(MENAFN- Costa Rica News) The post 28,000 Jobs in Costa Rica Could Be at Risk Due to AI Advances appeared first on The Costa Rica News.

In less than two months, artificial intelligence (AI) has made a wave of headlines that should set off alarm bells in the services sector:

1. Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and Wipro reported the net dismissal of 64,000 employees in their 2023-24 fiscal year, after migrating a large portion of their contracts to“AI-first” delivery models.

2. Microsoft confirmed the layoff of more than 6,000 people-about 3% of its global workforce-and announced another 300 cuts this week, while concentrating resources on Copilot and its nascent AI“agent factory.”

3. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, warned that AI“could eliminate up to half of entry-level office jobs and push US unemployment to 20% within five years.”

In Costa Rica, the services sector has been a success story: more than 82 Shared Service Center (32 of Fortune 500 companies) and exports of US$7.3 billion in knowledge-intensive services annually. But that success relies on tasks that are now in the crosshairs of automation.

According to estimates based on OECD data, if 28.5% of the country's 300,000 service center jobs are affected by automation, more than 85,000 positions would be at risk. Even if only a third are transformed without effective restructuring, that would mean around 28,000 jobs are directly at risk by 2027.

“When Bangalore demonstrates it can operate with 10% fewer staff, our clients wonder why their center in Heredia needs the same payroll as yesterday,” says Guillermo Salas Dalsaso, an expert in innovation and digital transformation.

Where do they press first?

The first to feel the pressure will be bilingual support agents, manual QA functions, and routine data processing. Generative chatbots already resolve up to 80% of first-level tickets; AI-powered testing suites generate and execute cases in minutes; and robotic process automatio (RPA) combined with language models validates accounting reconciliations at a fraction of the human cost.

“AI won't eliminate all jobs; what it does is eliminate the monotonous and amplify the strategic: context interpretation, ethical oversight of models, and design of hybrid human-machine experiences,” adds Salas.

From risk to advantage, five urgent moves:

Instead of waiting for a government lifeline, BPO and SSC companies themselves can start protecting their operations today:

. Train talent in conversational AI through 12-16 week bootcamps that teach prompt engineering, sentiment analysis, and data curation.

. Create internal sandboxes where cross-functional teams test co-pilots and chatbots without exposing sensitive information before scaling projects.

. Implement internal talent markets that allow employees to migrate from automated tasks to new roles-for example, algorithmic oversight or advanced analytics-before disengagement becomes the only option.

. Rewrite productivity indicators, measuring“cases resolved per human-hour with AI” instead of metrics based solely on volume or call time.

. Invest in specialized bilingualism, so that the differential is no longer“speaking two languages,” but rather mastering a domain (finance, healthcare, cybersecurity) and communicating accurately with AI in that context.

“Our realistic goal should be to convert 20,000 Costa Ricans into 'augmented agents' by 2027. Whoever gets there first will not only retain the accounts they already have; they will also attract the new lines of business that AI opens every quarter,” concludes Salas.

The post 28,000 Jobs in Costa Rica Could Be at Risk Due to AI Advances appeared first on The Costa Rica News.

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