From the article:

Of the 70 quarter-end readings since 2009, headcount fell from a year earlier only eight times, and all eight have come in the last eight quarters. The declines have also deepened, with the most recent quarter showing the steepest drop yet.

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The timing of this decline has not been uniform across geographies. Rather, the trend has rippled from higher- to lower-income economies. Comparing the largest call-center countries, we see the decline first appearing in higher-income countries, progressively spreading to middle- and then lower-income countries. That said, we also find that certain countries, like China and Nigeria, still show growth.

Decline aside, the overall shift in call-center employment from higher- to lower-income countries is not surprising. Companies certainly had a clear reason to relocate operations to lower-income countries. Revelio wage data shows average pay of $5.44 per hour in upper-middle-income countries and just $2.32 in the six lower-middle-income countries—relative to $22.52 in high-income countries.

Offshoring to lower-cost countries, however, no longer seems to buoy the call-center market. Since 2020, lower-income countries have increasingly driven call-center headcount growth amid declines already occurring in high-income markets. By mid-2024, however, the global growth rate turned negative, with all markets experiencing declines by the fourth quarter of 2025.

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The decline is surely multifaceted. It could in part be a correction from the hiring boom that followed the COVID pandemic, or general corporate cost-cutting driven by higher interest rates.

But those explanations should hit office work broadly, and they don't. Across the 12 middle-income countries, the pattern is recognizable: in the pre-ChatGPT era, call-center headcount generally kept pace with other office and administrative, "white-collar" roles. In the post-ChatGPT era, we see sluggish growth or outright declines in call centers—even as the rest of white-collar work looks fairly robust. So, although we cannot observe which firms replace people with chatbots, this divergence in headcounts between call centers and the rest of their labor markets makes AI’s potential role in this trend hard to wave off. Moreover, call centers’ high-volume, scripted work is exactly the profile the ILO flags as most exposed in these countries.