Teleperformance Stock Drops 15% as AI Cuts Into Call Center Work
Teleperformance, a French company that runs call centers and online content moderation for other businesses, saw its stock price drop more than 15% on November 6. The drop came after the company said artificial intelligence, or AI, is taking away work it used to do for clients.
Teleperformance put out its earnings report on November 5. In it, the company said it now expects its revenue to fall between 1.5% and 2.5% in 2026. Before this, the company had expected its revenue to either stay flat or grow by up to 2%. At one point during the day, the stock fell by as much as 21.3% before it bounced back some.
What This Means For You
If you're new to this topic, here is the simple version. Teleperformance is a company that other big businesses hire to handle things like customer service calls and checking posts on websites for bad content. This is called "content moderation." It means workers look at posts, photos, or videos and decide if they break the rules.
Now, AI tools can do a lot of that checking work automatically. That means companies need fewer human workers for these jobs. When that happens, it can hurt the stock price of companies that depend on providing those workers, like Teleperformance.
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Why Teleperformance Is Struggling
Teleperformance brought in €2.532 billion in revenue for the third quarter. That is up 1% from last year on paper, but down 1.2% once you adjust for currency changes and other factors.
The biggest problem is in the company's Trust & Safety division. This is the part of the business that handles content moderation for big tech platforms. The company's CEO, Jorge Amar, said big tech clients are now using AI tools to handle basic moderation work instead of hiring people.
On top of that, some clients are moving their work to countries where labor is cheaper. This is easier to do now because real-time translation tools have gotten better. Together, these two problems led the company to lower its expectations for 2026.
Interestingly, when you take out the Trust & Safety division, the rest of Teleperformance's business actually grew by 2%. This shows the trouble is mostly in one part of the company, not spread evenly across everything it does.
How Teleperformance Is Trying to Adapt
Teleperformance is not just sitting still. The company said it had about 1,400 AI projects running by the end of September. That is more than double what it had a year earlier.
Despite the bad news, the company kept some of its other financial targets the same. It still expects its profit margin to stay near 14.6%. It also still expects to bring in between €800 million and €850 million in free cash flow, which is the extra cash a company has left after paying its bills.
However, the cost of restructuring, meaning the cost of reorganizing the business, is expected to land near the high end of its earlier estimate. That range was between €120 million and €140 million.
What's Happening Elsewhere
Teleperformance is not alone in facing these changes. Other companies are also adjusting how they use workers as AI tools improve.
- HubSpot announced 660 job cuts as it shifts its products to focus more on AI-driven results for customers.
- Barclays disclosed plans to cut 5,000 positions, with technology and support jobs among those affected.
- Amazon has also made recent workforce cuts while continuing to invest heavily in AI technology.
Not every job cut at these companies can be directly blamed on AI. But together, these moves show that many businesses are rethinking how much they rely on human workers.
It's also worth noting that AI does not always replace people completely. Some companies have found that AI alone cannot always handle customer service or hard decisions well, and have had to bring human workers back.
If you want to follow how AI keeps changing jobs and companies like Teleperformance, keep checking back for simple, clear updates on what's happening and what it means for you.
Blog posts about AI’s impact on jobs often pair headlines like this with an ai image for posts that visualizes the shift from human call center agents to automated systems.
Much like post content automation tools are reshaping marketing workflows, AI-driven chatbots and voice agents are now handling routine customer inquiries that once required large human call center teams.
Source: Coinpaper
