As the business process outsourcing (BPO), or global business services (GBS), sector in South Africa continues to grow, local contact centres are shifting their focus towards digitally enabled jobs and embracing technological advancements, such as AI.

During a media event on September 29, outsourced services industry organisation Business Process Enabling South Africa (BPESA) CEO Reshni Singh described AI as a “positive disruption” in the BPO sector.

She explained that, while South Africa was consistently ranked among the top three locations for customer experience, international clients were increasingly looking for capabilities that combined customer engagement with technology, business processes and digital problem-solving.

In this vein, global collections and BPO company Nutun chief client and operations officer Stephen de Blanche told Engineering News that the impact of AI on the BPO sector had been broad-based.

Internally, he said AI had allowed the company to recruit agents at scale and to better match more accurately the kinds of skills and roles the company was looking for. The introduction of AI also assisted with faster upskilling.

AI has also enabled greater quality assurance on calls at a much larger scale than before by allowing Nutun to monitor conversations and identify areas of improvement on a real-time basis.

Externally, De Blanche said AI had allowed the company to tackle workloads that, from a cost perspective, could previously not be done sustainably.

Nutun launched its AI operations Centre in Johannesburg, Gauteng, in June. It incorporates the company’s proprietary agentic AI solution Zoey, which operates across two functions.

As an outbound agentic AI, she authenticates consumer identities, negotiates payment commitments, offers settlement discounts, concludes payment arrangements and facilitates warm-lead transfers to human agents where the interaction requires it.

As a quality assurance intelligence layer, she listens to agent-based calls across Nutun's principal portfolio, ranking call disposition and agent performance, surfacing consumer insight and providing post-call coaching to agents.

The company has thus embraced a hybrid model where advanced AI and automation augment human agents and advisors rather than replace them.

De Blanche explained that AI was well-suited to address low-complexity tasks where the conversation was predictable, while more complex conversations were handled by human agents.

“We’ve managed to get the interplay between Zoey and the human agents so that Zoey knows when she should hand over to a human because the conversation has gone to a place that Zoey is not ideally suited to handle . . . we've also learnt where the sweet spot is between using the technology and using humans collectively together,” he said.

The company plans to launch this hybrid process in the UK and the US in the coming months.

INDUSTRY

Meanwhile, as AI, digital transformation and automation reshape GBS roles, the sector continues to explore how talent sourcing, assessment and development need to evolve, and which human, digital and future-of-work capabilities will become increasingly important.

With this in mind, the sector continues to be a major employer in South Africa, with about 180 000 jobs created over ten years, of which about 90% of sector hires are young people, according to BPESA.

On September 22, South Africa was named Delivery Destination of the Year at the 2026 Global Sourcing Association Awards, held in London, in the UK.

This is the third win for South Africa, which won offshoring destination of the year in 2012 and 2016.

The recognition comes at the end of a record quarter. Between April and June, the sector created 8 825 new jobs, with nearly half of those roles serving clients in the UK.

Meanwhile, in a media release, South African-founded BPO iContact explains that more organisations are partnering with BPO providers to boost efficiency, manage costs and enhance customer experience, highlighting the importance of choosing the right BPO partners.

Additionally, the company explains that, as US companies face mounting pressure to optimise debt recovery operations while maintaining compliance and cost-effectiveness, many are discovering the advantages of partnering with South African accounts receivable speciality.

The company notes that several factors have positioned South Africa as an ideal location for US accounts receivable outsourcing.

iContact CEO Clinton Cohen explained that South Africa’s English-speaking workforce provided seamless communication with US debtors, eliminating the cultural barriers and accent challenges that could hamper collection efforts in other offshore locations.

Cohen said the country had invested heavily in the telecommunications and data infrastructure necessary for modern collection operations, including sophisticated dialler systems, customer relationship management platforms and compliance monitoring tools.

iContact and Nutun are both members of BPESA, which is the national industry association for South Africa’s GBS sector.