In a multi-story office building in Manila's financial district, about 60 young men and women are monitoring and operating shelf replenishment robots in Japanese convenience stores through remote control. When the robot occasionally drops canned drinks, the staff will wear a VR headset and use the joystick to intervene to assist the robot in completing the picking work.
These AI robots are designed by Tokyo startup Telexistence and run on NVIDIA and Microsoft platforms. Since 2022, Telexistence has deployed the robot in more than 300 FamilyMart and Lawson convenience stores in Tokyo, and plans to enter 7-Eleven in the future.
Astro Robotics, a robotic workforce startup, is responsible for 24-hour remote monitoring of these robots in Manila. As Japan faces a labor shortage and is cautious about immigration policies, remote robot operation has become a new model for outsourcing manual labor. Juan Paolo Villonco, founder of Astro Robotics, said that this not only reduces business operating costs, but also expands business scale. "In Japan, it is difficult to find employees willing to do warehouse work, and the wages are very high." He said that young and technically proficient talents in the Philippines are just qualified for this job. According to company employees, each operator (called a "driver") can monitor about 50 robots at the same time.
Although the robot can work autonomously most of the time, it makes mistakes about 4% of the time, such as bottles falling or rolling. At this point, the driver needs to intervene and use VR equipment and controllers to manually simulate and complete the operation. Especially when imitating the grasping movements of human hands, it is extremely challenging for the robot.
IT services and technology jobs in the Philippines have surged due to the boom in AI and automation. Despite layoffs in related positions in rich countries, Filipino technology workers are still busy operating industrial robots, driving autonomous vehicles, collaborating with AI to complete tasks, or participating in the development of AI agents (computer programs that can act autonomously). However, some experts pointed out that these positions may be fully automated in the future, and workers may be "replaced by machines that train themselves."
According to Jose Mari Lanuza, head of research at the Sigla Research Center, a technology think tank in Manila, the Philippines is a global outsourcing center, and international companies continue to recruit automation and AI-related positions, but they prefer "low-cost labor." These positions require higher skills than traditional "AI positions in developing countries" such as content review or large-scale language model training, but they also face difficulties such as lower pay, work contracts, and a reduced sense of self-worth.
"The worker becomes the caretaker of the machine, replacing the machine in doing the work." Lionel Robert, a professor of robotics at the University of Michigan, commented, "You become the stand-in for the machine."
Many skilled Filipinos work for foreign companies. According to Rowel Atienza, a machine learning professor at the University of the Philippines, one-third of his students are employed by foreign companies such as the United States. Global automation is accelerating. The AI agent market is expected to grow to US$43 billion by 2030, and the industrial robot market has almost doubled in size.
Astro Robotics’ current engineering and computer science graduates are responsible for supervising the robots, which use algorithms to calculate the distance between items and replenish the shelves. Drivers earn about $250 to $315 a month, similar to call center employees, and their responsibilities include monitoring robots and reporting on their performance. When the robot makes a mistake, employees use VR to operate it manually. They intervene about 50 times a day on average, and it takes up to five minutes to deal with the error each time. Wearing VR headsets for long periods of time causes many employees to suffer from symptoms of “virtual reality motion sickness” such as dizziness and visual fatigue.
Telexistence said it already has a large amount of unique remote operation data and experience, and is working with San Francisco startup Physical Intelligence to use human operation data to train basic AI models, with the goal of giving robots similar human-like "physical intelligence." The company said the move is expected to convert manual remote operation tasks into fully automated operations.
However, experts believe that complete automation may never be achieved and humans will still play a role in a hybrid human-machine workforce. "Robots and AI will not take away everyone's jobs, because humans are still very useful." Robert said.
The World Economic Forum surveyed about 1,000 global employers this year and the results showed that the proportion of purely human positions will rapidly decline and be replaced by human-machine collaboration or fully automated positions. About 41% of the companies surveyed expect to lay off employees in the future due to obsolete skills.
The hybrid human-machine workforce model is now a reality in the Philippines. In addition to IT services, Filipino engineers also assist in the research and development of AI systems around the world. A data engineer at an international company said that he is developing a large-scale language model trained using his own data to answer questions for employees, "with the goal of speeding up internal processes." He revealed that foreign companies generally adopt the "Philippine salary standard", which is "not too low. Although you can get more at the headquarters, the expenses will be much higher."
An engineering graduate outsourced by a top US consulting company said that he developed an AI agent for the IT service desk, which significantly reduced his workload. "Now I only handle six tasks a day, but I am always afraid of being informed that I am no longer needed during meetings." His income is US$874 per month, which is about 70% of the US minimum wage.
Xian Guevarra, secretary-general of the Computer Engineers Association of the Philippines, criticized, "Filipino talents are being maximized by international companies, and the tools they develop may replace themselves in the future. Technology applications should improve efficiency rather than benefit overseas companies."
Although working for foreign companies pays higher wages, some Filipino engineers still choose to serve local companies. Marc Escobar, chief technology officer of Philippine startup Sofi AI, was offered a high-paying job by American AI company Anthropic, with a monthly salary of US$1,500, but he ultimately chose to stay locally, “hoping to promote the growth of local engineers and AI.”