A sweeping Wall Street Journal profile into Phoenix’s crumbling call-center economy offers one of the starkest mainstream portraits yet of what artificial intelligence is doing to customer-facing, phone-based work; the same kind of work that sits at the core of the credit and collection and customer service industries.
Phoenix built its economy on back-office and customer-service jobs. Between 2021 and 2025, the metro area lost nearly 24,000 customer-service jobs, a 26% decline. Nationally, the Labor Department projects office and administrative support employment will fall another 4% over the next eight years, which is the steepest projected drop of any major employment category. Nationally, office and administrative support jobs have already fallen from roughly 18 million at the end of 2019 to about 16.5 million today.
AI isn’t the only culprit, but it’s accelerating the timeline. Since 2019, large multinational companies have grown their offshore workforce by 36% — more than 8 million jobs — compared with just 17% domestic employment growth over the same period, according to workforce analytics firm Revelio Labs. Companies aren’t conducting mass layoffs. Instead, they’re not replacing workers who leave. Attrition is doing the work quietly.
The human costs are vivid in the piece. A senior customer-relationship manager at Sears Home Services helped his employer roll out AI to replace human customer-service workers before being laid off himself. “I was literally digging my own grave,” he told the Journal. An AT&T customer-service rep notes that callers who reach her have already fought through automated systems and arrive angrier than ever. A test grader saw her work outsourced to India. A staffing firm that once employed a dozen people is down to five, and its owner is now considering pivoting to skilled trades he considers more automation-resistant.
The Journal
