The Caribbean's outsourcing boom meets its first serious test

After a decade of breakneck hiring, the region's global services sector faces onshoring, automation and a widening skills gap.

A jobs engine tested by AI and onshoring

For a decade, business process outsourcing was the Caribbean's most reliable machine for creating entry-level jobs at scale. Jamaica made itself the regional leader, and its Global Services Sector still ranks among the island's largest private employers. But the latest figures highlight that the boom has cooled. Government data show sector employment easing from a peak of roughly 62,000 jobs in March 2024 to around 50,000 two years later, with the Global Services Association of Jamaica offering a more conservative estimate near 40,000.

The revenue picture tells a similar story. Local spending by the sector fell to about US$780 million in the fiscal year to March 2026, a drop of roughly 22%, or US$220 million, from the prior year. The number of operating firms has thinned from more than 90 to about 70. Officials and industry leaders, including Yoni Epstein, the association's president-elect and founder of itel, have attributed the contraction to a mix of onshoring by North American clients, automation, geopolitical uncertainty, elevated domestic operating costs and disruption from Hurricane Melissa.

A widening regional map

Even as Jamaica consolidates, the sector's geography is broadening. The Dominican Republic remains the region's volume leader: its 2025 free-zone statistics counted 37,218 call-centre and BPO positions, close to a fifth of total free-zone employment, though that figure slipped marginally year on year even as overall free-zone jobs edged up past 200,000. Trinidad and Tobago has courted operators aggressively, citing cumulative investment of some US$245 million and more than 3,000 jobs across nine international companies, with iQor alone employing around 1,700.

Guyana, flush with oil revenue and a young English-speaking workforce, has set the boldest target, publicly aiming for 15,000 new BPO jobs and building new contact centres in communities such as Hope Town and Mahaicony to spread work beyond the capital. Whether that ambition survives the same headwinds now buffeting Jamaica will be an early test of the region's next wave.

The pipeline problem

Underneath the headline numbers sits a persistent skills question. In Jamaica, the Inter-American Development Bank has backed a multi-year Global Services Sector project run with JAMPRO and HEART/NSTA Trust to build the training pipeline, funding train-the-trainer programmes and an apprenticeship scheme that grew from about 143 participants to roughly 1,800. HEART/NSTA operates 26 institutions and dozens of community-based interventions, yet its managing director, Dr Taneisha Ingleton, has publicly noted a continuing mismatch between the technical, digital and soft skills employers need and those job seekers bring.

That gap is now the industry's central strategic concern. As voice work becomes automatable, the value migrates to higher-order services: analytics, finance, IT support and knowledge process outsourcing. Those roles pay more and are stickier, but they demand deeper training that regional systems are only beginning to deliver at scale.

The verdict, for now, is nuanced. The Caribbean global services story is not ending, but it is maturing. The easy years of adding seats for basic customer support are giving way to a harder contest over skills, cost and specialisation. The territories that invest fastest in the training pipeline, rather than the cheapest labour, are the ones most likely to keep the jobs engine running.