Redefine Properties has warned that AI could automate more than a third of the SA BPO sector within five years, putting one of the country's biggest job-creation bets at risk. COO Leon Kok told Business Day that call centres handling repetitive, low-skill work are the most exposed, and Redefine is already managing its property concentration risk accordingly.

SA has spent years positioning itself as a global BPO hub, competing with India and the Philippines. The government's target is 500,000 jobs by 2030, and the sector is projected to hit $3.6bn by 2027. 

Western Cape demand for big-floor-plate offices got so hot that operators have started moving up to Gauteng. But a Caribou and Genesis Analytics study with the Mastercard Foundation puts automatable tasks in African tech outsourcing at 40% by 2030. 

Redefine isn't the first to flag this; analysts, Mastercard Foundation research and global outsourcing peers have been sounding the same alarm for over a year now.

There's no easy answer. SA does have ventures building local AI tools, including Nineteen58 and Botlhale AI (though we haven't heard much from them since their award run a year or so back). The harder reality is that SA's BPO clients sit overseas, where the adoption decisions get made, and SA has limited influence on those calls. 

If AI makes everything cheap, the human experience is what becomes valuable. SA needs a coordinated campaign to sell that story to overseas clients before they default to AI, and our jobs go with the rounding error.

You might also like: Our piece on human-sounding call centre AI, the latest startup winners, and how Capitec Pulse AI is already changing the game.

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