Transcription
Hi, I'm Lisa. Good to see you. Let me tell you a story.
Lisa isn't human. She is an AI chatbot. There's no reason why Lisa can't replace us. As the clamor around AI-driven job losses grow, one sector stands in the firing line of disruption. Business process outsourcing, or BPO. BPO workers will be affected by job displacement in the future. There is a redundancy in our job. There are a couple of times that I am about to cry.
India and the Philippines, the world's outsourcing capitals, confront a rupture. With millions of workers at risk. I mean, I see a massive risk, 2 to 3 million people getting disrupted. Is this all just fear-mongering? In terms of targets for the Philippines outsourcing sector, they've been quite optimistic about job growth. Or is the projected AI job apocalypse already here? Millennials and Gen Z were given a promise. Work hard, and you get a good job. But that promise is broken.
Don't worry. Don't worry. I'll take care of it for you. I'll take care of it for you. 10:00 p.m. Most of the Philippines is ready for bed. But here in greater Manila, the day is just beginning for some. My name is Sandre Agent, and I work on a graveyard shift. So, since I'm having my heavy heavy meal right now, we have noodles, eggs, and also meats. It helps me energize my body to be awake.
Paul works these hours because the clients he serves are on the other side of the globe. He is part of an industry known as business process outsourcing, or BPO. Outsourcing is when a company hires or contracts another company to handle a specific task instead of that company doing it on their own with its own employees. And that's usually done when the cost is lower to do that outsourcing to the other company instead of paying full-time employees with benefits and office space. A lot of it is administrative. A lot of it is repetitive. Say big banks like JP Morgan, IT companies like IBM, Google, Facebook. Say retail firms Walmart, Amazon has a sizable presence as well as in the Philippines.
In the Philippines, jobs under the BPO umbrella include admin work, accounting services, IT development, and customer support. The company I'm working with, we cater US clients. We are receiving calls from our clients to update their information, a phone number, or any information on their account. So, that is the usual conversations we have with our clients. Working on a BPO company pays a lot compared to my previous job. I was able to send my four kids on a private school. Now, we're able to afford to buy our own house. The sector currently employs around 2 million workers and brings about 40 billion dollars per annum, which translates to a little less than 10% of the national GDP. Most of this, around 70%, are driven by work being outsourced from North America.
In India, a similar story plays out in Bengaluru, the country's back office capital. Outsourcing generates about 7% of GDP, employing 6 million Indians. Hot tea at midnight is fuel for these workers. I started working in BPOs in 2022. By coming in BPO, I think I can do it better for our future opportunities. Complete night shift, 8:00 p.m. to morning 5:00 a.m. So, given the time difference between the west and the east, when America wakes up, the Indian and the Philippine workforce continue to work in multiple shifts. And that's really where we say that the Indian and the Philippine labor workforce works 24/7, irrespective whether it's morning, evening, or night.
India is by far the outsourcing leader, capturing an estimated 50 to 55% of the global market. The Philippines is second with about 15 to 17%. But there is a problem. Something's coming to steal the industry's lunch, or supper in this case. According to reports from the IMF, OECD, Bloomberg Intelligence, and others, back office services are amongst the most at risk of being replaced by artificial intelligence. The Philippines outsourcing industry is extremely vulnerable to AI. Although we have not really felt its effects significantly yet, but we know that it's coming. General perception amongst the IT worker that AI will take over their job, that most of the repetitive work might not be available after a certain point. So, they're really in a scared situation, and there is a lot of insecurity amongst the overall IT sector employees.
So, why does AI pose such a threat to outsourcing today? The answer may lie in how it all took off. In the early 2000s, US companies under pressure to cut costs turned to India to fix a big problem. Y2K, also known as the millennium bug. We were moving our calendars from 1999 to 2000, right? And all the computer programs were programmed for two digits of the year to be taken, which was till 99. And the moment it hit 2000, nobody knew how to enter the four digits of the year. So, people were panicking, and that's really where it all started. You know, there was a lot of scare. Flights would stop, and most of the industry would come to a standstill. I think India played a very significant role in solving the Y2K problem, and I think that was the starting point.
Fixing Y2K meant combing through and fixing millions of lines of code. Repetitive work done over and over again. Although outsourcing existed before Y2K, this period significantly accelerated its growth. A lot of high volume scale work came into India. It started with that. Then the realization hit the western companies that, hey, this is a nice way of getting work done at much lower cost. And that's where the Philippines also popped into focus, where you have a natively English population and culturally adaptable to the United States. So, you could say India went in first, primarily driven by tech. And then the Philippines shortly followed, primarily driven by customer support, by customer experience.
But the same characteristics that make BPO work easy to offshore also make it highly suitable for automation. So, typically the outsourcing industry works on repetition, primarily because they're expected to do the same thing again and again and again. Once you start getting data, it's easier to see the pattern. So, once a pattern is seen on data, it can be automated. It can be replaced with AI. The agent typically has a script that he or she follows, and therefore the responses will be predictable. Once that conversation is closed, the whole conversation actually is what has been recorded. Imagine that is two decades worth of transactions, conversations that have happened within these BPO companies. These scenarios are sort of fed to the AI systems. The voice quality, the intonation, the tone, as well as the language, the accent, that's being captured as well in these conversations. It adds another layer to how these AI systems have actually learned how these operations are done.
And signs of the AI job apocalypse could already be here. In April this year, Oracle cut 12,000 jobs in India as it reportedly boosts AI spending. India's tech giant TCS, which is among the world's biggest back office providers, cut 12,000 jobs a few months ago. This was the largest reduction in its history. Hiring has tanked, too. India's top IT firms added only 17 net employees in the first 9 months of the 2026 fiscal year. Down from thousands of hires the year before. They're not hiring. But they're also laying off in parallel. I get very worried because there are lots of people losing jobs, and we don't know where we're going to get them another jobs from.
Without the BPO, this entire cohort would either be unemployed or would be doing lower-paying jobs. So, this entire cohort of people, they make about $160. And that's a very big thing for a family that comes from such a low-income strata, right? We have so many people whose parents are maids or auto rickshaw drivers or plumbers. And that gives us a lot of pride to play a role in changing the economic status of a family like that. If AI disruption is truly on the way, how long before we see the impact on a wider scale? The alarm over AI job disruptions has gotten louder. One reason, AI's rapid advancement over the past 2 years.
We're going to demonstrate two different voice models so that we can see how AI was able to improve over time. Ralph Regalado is the head of artificial intelligence at Collab, a Philippine company that offers AI products. I saw you were looking into my AI products recently and wanted to see if I could answer any quick questions. Do you have a quick moment? The way that it delivers the intonation is kind of repetitive. So, it sounded more robotic. So, let's try to see all the newer advanced voice models that are available right now. Good morning. May I confirm if I'm speaking with Mr. Patrick Cruz? You can hear that it's much more sounded like human. There's a difference in terms of the intonation.
For most businesses, they look at it from the perspective of how can I improve customer experience. When I call to, for example, a hotline, it could take me probably like 30 minutes waiting in the line because human agents at the back are still entertaining other callers. So, now with this, it's able to immediately entertain calls because they don't have a limitation of how many calls can I actually accommodate. An AI agent will never show emotions, will not get irritated, will not get tired, is willing to work 24/7. And it's not just voice agents. Video bots are being built for visual troubleshooting. Remember Lisa? I'm basically using this Samsung S25 Ultra that is an Android phone. Thanks for sharing that you have a Samsung S25 Ultra. I've sent you a guide to help you check your battery usage.
Research firm Gartner estimates that by 2029, 80% of common customer service issues can be resolved by AI. For now, though, some BPO companies are using AI to work alongside humans to boost productivity. Speed is the new customer experience. When our agents are not available, they answer these through chatbots in our BPO. That made us even more efficient. It saved us 30 minutes to an hour of every transaction. Historically, some of our calls are taking longer than that, 1 hour to 2 hours, especially for a technical support call. So, that saved us a lot of time, and you know, time is money. Because right now the technology is really expensive, right? So, not all organizations can actually invest in such technology because of the cost. But if it actually became much more cheaper, for sure it would be a no-brainer for organizations.
In Bengaluru, AI is disrupting another commonly outsourced task, coding. Let's have a contest between AI and human, and let's see who writes the code better and faster. Mukund Jha, who runs one company driving the change, shows us how. One is going to be the AI laptop. This is going to be the human laptop. I've been coding since age 12. Very advanced programmer, but we'll see which one wins today. Let's ask the referee to start the timer. Okay. Let's go. I'm just going to give it a very simple problem. I'm going to say, "Build me a website to launch my luxury homestay." You can see it's asking me some clarifying questions. "Hey, what kind of room types do you have? What is the booking flow? What kind of payment integration do you need?" Now, it's started building the software. Meanwhile, I'm going to try and just do this myself.
8 minutes later. I've barely gotten started, and looks like AI is almost there. So, I'm just going to focus and type fast now. Another 6 minutes goes by. I'm just going to stop the timer. We have 14 minutes, 9 seconds, and you can look at this beautiful website. The whole outsourcing industry will need to be reimagined completely, right? So, earlier, the arbitrage that it relied on was software developers being really expensive. It used to take a lot of time, and you would outsource it to India developers at a cheaper cost. But what's happening with AI now is that anybody can build. One of our services called out that about a million jobs are going to get impacted in the BPO and the IT outsourcing industry by 2030. And about 40% of the current jobs are actually going to go away purely because of automation.
AI jitters in February this year saw Indian IT stocks wipe out $50 billion value. The reason, an AI model called Claude, developed by Anthropic. So, it's crazy. Anthropic AI released a plugin that would enable software developers to write code faster, better, and more efficiently, right? Markets got spooked. It's not just about this one plugin that Anthropic released with Claude, but it's also about what are the various possibilities that AI can do, thereby replacing hundreds and thousands working as outsourcing support to the Western countries.
Let me give you a quick demonstration. For example, here with the legal department, let's say 30 people, for example, who are working on reviewing contracts, writing contracts. Today, one person can do everything. Let's talk about claims processing. About 40 odd people in the department working on processing claims. Using AI, we have been able to cut down their actual number of hours from about 80 hours to about 40 or 30 hours. Let's say data entry. A simple AI agent can scan, read, record, write, and thereby fill all the fields that are required. And maybe what a 10-member team was doing, maybe a two or three-member team can actually do. AI agents are going to be there for us 24/7, 365 days a year without a break, without a holiday. That's really the new reality of the workplace that we're all leading to.
Still, experts have warned of AI-driven disruption for years. So, why isn't there large-scale job replacement yet? One reason is that the technology had not advanced enough. But we may be close to the tipping point. Ravi is a junior-level coder in Bengaluru with 3 years of experience. He has asked to remain anonymous. Actually, you know, HR, the company has announced me as a star performer of the year last year, and they have given me a significant raise as well. And after 4 or 5 months, they had laid me off. I was working on a project at 5:00 a.m., and I was about to go for sleeping, and I received an email that because of AI, we are about to reduce the workforce, etc., etc. The mail clearly mentioned that because of AI, we don't need much resources.
AI is affecting workers in India. We already see a very visible impact. This is new because there are so many engineers out there who think that their remuneration is going to be so rosy. There is a halo around the AI industry. But what is really happening is that their futures are really at stake now, and we really don't know where that will head. Here in Bengaluru, this IT union leader has started to see the impact on his members. The number of cases has rapidly increased. Once the layoff is happening, they are not getting alternate jobs. So, they are coming more to us, and they are expecting the union should give the protection that their benefits and their compensation, they should get appropriately. Yeah, I haven't told my family that I have been laid off. This job is very much important for me because I have to run my family. Even I don't have my own house. In my hometown also, my family is living on rent. And my sister is also, we have to arrange money for her marriage as well.
In the Philippines, a similar story is unfolding. For this year, I am planning to have renovation in our house. I really want to improve, specifically this flooring. Because I lost my job, the improvement will be postponed. Ivan worked as a quality analyst or QA at a call center. His job was to monitor and improve the performance of customer service agents. Aside from me, we are more than 70 plus QAs including two supervisors that are replaced by an AI. The human QAs are no longer needed for recordings of the agent because the AI is already doing their job. Calls are listened by an AI, the words that you're speaking, the pitch and tone of your voice, and the resolution that you'll be giving to a customer. And by the end of your 8-hour shift, they're going to give you a score. And at an alarming pace that no humans could actually be done. And that's why QAs are the first line of workers that are being affected by AI right now.
Ironically, Ivan may have helped train his automated replacement. The AI tools when they were first introduced were not yet perfect. So, I think they're in the trial and error stage yet. So, the intervention of a human QA is needed to double-check or to cross-check the output of the AI tool because they can still see a lot of errors in the productivity of an AI audit. I helped improve the work of AI, and now the AI replaced my job. Similarly, recordings of real help desk calls have been used to train AI on how to respond to customer requests. The cruelty of it, probably, is the better you do your job as a human agent, the more likely a company will be able to use your work to train an AI.
If you have encountered one of these web verification tools, known as CAPTCHAs, that ask you to identify traffic lights or pedestrian crossings, you may be training AI without knowing it. So, in the case of self-driving car navigation, the early inception of that is to train AI to do what we call object detection. And object detection really started out as humans literally labeling objects on a video or on a feed. Is it a traffic light? Is it a pedestrian? You know, is it a car? Or this is where you should turn right following the traffic rules. So, all of this takes massive data gathering, initially primarily done by humans themselves. And then later, AI will learn how to do it automatically. So, we all got tricked, right? All the data that we have been giving away to these digital platforms that now AI can use to train its own.
As AI advances and becomes more cost-effective, experts warn of a race to the bottom where, in order to compete, humans are asked to work for less pay and longer hours. When the companies are laying off employees, most of the time they're not telling up front, "Because of AI implementation, we are laying off," but what they're trying to create an argument that your performance is not up to the mark. They're spending a number of hours, maybe sometime 13 to 14 hours in a day, and the management is trying to give an impression that if you can't deliver within this stipulated time frame, you might lose your job, which actually creates a lot of physical and psychological issues. They are getting into depression. They are facing a lot of problems, let's say nervous system problems.
Meanwhile, Ivan is focusing on getting part-time work, given a permanent job seems elusive. And as a breadwinner, I live with my mom. I receive a monthly salary of less than 30,000 a month, and that salary goes to basic needs, food, the utility bills, and also for the medicine of my mom. There are times that I am about to cry to myself because, you know, stress, and at the same time I have to stay strong to provide for my family. But amidst the doom and gloom, a conundrum. The outsourcing industries in India and the Philippines appear not to be shrinking, but instead growing. So, what is the real picture?
In India and the Philippines, millions of outsourcing workers fuel the wider economy, buying cars, houses, and everything in between. Technically, that is when. So, currently we are at Manyata Tech Park, one of the largest tech parks of India. Like 20 years before, what was here, it was just empty fields over here, paddy fields. Manchesh Rao is a property broker. So, it is always preferable for anyone who is working in any of the companies to stay as close to their home. How important are the IT and BPO people for real estate? I think they are the major share of home buyers, especially the first-time home buyers who come from different cities, aspire to make Bangalore city as their home. The companies which are currently there, now they have slowed down in their hiring. I definitely see that at the entry level of ticket size, there is a pause. There is a wait-and-watch kind of a scenario. Clients talking to us during their home buying decisions, talking about AI disrupting their industry, definitely they are talking about it. It's no more a secret. It's an open secret, I would call it. I think it will take a little time for us to understand how further AI is going to disrupt the market, and what are the repercussions of it, and how long it is going to be. If a million people lose their job, it's a huge impact on the Indian economy. It has a trickle-down effect in the real estate industry. The other, maybe the automobile industry or the other sectors will be impacted because the consumption will be reduced drastically.
In the Philippines, there are worries about AI at this small eatery near Manila. Nearly all its customers are back office workers. Yet, is pessimism warranted? For all the talk of impending AI disruption, the opposite appears to be happening in the sector. 2025 saw both the Philippines and India add jobs, over 80,000 in the Philippines and 120,000 in India, according to industry data. The forecast for 2026 shows further job creation. In the current state, AI is a good augmenting tool for human beings, helping human beings to do better and not reach the stage where it can replace, at least in the BPO industry. We recruit not just for backfill, but for the new assignments that we keep getting from new clients, right? We have a rural market that is expanding, right? They would still prefer somebody who can explain that a little bit better. Government is expanding more on outsourcing than before. So, for that expansion, we still need people. New jobs being hired is really, you know, historical demand coming up. Also, automation is not really that reliable. The usual issues that come up are data security, data privacy, of course, the ability of AI to execute. It still leaves a lot for humans to come in and oversee.
AI is limited to repetitive tasks, the tasks that are predictable. And so, anything that requires judgment, empathy, and cultural intelligence really needs humans in the loop. Some of the drawbacks of AI is that, number one, it couldn't empathize with the client. It cannot sense tension. It couldn't also tell if the client is about to withdraw the contract. It couldn't sense cultural intelligence. So, we still need humans in the loop for judgment, empathy, and cultural intelligence. Today, as we speak, even if about 25-30% of software development happens through AI, there is a level of engineers that are required to check if the code is right and then ensure that it gets integrated into the platform. So, there is a human layer above the AI layer, and the use cases are few. But for some, the question is not whether AI can replace some human tasks, but when. After all, many of the reports that estimate job losses are not accounting for the present, but projecting for the future. The job losses, that's not really happening on a big scale yet, right? We know that it will. Limitations of voice AI is it's only limited to what data you trained, right? So, if it can only do this particular task, so comparing to humans, they're still able to actually find ways and means or perform some judgment to which voice AI cannot actually do. Probably the next 3 to 5 years, we'll be seeing more and more organizations leveraging contact center AI because again, the technology is also improving. The transition is going to be gradual and it's going to take time. And only once they get at scale is when the impact is going to be a lot more higher.
So, in the Philippines, despite the BPO growth trend, industry projections may have to adjust for the impact of AI. In terms of targets, well, for the Philippines outsourcing sector, they've been quite optimistic about job growth. They're also the first to admit that their original target of 2.5 million jobs by 2028 may not actually occur. And I think that's an important admission that the dynamics of the environment has changed. There is an IT-BPM roadmap to 2028 that targets $59 billion of revenues, which is double the level in 2022 for the sector, adding more than 1 million jobs actually to the economy. Is that still on track? Obviously not anymore. So, these targets need to be recalibrated, and therefore we cannot be complacent. The jobs that we know may not be there.
Back at the HR in Manila, the call center agents shared their experiences with automation. If the AI job apocalypse in the outsourcing sector is inevitable, what can the millions currently employed in India and the Philippines do? A 2025 World Economic Forum report suggested that AI and automation will have a positive effect on job growth by 2030. An estimated 170 million jobs created versus 92 million displaced. But here's the rub. The jobs created may not be in the same places or for the same workers as those that are lost. The highest amount of investments in AI innovations happening in the Americas, followed by the UK, Europe, China, Israel. I think a large amount of AI-related employment could also get created in those economies. You know, if few countries hold entire power of AI and the future of AI, they are going to call the shots, and then the other countries which become captive users have to just follow the rules. Without sounding dystopian, but looking at the writing on the wall, the story of AI and jobs, it's really about neo-colonization, a new empire. It's about the dependencies that countries have now. For instance, it is a new kind of polarization. A UN report says over the past 20 years, the income gap between the richest and poorest countries has narrowed. However, it warns AI could entrench divides, ushering in an age of unequal progress. This power imbalance could mean that it will set us back to being just consumers of these technologies. Living on the edge of tech bros like Elon Musk and Sam Altman is very different from living on the edge for an ordinary worker in the IT industry, even in white-collar jobs. It's about high degrees of precarity, high degrees of uncertainty. So, this is part of a long value chain of exploitation.
But in the AI economy, it's almost as if we believe that human beings are users and companies can simply get away without making contributions to worker protection, worker rights. The AI story remains complex. One Indian government survey says 1.5 million tech jobs in India could be displaced by AI by 2031. But up to 4 million new roles could also emerge. Definitely, there's still something to be worried about AI when it comes to losing jobs, but we have hired more than we've let go of people because of AI because it's changing how work is being done. I think every single day my brain gets divided into two parts. What's going to happen to me and my business or my industry? But on the other hand, when I read the likes of IT services here saying, "Hey, you know what? It's not going to be doomsday." I think it just gives me a breathing space. This dichotomy of a doomsday or not, or everything is going to be fine, is every single day in my mind. It's easier to predict what jobs could go and harder to predict what new jobs can get created. You know, at the early onset of the internet globally, people couldn't predict digital marketing or web developer or influencer. The mitigating factor is how well are you able to adapt.
At this Bengaluru BPO which has 10,000 workers, AI workshops are now routine. From call center agents to other staff, everyone attends. "AI is going to eat away BPO jobs. Right? How many of you have that fear in yourself? Raise your hands." Ah, almost all of you. Some roles will become redundant, some new roles will come in. The new roles can be very different. It can be prompt strategist, AI workflow specialist, AI operations manager, AI-enabled customer experience specialist, quality AI quality and governance specialist.
Near India's capital, New Delhi, the NaMaYa Foundation runs a program aimed at helping workers find meaningful jobs. Here, a graduation ceremony is being held for women who recently completed an AI course. The mission of the organization is to enable women from underserved communities to master AI. India, in particular, we are one of the world's youngest populations. 49% of our total population is women. So, now AI has come and has put at risk these very aspirations of our people and of our women. I think women are at threat potentially of certain road jobs that are now being automated. That is something that we have seen. Data suggests 71% of men are equipped with AI skills, whereas there is almost a 42% gender gap between the number of women that are equipped in AI versus men. It would be worthwhile remembering that many women are in the call centers, in the business process management industry. And when these jobs are disappearing, there is a high likelihood that they are going to find it extremely difficult to get into the AI industry.
A 2025 World Economic Forum report urges upskilling as the main way to mitigate AI disruption. It estimated that six in 10 global workers will need it. But for back office workers, it won't be easy. The cost of upskilling. It's going to take a lot of money to enroll in one of the courses offered by private institutions. It's also difficult in terms of time. Enrolling in those kinds of courses. So, upskilling is just like this hamster wheel where an employee jumps into the wheel and just keeps running and running. AI changes so fast. And so we talk about lifelong learning because you don't know what next month's version is going to look like and what it's going to be capable of.
In Metro Manila, the mood is jubilant at a different kind of outsourcing company. One that doesn't do repetitive tasks. This is a team party at a global capability center or GCC, where highly skilled talent handles more complex jobs. This is a model that pushes the industry up the value chain. So, the next wave of outsourcing is the global capability center. BPOs love hiring by the 500s and 1000s, and again, many of these tasks are repetitive, whereas the GCC comes in and they're hiring much higher value skills. They're hiring much more senior talent to handle more complex functions. Intellectual property, finance heads, and accounts payable. Some of them wouldn't want to automate AI yet. It needs an actual human to think about it. The future of outsourcing will be in two areas. Traditional outsourcing will probably remain, and that will be challenged, obviously. But GCC, on the other hand, is kind of in its infancy, and that's a really exciting area to be because of the skills and the type of employees that they're hiring and developing, which is great for the Philippine economy.
However, because GCCs require more advanced skills, the roles are not immediately convertible for many BPO workers. I don't think GCCs will be able to absorb the staff by the thousands. GCCs will absorb some of that talent for sure, maybe 10 to 30% of that. So, the biggest question is what happens to the 60 or 70%? Philippines contact center, like the BPO industry, is one of our country's revenue-generating workforce, and I'm just kind of scared if the adoption of this technology will shift the operations from the Philippines to other countries. Where do they end up? Likely in the gig economy. That's where a lot of jobs are. It's not a promotion. It's not an advancement for them, per se. Also in hospitality.
Another solution may lie outside the service sector. Various reports suggest that jobs involving fine motor skills and technical knowledge are more resilient to AI disruption. The government needs to focus on heavy industry. It could really help mindset shifting. For decades, BPO workers were being offered a lot more than the blue-collar workers whose earning a minimum wage daily. The mindset should start shifting because of the reality that our jobs here are actually not permanent. There's so much investment happening in the semiconductor industry in India. India's getting new investment in the manufacturing side. There's a lot of work happening at the factory side. We need workforce that is skilled to do shop floor work. People will have to shift and move and take those employments because a job is better than no job. Some salary is better than no salary at all.
AI appears to be both a job creator and destructor. But if the AI job apocalypse is truly on the way, the back office sector may be where we see early signs of its arrival. AI is there. If we're going to miss our chance to innovate, then other countries will take that opportunity from us. That's what scares me most. That being a laggard of not pursuing and leveraging the technology early. One thing I can tell you on record is I'm quite happy I'm towards the end of my working career. I really worry about the youngsters who are coming into the labor market right now. Because what will they do and have nothing to do? So, yeah, so that keeps me up at night for sure. As a CEO, what worries me is one of the recent interviews of Sam Altman that I saw. And when the interviewer had asked him, "What's your succession plan?" He said, "My successor will be a bot." That really scared me that day. The AI job apocalypse is about to come. It may not yet be here, but we should not be complacent because it is coming.