If you message a bank, a telco or an online shop in the Philippines this year, a bot is increasingly the first to answer — and 98% of Filipinos say they want to be told when that is the case. That figure comes from the Philippine cut of Genesys' 2026 State of Customer Experience report, presented at a media briefing in the company's Quezon City office on October 21 and reported by the Inquirer. The same study says Filipinos have warmed to AI customer service faster than anyone else in the region: 64% feel more positive about it than they did two years ago, against 56% across Asia-Pacific and 50% worldwide.
Genesys sells the software that runs many of these AI agents, so the company has an interest in the answer. But the numbers are the most detailed public look yet at how Filipino customers — and the BPO industry that serves customers abroad — are reacting to bots replacing the first "hello."
What Filipino customers told Genesys
The Philippine findings, as reported by BusinessWorld, BusinessMirror and Context.ph from the same briefing:
- 64% of Filipino respondents feel more positive about AI-powered customer service than two years ago. Among them, 35% credit a good experience with an AI agent for the change.
- 73% say chatbots and virtual agents have made it easier to resolve a concern without a human.
- 78% do not care whether a person or an AI fixes their problem, as long as it is fixed quickly and completely.
- 45% are comfortable letting AI make decisions on their behalf, per the Inquirer's report — close to the 46% Genesys reports globally.
Acceptance comes with conditions. Besides the 98% who want disclosure, Context.ph reports that 58% want control over their personal data and 84% expect AI to make service more personalised. Good service also pays: 91% of Filipino respondents would recommend a company after a positive experience, 87% would buy again, and 85% would consider buying more products.
| Measure (2026 State of CX) | Philippines | Asia-Pacific | Global |
|---|
| Consumers more positive about AI service than two years ago | 64% | 56% | 50% |
| CX leaders planning AI tools for staff in the next two years | 62% | 55% | 47% |
Sources: BusinessWorld, BusinessMirror and Context.ph, citing Genesys. One outlet, The Daily Chronicle, put the global figure at 60% rather than 50%; the other four reports from the briefing agree on 50%, so that is the number used here.
What Philippine companies plan to do next
On the business side, 62% of Philippine customer experience (CX) leaders plan to deploy AI-powered tools to help agents, supervisors and other staff within two years, above the Asia-Pacific average of 55% and the global 47%, BusinessMirror reported. They expect to put an average of 32% of their customer service budgets into AI tools over the next 12 months, and 49% expect agentic AI — software that can carry out multi-step tasks on its own, not just answer questions — to take on a bigger share of customer concerns, according to BusinessWorld.
That tracks with the global report Genesys released in July: 82% of CX leaders worldwide expect autonomous AI agents to orchestrate customer experiences within three years, and 40% of organisations already use agentic AI.
"In the era of AI, I think the number one currency is trust," Genesys vice-president for Asia Mao Gen Foo said at the briefing, per BusinessWorld. "Without trust, nothing works."
'A plus, not a minus': the BPO question
The Philippines exports customer service. So the question put to Genesys was whether AI that handles customer chats threatens business process outsourcing (BPO) jobs. Foo's answer, quoted by the Inquirer: "I think, honestly, I feel this is a plus, not a minus." He said the technology "will actually level up the productivity knowledge of BPO workers in the Philippines."
Genesys country manager for the Philippines Kulachart Ngernpermpoon argued that AI makes CX jobs more valuable, not less, because deployments still need experienced people to run them. "The deployment of AI could be much faster and much more scalable, but you need to have the right team head or the right co-worker or the right managers," he said, per BusinessWorld. BusinessMirror noted that the executives offered no figures on how many local small businesses use AI for customer service, or what a smaller firm would need to spend.
These are the views of a vendor whose product automates the work. The Genesys global report itself records the risk on the other side: 84% of consumers will give a virtual agent three attempts or fewer before giving up, and the inability to reach a human agent remains their top frustration.
The catch: bots that forget you
The report's global findings explain why disclosure and hand-offs matter so much. Genesys says 95% of consumers expect a company to remember their information across channels, yet 48% of organisations do not automatically pass details between virtual and human agents. Two-thirds (66%) of consumers would switch to a competitor after three or fewer bad experiences, and for 21% a single bad experience is enough.
That matches a separate Twilio survey we covered last month, which found AI already handles 46% of customer service conversations in the Philippines while 73% of Filipinos still have to repeat themselves. The two studies were run by different firms with different samples, so the figures are not directly comparable, but they point the same way: Filipinos accept the bot, and punish the company when the bot forgets.
If the bot is not solving it
The report's own numbers suggest a simple approach for customers:
- Ask whether you are talking to AI. Companies have now been told that 98% of their Filipino customers want this disclosed, so a direct question is reasonable.
- Ask for a human early. Genesys found most people give a virtual agent three tries at most; there is little to gain from a fourth.
- Do not expect to be remembered. Nearly half of organisations do not pass your details from the bot to the agent, so keep your reference or ticket number handy.
About the survey
Genesys worked with an independent research firm to survey 5,811 consumers and 1,560 CX and business leaders in more than 20 countries in March and April 2026; the Asia-Pacific portion covered 1,426 consumers and 508 business leaders, BusinessWorld reported (that paper gave the global leader count as 1,580, against 1,560 in Genesys' own release). Genesys has not published the Philippine sample size. The 98% disclosure figure appeared in the Inquirer and Context.ph reports; BusinessWorld and BusinessMirror did not carry it.
