Artificial Intelligence Is Making Call Centres More Expensive, Not Cheaper – eBusiness Life Magazine

By Sanjay Govender

The Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry has embraced AI as a technology capable of improving operational efficiency, enhancing customer experiences, and supporting business growth. But inside South African call centres, the opposite is quietly happening.

As AI tools become deeply embedded into customer engagement environments, many operators are discovering that the real cost of AI is not the software licence – it’s the infrastructure required to run it.

From voice neutralisation software and real time call assistance to AI driven first line support and live agent coaching, the processing demands inside modern BPO environments have increased dramatically over the past 18 months.

What many providers underestimated was the back-end impact. AI does not run for free. It requires compute power, memory, networking throughput, low latency environments, and increasingly expensive infrastructure to support it at scale.

The result is that many BPOs are now facing a difficult and expensive decision. Option 1: One approach is to run AI workloads directly on endpoint devices. This means moving away from standard workstation deployments toward higher specification machines capable of handling AI assisted applications locally.

In practical terms, this is driving a noticeable shift away from traditional Intel i5 deployments toward growing demand for i7 powered devices on the call centre floor. AI enhanced workloads are forcing hardware upgrades far earlier than many refresh cycles originally planned for.

Option 2: The second option is to keep endpoint devices relatively standard while shifting the AI processing burden into the backend environment. In this model, AI applications and workloads are hosted centrally on servers, reducing the processing demand on the user device itself….