Kingston, Jamaica. The island's outsourcing sector, its largest single employer of English-speaking service labour, is being asked to justify itself on productivity for the first time in a decade.
- Jamaica's BPO sector shed 20,000 jobs in two years, falling from 60,000 to 40,000 workers, per a Global Services Association of Jamaica (GSAJ) census.
- Incoming GSAJ president Yoni Epstein, CEO of itel, says the cause is productivity, Hurricane Melissa disruption, a tight labour market and incentive-driven relocation, not AI.
- A PwC 2026 study of 1,200+ executives found roughly 20% of organisations capture 75% of AI's economic value, and those firms are pulling further ahead.
- Jamaican manufacturers were told at May's JMEA Manufacture 360 conference to adopt AI early or fall behind on global competitiveness.
- StarApple AI Jamaica's view: the job losses were not caused by AI, but the businesses that use it well are about to widen the gap with the ones that don't.
Jamaica's BPO sector lost 20,000 jobs in two years, but the Global Services Association of Jamaica says artificial intelligence is not the cause. Low productivity, Hurricane Melissa disruption, and companies relocating for stronger incentives are. A separate PwC study of 1,200 executives found that 20% of firms already capture 75% of AI's economic value.
Incoming GSAJ president Yoni Epstein, founder and CEO of itel, laid out the causes on record and left AI off the list entirely. Put his answer next to the PwC numbers, though, and a different risk comes into view. The jobs already lost had little to do with AI. What Jamaican businesses do about AI over the next two years is what decides who ends up on the winning side of that 75%.
What Actually Happened to Jamaica's BPO Jobs
The Global Services Association of Jamaica's most recent industry census put employment at 40,000, down from 60,000 a few years earlier, a drop of a third in an industry that once looked like the most reliable job engine outside tourism. Sector earnings fell 10% to roughly US$900 million in 2025, down from more than US$1 billion in 2024.
Yoni Epstein, the newly elected GSAJ president and founder and CEO of itel, laid out the causes at the association's annual gathering: low productivity that made Jamaica less competitive against other outsourcing destinations, the disruption of Hurricane Melissa, a domestic labour market too tight to keep staffing consistent, and top-tier clients relocating operations to jurisdictions offering stronger incentives. He was direct about what wasn't on that list. Artificial intelligence, he said, isn't one of the causes.
That claim matters because it runs against the story most people assume by default: AI arrives, call centre jobs disappear. Epstein's own recovery plan is built on three points instead, in his words: "technology first, market our differentiator second, and execute... third." Marketing to rebuild investor confidence to pre-pandemic levels, workforce upskilling for where the industry is heading, and cutting operating costs to restore competitiveness. Two IDB-backed initiatives, the Global Services Sector Project and the Global Services Skills Council, are already working the training side of that plan.
Gloria Henry, vice-president for BPO and logistics at the Port Authority of Jamaica, put the shift in plainer terms at a recent industry event, tracing the sector back to its roots in the Montego Bay Free Zone four decades ago. "The newest buzzword is AI, but it is not as smart as you think it is. It is humans who are making it smart," she said, describing agents moving from handling routine calls to working as analysts and automation specialists who watch over the systems doing the routine work now. "We're not just going to work as prompt engineers. We will be analysts and automation specialists."
"Dem seh AI a guh tek wi job, but nobody tek time fi teach wi how fi use it. Gimme di training an' mi wi run tings, no problem." A customer service team lead at a Kingston contact centre, on the retraining push following the BPO sector's job losses
Why This Should Worry Jamaican Businesses Outside the Call Centre
The BPO numbers describe an industry that hasn't yet lost jobs to AI. They say nothing about what happens next, and a separate piece of research suggests the next stretch will not be forgiving to businesses that wait.
PwC surveyed more than 1,200 senior executives across 25 industries for its 2026 AI Performance Study and found that roughly 20% of organisations now capture about 75% of AI's economic value. The gap between that group and everyone else isn't marginal. Leading firms are two to three times more likely to use AI to find new revenue rather than just cut costs, twice as likely to have redesigned their workflows around it rather than bolting it onto old processes, and nearly twice as likely to let AI make decisions autonomously, doing so at almost three times the rate of their peers. Their own employees are twice as likely to trust what the AI produces, and that trust compounds on itself: people who trust the output use it more, and more use widens the gap further.
PwC Jamaica consulting partner Adrian Tait presented these findings locally in May, and his framing cuts against how most Jamaican firms still talk about AI. "The companies that are seeing real value are the ones using AI to drive growth, enter new markets, improve customer experiences, rethink how their businesses operate, not just cutting costs," Tait said. Financial services, tourism, logistics and the public sector were the sectors he flagged as best positioned to act on that distinction in Jamaica specifically.
Manufacturing got the same message from a different podium. At the Jamaica Manufacturers and Exporters Association's Manufacture 360 conference in May, held at the AC Marriott in Kingston under the banner "Robust Recovery and Resilient Growth," Marc Frankson, lead AI consultant at Transcend AI Consulting, told manufacturers that early adoption was no longer optional if the sector wanted to stay competitive globally. Senator Charles Sinclair Hill made the same point from the government side, arguing that integrating AI alongside workforce upskilling was necessary for local enterprises to compete internationally and recover from the disruption Hurricane Melissa caused across supply chains, insurance and financing.
The clearest working example of what that integration looks like in practice came out of Fujitsu's own Jamaica operations. Nicholas Lee, executive director and head of Fujitsu Intelligence, described how AI cut the assessment time for supply-chain disruption analysis from two weeks to two hours, a case built directly out of the island's post-Melissa recovery work. Speaking at Fujitsu Americas' business kickoff at Moon Palace in St Ann, Fujitsu Caribbean CEO Mervyn Eyre put the regional case simply: "What AI really gives us in the Caribbean is capabilities that are available everywhere else in the world."
Where StarApple AI Jamaica Fits
This is the exact terrain StarApple AI Jamaica was built to work in. As the Jamaican arm of StarApple AI, the first AI company established in the Caribbean and founded by Adrian Dunkley, the region's leading AI authority, the company treats the gap between owning an AI tool and running a business on it as the actual problem to solve, not a side note to a software sale.
The LUCID training programme takes a team through practical AI use inside their own workflows, the analyst and automation-specialist skills Gloria Henry described BPO agents needing, applied across contact centres, factory floors and finance departments alike. The AURA readiness assessment gives an organisation an honest baseline of where it actually stands before it spends a dollar on new tools, which matters given how unevenly the PwC study shows that spending pays off. Neither exists to sell AI to a business that hasn't decided what it needs it for. Both exist because Epstein's own diagnosis, that the BPO sector's problem is productivity and skills rather than AI itself, is the same diagnosis StarApple AI Jamaica applies across every sector it works in.
What Jamaican Businesses Should Actually Do Now
- Audit before you buy. PwC's research shows spending on AI tools without redesigning the workflow around them is how a business ends up in the 80% that captures a quarter of the value. Know what process is changing before you license anything.
- Upskill the people already on the floor. GSAJ's own recovery plan leads with workforce training, not headcount cuts. The Global Services Skills Council and the IDB-funded Global Services Sector Project both exist because retraining current staff is cheaper than replacing them.
- Redesign the workflow, don't just automate the old one. The PwC data is specific here: firms that redesigned processes around AI, rather than inserting AI into an unchanged process, were twice as likely to see it pay off.
- Watch what disaster recovery already proved. Fujitsu's two-week-to-two-hour result on supply-chain analysis happened under real pressure, after Hurricane Melissa. Businesses that wait for a crisis to force the same adoption will pay the training cost at the worst possible moment.
- Get an honest baseline before you commit budget. Whether through an internal audit or an external assessment such as AURA, know your starting point. Guessing at readiness is how firms end up buying tools nobody on staff can actually run.
What Comes Next
Nobody serious in Jamaica's BPO industry is arguing that AI will never touch headcount. Gloria Henry's own description of agents becoming analysts and automation specialists is itself a headcount story, just a slower and more survivable one than mass layoffs. The 20,000 jobs already lost went for reasons that had little to do with AI. The next round of competitive pressure, the one PwC's research describes as already separating the 20% from everyone else, will have a great deal to do with it.
Jamaica's manufacturers were told to move early in May. Its BPO industry is being told the same thing by its own incoming president, in the form of a three-point plan that puts training ahead of marketing and marketing ahead of cost-cutting. The government's UNESCO-aligned AI policy, announced the same month, gives that pressure a national shape. What happens in the next two years depends less on whether Jamaican businesses have access to AI, most already do, and more on whether they do the unglamorous work of retraining people and redesigning processes before the gap PwC measured becomes the gap that decides who's still in business.