Hedge funds are betting against the shares and debt of outsourcing companies providing call centres, telemarketing and other services, in the belief they will be decimated by the rapid growth of AI.
Stocks including Paris-listed Teleperformance, the world’s largest customer service company, and Nasdaq-listed TTEC Holdings are among those targeted by short sellers, as investors look beyond big software names for firms whose products could be under threat.
Call centre and other so-called customer experience companies are “a very, very clean AI disruption case”, said Kasper Elmgreen, chief investment officer for fixed income and equities at Nordea Asset Management. “Essentially you have a service which is just selling human time to handle repetitive tasks.”