Appropriating intelligence: capital accumulation through cognitive dispossession

The business process outsourcing (BPO) industry in the Philippines accounts for 40% of the global customer experience workforce where jobs are now rapidly being transformed by the integration of generative AI (GenAI) tools. Therefore, the Philippine BPO sector offers a strategic window into how GenAI is not only reorganizing tasks but also redistributing value and power in workplaces that are linked to global value chains. Based on qualitative interviews with knowledge workers in Philippine-based BPO firms, this article shows how workers’ tacit knowledge is systematically captured and codified in AI systems, how cognitive work becomes reorganized around algorithmic rules, how AI-augmented labour is commodified, and how collective forms of intelligence are enclosed within proprietary systems in ways that reinforce existing global hierarchies and inequality. The central thesis of this article is that these interrelated processes constitute a new modality of capital accumulation through cognitive dispossession on a world scale.