For nearly two decades, Visaya has built its business the traditional way, by mastering processes, developing specialized talent, and earning the trust of global clients one contract at a time.
Now, the Filipino-owned knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) company is attempting something far more ambitious. It wants to turn artificial intelligence from a disruptive force into its next growth engine and become what Chief Executive Officer Julian Valenzuela describes as the Philippines’ first “frontier firm.”
The goal marks a major shift for a company that has grown from an outbound sales provider into a specialized KPO player serving healthcare, customer experience, and finance and accounting markets.
“We’ve done a good job of making a name for ourselves. We were able to grow Visaya to be a local, mid-sized player. However, I think we’ve plateaued as a mid-sized player,” Valenzuela said.
That realization gave birth to Visaya 3.0, a strategy designed to weave AI into the company’s operations while helping clients navigate their own digital transformation.
Rather than replacing outsourcing with automation, Valenzuela sees AI as a tool that can deepen relationships with customers that have stayed with Visaya for years. The company’s average client engagement lasts seven to eight years, with its longest partnership reaching 14 years.
The next opportunity, he said, is moving from being a process executor to becoming an AI transformation partner.
“We’re trying to transform ourselves to become a service provider for our clientele, to actually implement AI for them and help them through their AI journey,” Valenzuela said.
Visaya is already deploying AI solutions with three clients and expects adoption to eventually reach 80 percent to 90 percent of its customer base. The company believes its advantage lies not simply in technology, but in understanding the businesses behind the data.
“AI cannot do 100 percent of the work. There still needs to be a human in the loop,” Valenzuela said.
That human element remains central to Visaya’s strategy. Its workforce includes certified nurses, accountants, and customer experience specialists whose expertise provides context that artificial intelligence alone cannot replicate.
The company’s transformation rests on three pillars, technology, processes, and people. Internally, AI is being introduced into recruitment, employee support, IT operations, and workflow redesign, challenging processes built over nearly 20 years.
“We have to retool what we’ve been doing for the last 19 years and ask if there’s a faster, more efficient way of doing things,” Valenzuela said.
The company is also preparing its workforce for the AI era through broad upskilling initiatives, supported by an in-house engineering team with specialists who previously worked with Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, and AWS.
Valenzuela emphasized that the strategy is about expansion, not workforce reduction.
“The goal here is not to let go of people. This will help us grow to the next level,” he said.
Today, Visaya has about 800 employees and enough capacity to grow to 1,200 seats after recent investments in its Bacolod facility and expansion of its Hanston site. The immediate target is reaching 1,500 employees, a level considered by the Contact Center Association of the Philippines as the threshold for a large enterprise.
For Visaya, the AI race is not just about adopting new tools. It is about proving that a Filipino company can scale globally, build advanced capabilities, and remain locally owned while competing in the next generation of outsourcing.
