With 90,000 employees in Morocco and more than 20,000 in Tunisia, call centers in the Maghreb are on the front line in the employment battle that is coming with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). . Since the beginning of the 2000s, the former, above all, has focused heavily on outsourced customer relations, one of the main sectors creating net jobs in the country: 10,000 on average each year.
Across all of its businesses, the outsourcing of services has never even weighed so heavily: 1.6 billion euros for exports in 2023, as much as aeronautics. Income which comes mainly from France. Despite increased competition in Africa, the Shereef kingdom still captures half of the tricolor market share outside France.
The release of the Swedish fintech Klarna, which in February praised the success of a tool designed in collaboration with OpenAI, the creator of the conversational robot ChatGPT, capable, in after-sales service, of carrying out “work equivalent to 700 full-time employees” does not, however, seem to worry the thirty or so companies which share most of the market in the region. “If generative AI had arrived fifteen years ago, we would have been shaken up, but the configuration is different today”, estimates Youssef El Aoufir, who co-founded Intelcia in 2006, present in Morocco and Tunisia with more than 10,000 employees and which achieved 734 million euros in turnover in 2023.
“The role of humans remains paramount”
For the simplest requests, recent developments in AI have led to an acceleration in the automation of low-value-added interactions, but Intelcia highlights more complex services that it “is still difficult to automate”. Acquired by Altice in 2016, the company counts public establishments and a housing finance organization among its French clients. So many situations in which advisors not only provide information, but must manage anomalies, says its co-founder.
Human presence is even considered essential in certain delicate configurations, such as when it comes to recovering a lost customer. “In this type of scenario, the role of humans remains preponderant, because it involves defusing crises that may be unpredictable”says Redouane Mabchour, general manager in the Maghreb of Concentrix + Webhelp, this giant with a turnover of 7.1 billion euros in 2023, which employs 13,000 people in the region.
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