The CRM and contact centre services industry for which you have been the largest to historically focus on call centers is highly competitive – how does Teleperformance differentiate itself and its services within this market?
We have been market leader in the customer experience and business processing outsourcing (BPO) space for many years, we are really one of the pioneers in that space. We just changed our branding from Teleperformance to TP. Four things differentiate us. We combine people, process, technology and, increasingly, domain expertise. We are a business-to-business (B2B) services company that manages large scale operations around the world, which involves finding, recruiting, training people at scale.
We are global company headquartered and listed in Paris, but we operate around the world. We have 1,500 large BPO clients that operate our core services in almost 100 countries. Being really meticulously focused on managing process excellence is in our DNA and the technology dimension has become increasingly important.
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Combining and augmenting technology with people and processes is critical. Very relevant domain expertise has become extremely important for us, as we are focusing more and more on vertical, specific solutions for our clients. Think about banking clients or insurance clients, for example. You need to be an expert in claims processing. If you’re servicing a tech client, you need to be an expert on, for instance, AI training. If you are a travel hospitality client, you need to be the expert in the domain expertise for that respective client.
Where would you place Teleperformance in relation to your competitors in the adoption of AI?
The challenge and the opportunity for a B2B service company has always been to reinvent and transform the business model. We are always changing it. If you think about the early 2000s, you had the rise of the internet and self-service portals, and people said you no longer need to call anybody. You can go to the internet and look things up. Then you had the rise of apps and mobile phones, and they said why do you need to call? You can chat or send a message, or you can use an app to find a solution. Then you have the rise of chatbots, and people said, why do you need to interact with somebody?
There is opportunity for us to always embrace these new technologies and integrate them in our workflows. I really do believe it’s not an ‘either’ ‘or’, but the combination of both. We deployed more than 200 AI projects last year. You can use AI, obviously, to train people in a very individualised way on how to make a call or how to run certain processes. But the human needs to supervise it, so AI becomes a layer on top of a human-led process to augment efficiency and drive better outcomes.
The future is very interesting as we enter the age of Agentic AI. We will enter a future where humans that have been augmented and assisted by AI, and agentic AI will work alongside each other. AI is rarely a plug and play solution, instead it’s an integration of layers of human led processes, augmented by AI.
How will AI affect the balance of your workforce?
AI has created new roles within the business. To give you one example, we have a business line within TP called trust and safety. That’s 10% of our current business, so roughly a billion euros, and that is a business that didn’t exist ten years ago. It’s providing content moderation and data labelling for tech clients. It’s a role that has evolved over the years. So, it’s all about embracing these new business elements.
We are also excited about call centre AI data services, where we provide support to our clients training their AI models. AI should make processes more efficient, but you also have humans, augmenting and curating data and training, and providing expertise to make this AI more powerful. That’s an opportunity area for us, and we are actually quite excited to grow in that further in this area.
What challenges do you envisage with AI in the next five years?
I do believe we live in exponential times. And that AI will be ubiquitous, and you always tend to underestimate the impact of big trends at the beginning. There will be an adoption curve, and there will be some time before AI will be implemented in large scale operations, because you have legacy systems to deal with first. We are obviously a large organisation, and we have to have this open, agile and innovative mindset. We want to be at the forefront of trying to lead that change. It’s an opportunity, but it’s also a challenge and you have to have an open mindset.
How does Teleperformance navigate geopolitical and economic uncertainty?
We are truly global, but our business is local. On the one hand, we are quite resilient, as we have this global footprint, but we do obviously operate on behalf of our clients, and their end customers in their market. From that perspective, of course, we keep a watchful eye. But we are quite resilient because we don’t ship products around or tariff things. We don’t have a supply chain. And I think business services in general, is a industry that can relatively easily adapt.
