“If the Job Can Be Outsourced, AI Can Do It” – What Those Words Mean for Guyana’s Youth

Jul 20, 2025 Features / Columnists, News

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By Karen Abrams, MBA, AA Doctoral Candidate

Kaieteur News – Last week, while watching my daily tech podcast, I heard four investors from a top Silicon Valley venture capital firm say something that made me pause the video. “We’re investing heavily in AI to replace all the low-wage jobs currently outsourced to developing countries,” one explained. “If the work can be done remotely, AI will eventually do it better and cheaper.”

I immediately thought of Guyana, where many young people have found jobs in call centers and other outsourced services once seen as stepping stones, jobs that offered the promise of skill development and steady income. But now, that promise is under serious threat. A recent article in The Economist described how AI is already managing customer service for major global firms, with one company replacing 90% of its overseas call center staff with AI chatbots operating 24/7, no breaks, no sick days, no complaints.

This shift is not some distant possibility. It’s happening right now. It threatens entire job sectors in Guyana and the wider Caribbean, industries young people rely on today. At the same time, it opens the door to remarkable opportunities for transformation in nearly every sector in Guyana. Whether in education, healthcare, mining, agriculture, public safety, law, infrastructure, or manufacturing, AI offers the potential for increased operational efficiency, greater transparency, and improved profitability.

But to benefit, we must have a capable population. And that brings us face-to-face with one of our greatest national challenges, school dropouts. These are the very young people we need to train, empower, and retain if Guyana is to meet its development goals.

Just last month, I spoke with a 19-year-old who told me, “Miss Karen, I didn’t like school, it was a waste of time, so I decided to help my family by going to work construction. The work is hard but my family depends on the money I bring in.” His words stayed with me. They reveal a painful truth: when young people can’t see how education leads to real opportunity, they make choices that trap them in short-term survival rather than long-term growth.

Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO who helped build much of the digital infrastructure we use today, issued a stark warning in a recent interview;

“Nations that fail to produce enough engineers, computer scientists, and data-literate workers will become economically irrelevant.”

His words should shake us. Guyana is a nation of fewer than one million people, sitting on vast oil wealth. Yet over half of our workforce hasn’t completed secondary school. If we are not intentional, we will find ourselves rich in resources but poor in capacity, unable to manage or innovate within the very economy we’re building.

Other developing nations are moving with urgency. Rwanda, despite its difficult past, has established a network of national technology academies and AI research centers. India produces over 1 million engineering graduates every year, more than our entire population. Singapore transformed itself from a resource-poor trading post into a global hub for technology and finance by aggressively investing in education and workforce development. These nations understand what Schmidt emphasized; in the age of AI, education is no longer just about personal advancement, it is a matter of national survival.

But education today must go beyond classrooms and textbooks. It must prepare young people to be intellectually curious, resilient, and ready to pivot across careers throughout their lifetimes. Literacy, numeracy, digital fluency, and problem-solving skills are the new non-negotiables. We must develop lifelong learners, young people capable of adapting to a rapidly evolving world.

Here in Guyana, we have a narrow window to act. Oil revenues give us the resources that others only dream of, but those resources will be squandered if we fail to invest in human capital. Every business leader should be asking how to upskill their employees. Every school should be embedding digital literacy and project-based learning into its curriculum. Every parent must understand that their child is growing up in a world completely unlike the one they knew, and must encourage exploration, reading, and learning far beyond the traditional classroom.

The investors I listened to made one thing clear, AI will not wait for us to catch up. But unlike many nations, Guyana has the advantage of size, youth, and capital. We are small enough to be agile, young enough to learn quickly, and wealthy enough, at least for now, to invest boldly in our future.

So the question is not whether we can prepare. The question is whether we will.

To the young people reading this, your future is not predetermined. That phone in your hand is more powerful than the computers that sent humans to the moon. Use it to learn. Use it to build. Use it to master the skills that AI can’t replicate, creativity, empathy, leadership, ethics. The world is changing fast, and Guyana needs your brilliance to help shape what comes next.

The next decade will define us. Let’s not miss the moment.

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• Artificial Intellegence, Doctoral Candidate, Guyana's Youth, jobs, Karen Abrams

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