Kasim Khan / Contributor

Jamaica’s outsourcing sector has shed roughly 20,000 jobs in two years, falling from a peak of 60,000 to 65,000 workers to about 40,000, according to the Global Services Association of Jamaica (GSAJ). The decline has left commercial landlords holding more than 245,000 square feet of vacant office space across Kingston and Montego Bay, much of it built specifically for call centre operations.

The two trends are unfolding at the same time, but industry leaders are careful to separate them. GSAJ President Yoni Epstein, speaking to the Financial Gleaner in July, said the job losses stem from low productivity, disruption from Hurricane Melissa, a tight local labour market and companies relocating work to jurisdictions with stronger incentives. “The job loss has been caused by a few things, but artificial intelligence isn’t one,” Epstein said.

That assessment complicates a simpler narrative connecting automation tools like Digicel’s Ruby directly to the empty towers on Half-Way Tree Road and Fairfield Road. Ruby, built on a platform from Canadian firm Ada, has handled more than 535,000 conversations since its Jamaica launch and now resolves 55 per cent of routed queries without a human agent, according to Digicel’s 2026 Sustainability Report. The company describes Ruby as augmenting rather than replacing staff, and it has not disclosed whether it uses an outsourced provider for the functions the tool now handles.

Still, the sector’s own numbers point to AI playing some role, even if not the lead one cited by association leadership. Jamaica’s global digital services sector spent an estimated US$780 million in the local economy in the fiscal year ended March 2026, down from about US$1 billion the year before, according to figures reported by the Jamaica Observer. Government data put current employment at approximately 50,000, while GSAJ’s own census puts it closer to 40,000, a gap the association has attributed to differing counting methods rather than disagreement over the trend itself.

What is not in dispute is the physical footprint. Buildings across Kingston and Montego Bay were constructed during the sector’s expansion years for large, open floor plans suited to dense phone and chat operations. That layout is difficult to re-let to other tenants. A six-storey building on Half Way Tree Road, for example, is being marketed in blocks of 30,000 or 43,000 square feet, sizes that mostly interest BPO-style occupants rather than smaller professional tenants.

The GSAJ’s recovery plan, outlined by Epstein, centres on marketing Jamaica to restore investor confidence, upskilling workers toward more complex knowledge-process outsourcing tasks, and reducing operating costs to compete with rivals like the Philippines and Mexico. Whether that shift toward higher-value work absorbs the same volume of office space the industry once needed is an open question landlords have not yet had to answer.

For now, the vacancy data offers a way to track a trend that employment and spending figures alone do not fully capture: even if AI is not the primary driver of job losses, as GSAJ maintains, the tools automating routine customer interactions are changing what kind of office space the region’s largest outsourcing market actually needs.