AI machines at the gate

Apr 08, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Peeping Tom…

Kaieteur News-The call center was once the second chance for the school-leaver who never got past CXC. It was the soft cushion for the young mother trying to piece her life back together. It was a foothold for the young man who refused to steal but couldn’t find anything to do.

The plan was for call centers to be established at Tushen, Enmore, Linden, the Corentyne and on the Essequibo Coast. The plan, hatched in 2015, was to establish call centers in these areas to absorb the battalions of unemployed young people who lacked opportunities. This was the grand plan of the PPPC administration that was contained in its 2015 election manifesto.

It was not a misplaced plan. Donald Ramotar, the then presidential candidate of the PPPC, had a vision for reducing unemployment and it involved the establishment of call centers. This is why the PPPC’s 2015 election manifesto promised centers across the country—five thousand jobs, scattered like seeds along the coast, with the promise that something might grow.

That was not a reckless plan. It had precedent: a Mexican firm had already spun 6,000 jobs doing Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) from the air and a dial tone. Another company on the Corentyne proved that even Berbice could hum with opportunity.

Call centers came and created thousands of jobs. But now things are going quiet within the BPO sector.

The silence of a closed call center is not like that of an abandoned house—it doesn’t groan or whisper. It sits heavy, like swallowed regret. One by one, the lights are going out in Guyana’s BPO industry, and the country will feel it.

But if Ramotar’s plan was a seed, the soil was always difficult. The problem with call centers was never their necessity—they were needed. The problem was never whether Guyanese could do the work—of course, they could. No one doubts that a people who thrive in Brooklyn’s businesses and New York’s health system can manage a headset and a shift.

The problem lay in everything else: in waking up early, in the tedium of showing up every day, in the stubbornness of youthful ambition that believes it deserves better, right away. The tragedy wasn’t that the work was beneath anyone. The tragedy was that the patience to endure it wore thin.

But now, the tragedy is something deeper. The tragedy is that the jobs themselves are vanishing—not because of us, but because of something colder. The machines are coming.

Call center jobs, like many others that gave modest employment to the average man and woman, are going the way of the typewriter, the elevator operator, the milkman. Artificial Intelligence is here—not a storm, but a rising tide. Slowly, methodically, AI is asking the questions humans once asked and providing the answers humans once gave. Companies that once needed 400 agents now need ten engineers and an algorithm. And we are left standing on the shore, wondering when the water will reach our ankles.

This is not a uniquely Guyanese story. It is a global one. But here, where a single job feeds a household of five, the pain cuts deeper. We will not feel it only in the loss of income, but in the swelling frustrations of youth. In the eyes of a boy who thought he had finally found something, only to be told that the machine does it better. In the tight mouths of parents who watch their children idle again. In the communities that go quiet, not from peace, but from pause.

And yet, there are lessons to be salvaged from this wreck.

We often say young people must be given opportunities—and rightly so. But less often do we say what they must give in return: their discipline, their time, their best. No industry, not even a fragile one, can survive in the face of casual absenteeism, chronic lateness and high staff turnover. No workforce can be strong when it treats work as a favor. Our work ethic must improve—not because foreigners demand it, but because it is the only way to build something enduring.

But let’s be fair: what good is a sermon on punctuality when the clock has been unplugged? Preaching about hard work to someone whose job has just been made extinct by a machine is a little like telling the drowned to swim harder. The system has shifted, the jobs are gone, and the government cannot bring them back—not with subsidies, not with slogans, not with schemes.

We must think anew.

The question now is what lies beyond the BPO. What do we do with our youth, whose greatest resource is time and energy, now that the phones no longer ring? We cannot resuscitate the call centers, but perhaps we can teach coding, design, and digital skills. Perhaps we can build small factories again, or grow food for export. Perhaps we can rediscover craft, or culture, or care work.

And perhaps—though it feels quaint to say so—we can return to the basics. To discipline. To showing up on time. To learning that every job, no matter how humble, has something to teach. Because the future is coming, and if we are to meet it without fear, we must bring more than complaints. We must bring the best of ourselves.

Machines will not mourn the loss of thousands of jobs. But we must. And having mourned, we must move- forward, upward, whatever direction life still offers.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

 

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