Tele-operation of robots allows physical labor to be offshored | Image: Eduardo Luzzatti for Rest of World
Monday, October 20, 2025
by Michael Beltran/Rest of World
Inside a multistory office building in Manila’s financial district, around 60 young men and women monitored and controlled artificial intelligence robots restocking convenience store shelves in distant Japan.
Occasionally, when a bot dropped a can, someone would don a virtual-reality headset and use joysticks to help recover it.
The AI robots are designed by Tokyo-based startup Telexistence, and run on Nvidia and Microsoft platforms. Since 2022, the company has deployed the machines in the back rooms of over 300 FamilyMart and Lawson stores in Tokyo. It is also planning to use them soon in 7-Elevens.
The bots are remotely monitored 24/7 in Manila by the employees of Astro Robotics, a robot-workforce startup. Japan faces a worker shortage as its population ages, and the country has been cautious about expanding immigration. Telexistence’s bots offer a workaround, allowing physical labor to be offshored, Juan Paolo Villonco, Astro Robotics’ founder, told Rest of World. This lowers costs for companies and increases their scale of operations, he said.
“It’s hard to find workers to do stacking [in Japan],” said Villonco. “If you get one who’s willing to do it, it’s going to be very expensive. The minimum wage is quite expensive.”
It’s easy to get young, tech-savvy Filipinos to operate the robots, he said. Each tele-operator, called a “pilot,” monitors around 50 robots at a time, an employee told Rest of World. Most workers in this article requested anonymity to safeguard their jobs.
The bots are usually autonomous, but occasionally — about 4% of the time — they mess up. Perhaps they drop a bottle, which rolls away. Getting the AI bot to recover it by mimicking the human grip perfectly — the friction, the feel of metal in the hand — is one of the more challenging problems in robotics. That’s when a pilot steps in.
Astro Robotics’ tele-operators are benefiting from an AI- and automation-related boom in IT-service work and tech jobs in the Philippines, even as layoffs hit similar workers in richer countries. Filipino tech workers maneuver industrial robots, drive autonomous vehicles, collaborate with AI on various tasks, or help build “AI agents,” which are computer programs that enable autonomous action.
But even as the workers collaborate with the machines, making them better, they may also be automating themselves out of a job.
The Philippines, a global outsourcing hub, has seen steady hiring for automation and AI-related roles by international firms, Jose Mari Lanuza, head researcher at Sigla Research Center, a tech think tank in Manila, told Rest of World.
“IT firms are in a race to the bottom looking for cheap … labor,” he said.
These roles require more technical skills than content moderation or large language model training — the kinds of AI jobs typically associated with developing countries.
But these workers, too, face familiar trade-offs: They are often employed as contractors and paid less than their counterparts in developed nations. Some of these roles could destroy people’s self-worth even more than losing jobs to automation or AI, Lionel Robert, a professor of robotics at the University of Michigan, told Rest of World.
“Now, they went from losing their job to the machine, to basically becoming the watcher of the machine doing the work. You’re like the [substitute] for the robot,” he said.
They mostly work for companies based outside the Philippines, Rowel Atienza, a professor of machine learning at the University of the Philippines, told Rest of World. A third of his students are employed by foreign firms, including ones based in the U.S., he said.
Automation is accelerating globally, with the market for AI agents expected to grow eightfold to $43 billion by 2030, according to market research firm MarkNtel Advisors. The industrial robot market is expected to almost double.
The combination of automation and offshoring is a “game changer” for the U.S., Robert said. Automation was expected to reduce the number of jobs locally but raise the demand for skilled workers who would receive higher pay. “But by offshoring those jobs, you have a double whammy in an economic sense,” he said.
Developing AI agent systems in the U.S. can cost anywhere from $10,000 for a basic chatbot to $300,000 for an enterprise-level autonomous system, Robert said. Costs would be much lower in the Philippines, where contractors usually do not receive health care or retirement benefits, he said.
At Astro Robotics, engineering and computer science graduates supervise the robots, which use an AI model to fill shelves by computing the distance between each item. Each tele-operator earns between $250 and $315 per month, roughly the same as a call center agent, an employee told Rest of World.
Their job is to monitor the robot and prepare reports about its performance. In the rare cases when the bot makes a mistake, they strap on a VR headset and use joysticks to manually control grasp and place the drink back on the shelf, the worker said.
Tele-operators in such roles face immense pressure to resolve errors quickly, said Robert. “The minute one thing stops, your job is to get that back online and hope that while you’re doing that, something else doesn’t go wrong at the same time,” he said.
The worker said they often feel dizzy and cross-eyed from cybersickness, a type of motion sickness associated with VR. Its occurrence is related to how much they use the headset: In a typical eight-hour shift, they take over the robot about 50 times, and it takes up to five minutes each time to resolve the error.
“It can be really tough. Imagine teleporting, the sudden disconnect from your surroundings, elevation — everything can cause accidents,” said Atienza, who has studied the nausea and disorientation resulting from cybersickness.
The tele-operators’ movements are helping train fully autonomous robots for Telexistence. Over the years, the company has gathered “a large amount of unique ‘embodied’ teleoperation data and know-how” from its human workers, according to a press release in June. The company is providing this information to San Francisco-based startup Physical Intelligence to help develop foundation AI models aimed at giving robots human-like “physical intelligence” — the ability to perform basic physical tasks, such as grasping or manipulating objects.
“This partnership intends to shift these manual teleoperation tasks to fully autonomous operations,” the release said.
Telexistence did not respond to Rest of World’s requests for comment.
Robert said full automation may never be achieved, and some humans would always be needed to monitor automated systems. “Are robots and AI gonna take all the jobs from humans? The answer is no — because humans are pretty useful. The future is a robotic-AI-automation-human hybrid workforce,” he said.
Some 1,000 global employers surveyed by the World Economic Forum this year said they expect the share of human-only jobs to decline rapidly, replaced by jobs done together with — or solely by — machines. About 41% of them also said they anticipate job cuts as workers’ skills become obsolete.
That hybrid future is already visible in the Philippines. Aside from IT-service work, Filipino IT engineers are helping build the AI systems transforming how people work globally.
A young AI engineer for an international firm, which manages data for Amazon, Coca-Cola, and other global corporations, said he is helping build an AI chatbot using an LLM trained on internal data. The bot would respond to employee questions.
“The goal is to speed up internal processes,” he said.
International firms are actively seeking IT workers like him, who receive a “Philippine rate,” the employee said. “It’s not so low-ball; it’s still pretty competitive. It’s bigger if you go there [to the headquarters], but then … your monthly expenses [there] can get really expensive.”
An engineering graduate working in IT services for a top U.S.-based international consulting firm said they helped develop an IT help desk agent, which has drastically cut their workload.
“Lately, we just handle around six tasks a day,” they told Rest of World. “Every time I’m called into a meeting, I’m afraid of being told I’m not needed anymore.” Hired through an outsourcing company, they work remotely and are paid $874 per month — about 30% less than the American minimum wage for full-time work.
Filipinos are being used to maximize the profits of international firms, Xian Guevarra, secretary-general of the Computer Professionals Union, which represents computer engineers in the Philippines, told Rest of World.
“Filipinos are building the tools that could be used to replace them later on. Tech should augment their work and efficiency, not [be] something to maximize profits overseas,” he said.
Filipino workers are eager to work for foreign companies because they pay better than local firms. Marc Escobar, chief technology officer of Philippines-based startup Sofi AI, was offered a job as an AI engineer for Anthropic, the California-based startup behind Claude.
He was offered $1,500 a month — high pay for a 22-year-old fresh out of university. But Escobar turned it down. Though Sofi AI pays about half as much, his company believes in creating opportunities for engineers locally, he said.
“I can’t do it [join a foreign company] because I want to see our local efforts, our company, succeed,” Escobar said. “I want to show that we can also upscale with AI in the Philippines.”
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