Asiatel Outsourcing has established AI Operations as its fourth Center of Excellence as it integrates artificial intelligence (AI) into customer support, knowledge management, quality assurance, and back-office work.
The company plans to use AI for tasks such as summarizing documents, retrieving information, automating workflows, and monitoring work quality. However, employees will continue to handle exceptions, client-specific concerns, and decisions that require professional accountability.
“The bigger shift is what comes next, and it is why we stood up AI Operations as our fourth Center of Excellence rather than treating AI as a plug-in for our existing teams,” said Miguel Enriquez, executive vice president, KPO and Centers of Excellence – Asiatel Outsourcing.
“My view is simple: You do not get the real dividend from AI by dropping models onto workflows, org charts, and QA processes that were designed for people,” he said.
Asiatel said AI will be introduced into individual processes under each client’s existing controls. Its goal is to redesign workflows around the technology instead of adding AI tools to processes originally built entirely for people.
The company is also dividing work between AI systems and employees. AI will perform tasks involving information processing, while people will remain responsible for work requiring context, experience, and judgment.
“Our operating principle is simple. We give the intelligence to AI and the judgment to humans, and we design that split into the system rather than bolting it on afterward,” Enriquez said.
The move comes as outsourcing clients increasingly measure providers by output, productivity, and work quality instead of the number of employees assigned to an account.
Asiatel is expanding its business around three operations: Asiatel BPO as the execution layer, Asiatel KPO as the expertise layer, and Asiatel Digital as the AI-enabled transformation layer responsible for automating workflows.
The company said this model could allow teams to produce more work without requiring employee numbers to increase at the same rate. It is also placing greater importance on workers with industry knowledge and AI skills, particularly in engineering, cybersecurity, environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, SaaS, sustainability, and AI-enabled operations.
Clients are also asking for stronger safeguards before allowing AI into outsourced work. According to Asiatel, businesses want to know where their data is stored, who can access it, and which AI models and vendors are involved. They also require human oversight, records of AI activity, and contractual guarantees that their information will not be used to train third-party AI models.