It’s a nervy time to be a frontline employee in a name heart or back-office hub. Startups are promoting ‘AI employees’ and the likes of enterprise capital agency Andreessen Horowitz are speaking of AI ‘productizing and unbundling’ the enterprise course of outsourcing (BPO) sector that executes the core capabilities of companies across the globe. Little question customer support, HR, and IT employees within the trade are questioning how their employers will reply—and whether or not their livelihoods are in danger.
At first look, then, it’s shocking to see the world’s largest BPO agency, Paris-headquartered Teleperformance, rating sixteenth on this 12 months’s Fortune’s 100 Finest Corporations to Work For – Europe listing.
The €10.2 billion ($12 billion) income firm, broadly referred to as TP, has managed to maintain its 500,000 folks completely happy within the AI age by sustaining a human-centric tradition even because it implements AI into inside and client-facing processes.
Alan Winters, TP’s world chief privateness and knowledge ethics officer, and till very just lately its chief folks officer, says that some staff fear about being displaced by AI, however the bottom line is to be clear about what you’re utilizing AI for and why. “People need to understand what’s happening. They’ll make the decision they need to for themselves, but the more they understand, the less fearful of change they will be,” he explains.
Winters additionally advocates for brutal honesty, together with about what you don’t know—which, within the case of a nascent expertise like AI, could also be quite a bit. Assuage fears immediately, if attainable.
“AI is not going to replace all of our jobs. It’s going to allow us to put resources where the impact from human interaction will be the most,” Winter says. Generally meaning automating duties for effectivity however not core actions that contain empathy and private connection. In these circumstances, AI is there to help or increase.
“People need to understand what’s happening. They’ll make the decision they need to for themselves, but the more they understand, the less fearful of change they will be.”Alan Winters, TP’s world chief privateness and knowledge ethics officer
He factors to recruitment for instance: At TP, AI doesn’t conduct a video interview; as an alternative it ‘listens’ to calls between a candidate and recruiter to assist the latter make an evaluation. “I could automate 100% of my recruiting process. But is that what I want the first experience of new employees to be if I’m telling them we’re a people-focused organization and that we value emotional intelligence?”
Humanity as a aggressive benefit
A enterprise case underlies TP’s precept that expertise can not substitute person-to-person interplay. Winters explains that TP sees combining human emotional intelligence (EI) with AI as a key differentiator in a market through which rivals are extra targeted on utilizing expertise to chop overheads.
“Ever since [founder and CEO] Daniel Julien started the company almost 50 years ago, we’ve had the mantra that if you have happy employees, you will have happy end customers, and therefore happy clients,” Winters says. AI hasn’t modified this view. “Who will our clients want to work with? The companies that are investing in their people, or the ones that say I can do this for the lowest cost, but I’ve taken the humanity out of human interaction?”
To double down on its dedication to human-centric operations—and to reassure staff that it’s critical about its strategic worth—TP has begun a tradition change program to include EI into its implementation of AI and practice its workforce on EI within the AI period.
(The coaching aptly features a set of AI-generated songs to assist folks bear in mind key messages, with titles like “Heart’s Compass” and “I Know What I Feel”).
As with every change program, measurement issues. Alongside tougher metrics like worker attrition, TP actively examines the influence of the coaching on the workforce and of AI itself. For instance, as a part of a brand new ‘EI index’ metric with Nice Locations To Work, the corporate assesses worker understanding and concern of AI, how a lot they belief what administration says about it, and whether or not they suppose communication has been clear sufficient.
Deft implementation
Winters has a number of classes to share with different corporations eager to embed EI in AI. First, be considerate about the way you implement expertise; don’t rush. TP makes use of a Lean Six Sigma method to map out processes and analyze the place groups have sensible points or the place there’s a chance to do issues in another way. It then checks how AI may assist help the method—and the way folks reply—earlier than rolling it out.
“If you’re not surgical about where you put AI, we believe that will have a huge [negative] impact on your culture,” Winters says.
Second, guarantee the entire government workforce totally buys into the thought and holds others accountable for implementation. “If you don’t have 100% support from the executive team, it will not happen, especially with a global company of 500,000 people in 100 countries—that’s a lot of people to get on the same page,” he provides.
Lastly, Winters says it’s important to method AI—and EI—with a humble, studying mindset. “Frankly, you’ll make mistakes, but we’re human, we all make mistakes. The key is how you learn from that.”
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