Lisa, a Filipina single mother, earned a living from content writing for 15 years. She started writing straight out of college, freelanced for years, and eventually joined a multinational in the country's booming outsourcing industry. Lisa says she never felt the need to use artificial intelligence (AI) in her work. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.

This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.

"I can say that I am able to do my job, I meet deadlines. In my opinion, there is no need for [AI]," she told the BBC.

Eight months into her latest role, and one month before the position was due to become permanent, she was made redundant. In the months before, Lisa says a public relations agency had been tasked with producing AI-generated material that she and her colleagues were asked to edit. She says her skills were used to train the AI on the company writing style.

"I feel like I dug my own grave," she says. "We were the ones who trained the artificial intelligence that replaced us."

Lisa, not her real name, is one of several former outsourcing employees the BBC spoke to who asked to remain anonymous. They signed confidentiality agreements in return for severance pay, and fear that speaking publicly could hurt their chances of finding work in an industry which has a small network.

Their experiences offer an insight into a question confronting emerging economies like the Philippines: what happens when AI begins to automate the jobs that helped lift millions of people into the middle classes?

Every evening around 5pm, streams of workers wearing company lanyards spill out of high-rise offices in the district of Cubao in Manila. It's one of several areas of the capital where multinational companies have premises – providing all sorts of outsourcing work including call centres, accounting, software development and marketing copy services for clients thousands of miles away.

For over two decades, these business districts have symbolised one of the Philippines' biggest economic success stories. Beginning in the early 2000s, the country was promoted as an English-speaking alternative to India for what's called business process outsourcing (BPO). Successive governments offered tax incentives, invested in infrastructure and encouraged multinational companies to set up large operations. Global groups like Accenture, Concentrix and Teleperformance built sprawling campuses, employing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos.

Today, the outsourcing industry employs roughly 1.9 million people, and generates $40bn (£30.1bn) in revenues every year, accounting for about 10% of the Philippines' economy. But experts say the industry is disproportionately vulnerable to the impact of AI.

The International Labour Organization estimates that 12.7 million Filipinos - more than one in four workers - are employed in occupations exposed to generative AI, the highest share in South East Asia. The organisation expects many roles to change rather than disappear but the types of service jobs that people do in the Philippines leaves it particularly at risk.

Jack Madrid, president of the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP), admits that AI is being adopted by the sector. More than two-thirds of IBPAP's members are already running AI pilots, he says.

"Agentic AI has the potential to automate at a much more accelerated pace," Madrid says. "Obviously, there's a layer of jobs that are automatable or have been automated."

But he adds that the vast majority of affected workers have been redeployed within the same organisations. Madrid says any weakness in hiring reflects more than the impact of AI.

"We've seen a slowdown in investment decisions on whether certain job functions or processes should be offshored," he says, pointing to slower global demand and uncertainty over how companies will ultimately deploy the technology.

Even so, he acknowledges the challenge. "We cannot do enough to be prepared," he says. "The importance of reskilling" cannot be overstated.

Mary, another former content writer whose name we've changed, says her employer encouraged the use of AI as a productivity tool. Instead of making her job easier, she says it created additional responsibilities.