Lead image for Artificial Intelligence Is Making South Africa's Call Centres More Expensive .
The BPO industry has embraced AI as a technology capable of improving operational efficiency, enhancing customer experiences, and supporting business growth. But inside South African call centres, the opposite is quietly happening. Writes By Sanjay Govender, Head of GBS/BPO Solutions at Qrent
As AI tools become deeply embedded into customer engagement environments, many operators are discovering that the real cost of AI is not the software licence - it's the infrastructure required to run it.
From voice neutralisation software and real time call assistance to AI driven first line support and live agent coaching, the processing demands inside modern Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) environments have increased dramatically over the past 18 months.
What many providers underestimated was the backend impact. AI does not run for free. It requires compute power, memory, networking throughput, low latency environments, and increasingly expensive infrastructure to support it at scale.
The next competitive battle in the BPO industry may not be about who has the cheapest labour model.
The result is that many BPOs are now facing a difficult and expensive decision. One approach is to run AI workloads directly on endpoint devices. This means moving away from standard workstation deployments toward higher specification machines capable of handling AI assisted applications locally.
In practical terms, this is driving a noticeable shift away from traditional Intel i5 deployments toward growing demand for i7 powered devices on the call centre floor. AI enhanced workloads are forcing hardware upgrades far earlier than many refresh cycles originally planned for.