Concentrix eyes operational efficiency boost from GenAI

OUTSOURCING firm Concentrix said integrating generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) improved the efficiency of its operations and workers, but they remain wary of the risks of using this technology.

Concentrix Philippines Country Leader and Senior Vice-President Amit Jagga said in a roundtable on Monday that the use of GenAI has presented opportunities and challenges for the company.

Still, despite the improved efficiency brought by the technology, the firm’s “base revenue will be on a relatively slower rate of growth versus the past,” Mr. Jagga said.

“A lot of our clients are not able to implement GenAI on their own and what they need is help from partners like us to implement that,” he said.

“One big example of how we’ve used this is for a large airline company, where initially we were physically answering about 90 to 95% of their interactions through calls,” Mr. Jagga said, adding that it reduced the volume to 50% when the company deployed GenAI technology.

Concentrix said they currently use GenAI in three broad areas, namely self-service, allowing interactions to be automated before somebody needs to talk to a consumer; the�� empowerment of the workers; and big data analysis or analytics.

The reception of AI among workers has been positive, Mr. Jagga said, as AI-powered solutions such as Real Time Assist help them to find the right answers to consumer queries, making agents personable and accurate as they do not have to be reliant on searching for pages related to the concern of the consumer.

“When we look at our traditional AI models, they were made to do specific tasks, they were evolved algorithms,” Mr. Jagga said.

In contrast, Gen AI is self-learning and able to generate on its own, he said.

“It’s a new kind of field and it definitely needs regulations,” he added.

Governments across the world will look at the regulation of GenAI in terms of risks such as the propensity to commit fraud like deepfakes, he said.

“Those are areas which need to be regulated for the privacy as well as for the general fraud prevention and compliance postures of the country,” Mr. Jagga said.

Concentrix has over 100,000 workers in over 50 sites across 20 cities in the Philippines.

“We’ve got operations in 70 countries across the world. The Philippines continues to be our largest. In total, we have a little over 450,000 game changers across the globe,” Mr. Jagga said.

As Concentrix employees have a hybrid work setup, they use an in-house developed platform called Secure CX for cybersecurity, he said.

“That platform… is able to co-create the same level of compliance standards that we run in the site. [It] has been very beneficial in executing the right level of compliance posture within work-from-home arrangements,” Mr. Jagga said. — A.R.A. Inosante