NEW technologies like robots and artificial intelligence (AI) will be at the core of the 2021 Transformation Summit and encapsulate the event's "The Next-Level Play" theme.

Organized by the Cebu IT BPM Organization CIB.O), the virtual four-day summit will be held from July 12 to 15, 2021.

Darwin John Moises, 2021 Transformation Summit chair, said Cebu's outsourcing industry currently handles mostly transactional jobs that do not require a lot of thinking.

The challenge now for the IT/BPM industry is to move toward high-value work that is more "decision-based" and tap AI and technology for transactional processes.

There is big potential in such jobs because they can be done remotely from locations like Cebu, he pointed out.

CIB.O president Pert Cabataña believes operations will be transformed to being decision-based in the next few years, with 20 percent of work being "pure AI" by then.

As a move toward this direction, contact center agents are now trained not just to read a script but make decisions from end to end.

He added that the industry has entered a "slow growth phase" from a rapid 50 percent acceleration in the early 2000s until the close of the decade to a 10 percent and 15 percent growth from 2010 to 2016.

The good thing is, according to Cabataña, there is a solution to addressing the decline in growth and it will be tackled during the summit.

Aside from discussions on data science, AI, IoT, blockchain and robotics, part of the sessions will be national and local economic as well as IT/BPM industry updates, data security and the future of the work environment. SPONSORED CONTENT