at scale, inside the same country, on the same kind of query. The 20,000 jobs already gone were not, by GSAJ's own account, AI's doing. The next 20,000 will not get the same alibi.
What the KPO Shift Actually Needs to Work
Page's four recommendations, the transition mapping, the curriculum requirement, the property audit, the public retraining scorecard, are the right shape for a policy response. What they are missing is the AI skills pipeline that has to run underneath a shift toward accounting, legal-process support, and data analytics, because every one of those higher-value functions is itself being reshaped by the same technology now displacing the lower-value ones. A worker retrained from a BPO seat into a KPO seat that gets automated within three years has not solved the problem. It has postponed it, at real cost to the worker who believed the retraining was the answer.
That pipeline has to start before secondary school, not after a layoff. The Genius Project, the tuition-free AI camp I co-founded for Caribbean youth with backing from the Caribbean AI Association and Maestro AI Labs, exists because the students who will fill Jamaica's next generation of KPO roles are sitting in secondary school right now, not enrolled in a retraining programme that has yet to be designed. The Caribbean AI Risk Management Council, which I helped establish, has separately argued that the region needs its own frameworks for measuring where AI displaces a job entirely versus where it only displaces tasks within a job, a distinction Jamaica's BPO debate has mostly skipped over.
None of this is an argument against Ruby, against Digicel, or against the BPO-to-KPO shift itself. It is an argument for treating the 55% figure as a workforce planning input, not as a customer service footnote in a sustainability report. Jamaica AI and StarApple AI, the company I founded to build AI systems for Caribbean institutions rather than import them from elsewhere, both exist to make that kind of local data and skills infrastructure someone's actual job. Jamaica has roughly eighteen months before Ruby's expansion reaches the rest of Digicel's Caribbean footprint. That is enough time to build the transition mapping Page is asking for, if the work starts now rather than after the next set of job numbers comes out.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Digicel's Ruby, and how does it work?
Ruby is Digicel's AI-powered customer service assistant, built on a platform developed by the Canadian AI firm Ada. It operates across WhatsApp, voice calls, the open web, and the MyDigicel app, and handles routine transactions such as checking a balance, activating a plan, paying a bill, and resolving common technical faults. According to Digicel's 2026 Sustainability Report, Ruby supported more than 535,000 conversations in Jamaica, its first market for the enhanced version, and resolved 55 percent of them without a human agent.
Did AI cause the 20,000 BPO jobs Jamaica has lost?
Not according to the industry itself. Yoni Epstein, president of the Global Services Association of Jamaica, told the Gleaner in July 2026 that the sector's contraction from about 60,000 workers to 40,000 over two years was caused by low productivity, the disruption of Hurricane Melissa in October 2025, a tight local labour market, and companies relocating to jurisdictions with stronger incentives, not by artificial intelligence.
How much has Jamaica's outsourcing sector shrunk, and what is it worth now?
Employment fell by roughly a third, from about 60,000 to 40,000 workers by GSAJ's count, or from 62,000 to under 50,000 by government figures, over two years. Annual sector receipts dropped from close to $1 billion at their peak to $780 million in the financial year to March 2026, a decline of about $220 million, and Kingston and Montego Bay now have more than 245,000 square feet of former BPO office space on the market.
What is the difference between BPO and KPO, and why does Jamaica want more of the second?
Business process outsourcing, BPO, covers high-volume, lower-skill work such as call centre customer service and data entry, the exact category of task an AI assistant like Ruby is already resolving at scale. Knowledge process outsourcing, KPO, covers higher-value functions such as accounting, legal-process support, specialised financial processing, and data analytics, which are harder to automate end to end. Jamaica's industry is pushing to shift its mix from roughly 80 percent BPO and 20 percent KPO to a 60:40 split.
What should a Jamaican BPO worker do to move into KPO-type work?
Trade consultant Yaneek Page's September 2026 recommendations point the way: look for employers building published curriculum partnerships and apprenticeships tied to public retraining programmes rather than informal on-the-job promises, and prioritise training in the specific KPO growth areas the industry has named, accounting support, legal-process work, financial processing, software administration, and data analytics, over generic customer service upskilling that stays exposed to the same automation pressure.
Is the Jamaican government tracking AI's effect on outsourcing jobs?
Only partially. Government employment data captures the sector's overall contraction, from about 62,000 to under 50,000 workers, but neither the government nor GSAJ has published the occupation-by-occupation transition mapping or the retraining outcome tracking that Yaneek Page called for in her Gleaner column, the kind of data that would show whether displaced workers are landing in KPO roles or leaving the workforce entirely.
Will Ruby's expansion to Digicel's other Caribbean markets cost more jobs?
Digicel has not published a jobs projection for the rollout, and its 2026 Sustainability Report frames Ruby as augmenting rather than replacing human agents. But the company plans to extend the assistant across more of its 25 Caribbean and Central American markets before March 2027, and a system already resolving 55 percent of Jamaican customer contacts without a person will put the same pressure on contact centre staffing wherever it launches next.