Artificial intelligence has already begun to take away revenue Sri Lanka earns from business process outsourcing, Opposition MP Ravi Karunanayake has said, warning that the technology will affect the economy in ways that are difficult to anticipate.
“The emergence of AI has already made one company engage in providing business process outsourcing service to reduce salaries for its employees,” he said.
Business process outsourcing has been one of Sri Lanka’s more resilient services exports, built on English-language capability and comparatively low labour costs — the same cost advantage that automation tends to compress first.
Karunanayake also pointed to demographics as a second structural pressure. He said the decline in Sri Lanka’s birth rate, now below one per cent, will expand the ageing population and bring social and economic consequences with it.
“Sri Lanka will have to face certain social and economic issues with the increase of the aging population,” he said.
On energy, the MP said Sri Lanka should focus on security of supply given hostilities in the Middle East, and argued that currency stability is the lever that determines how manageable higher oil prices become.
“Sri Lanka should focus on making the rupee stable so that the increase of oil prices will be manageable with a stable local currency,” he said.
He also urged attention to power generation capacity, saying demand for renewable energy could rise sharply later this year and into next year with the El Niño phenomenon expected to affect Sri Lanka.
“Sri Lanka should focus on renewable energy in that scenario,” he said.
