Krisp sees South Africa shaping the future of global customer experience

November 9, 2026

It’s an exciting week for the Global Business Services (GBS) and business process outsourcing (BPO) sector as the BPESA GBS | BPO Conference & Alchemy Awards 2026 gets under way in Cape Town. Hosted by Business Process Enabling South Africa (BPESA) at the Cape Town International Convention Centre on 10 and 11 November under the theme ‘Thrive’, the conference brings together industry leaders, global investors and stakeholders around collaboration, growth and South Africa’s global competitiveness.

The sector’s momentum is clear from its 2025 results:

• The GBS and BPO sector created over 26,346 new international jobs.
• It generated over $422 million (R7.55 billion) in export revenue.
• Youth jobs accounted for approximately 90% of new hires.

Supporting the conference for the second consecutive year, this time as platinum sponsor, is Krisp, a pioneering global AI voice technology company that is helping contact centres improve customer conversations across accents, languages and environments.

Krisp sees South Africa as one of the most important markets shaping the future of global customer experience (CX). The region combines incredible talent, service quality and growing AI adoption, creating an opportunity to expand into more complex, multilingual and technology-enabled work. BPESA plays a central role in bringing the industry together around that opportunity and in strengthening South Africa’s position as a global delivery destination.

Harry Folloder, Chief Commercial Officer at Krisp said: “South Africa is one of the most exciting CX markets in the world right now, and BPESA brings together the operators, leaders and technology partners shaping where it goes next. We want to be part of the conversation around how the region grows, how AI changes what’s possible, and how South African talent can compete for an even broader range of global work. Our partnership is about supporting an ecosystem with significant opportunity ahead.”

Folloder added that when South African teams use Krisp’s technology, they can serve more customers across accents, languages and markets. The opportunity, he said, is no longer just to bring more work to the country, but to expand the kind of work South Africa can win. “The region has the talent, infrastructure and delivery expertise. AI can remove more of the barriers to putting that talent to work globally, and we’re already seeing that happen with BPOs here today.”

Krisp enhances communication clarity in real time by improving comprehension across accents, translating speech across over 60 languages, and removing background noise and voices, making it an essential tool for high-performance contact centres globally. It builds real-time Voice AI models for meetings, contact centres, and developers. Its solutions include bidirectional accent conversion, live speech-to-speech translation, agent assist, voice security and speech analytics, all built on patented, award-winning noise cancellation models.

The latest of these awards include two Webby Awards for Technical Achievement and CMP Research's Disruptive Technology of the Year, and Krisp was recognised as a leader in AI Trustworthiness by Cybernews. The company has also enjoyed recognition from Forbes, TIME, Gartner, and Fast Company.

Krisp is setting the standard for real-time Voice AI in global customer contact. Its patented, enterprise-grade technology delivers tangible, high-impact results for 2,500 of the world’s leading enterprises, and it is trusted as the benchmark for real-time voice performance. Today, Krisp is deployed on over 200 million devices and processes over 80 billion minutes of voice conversations every month.

Its applications are also privacy-first, using industry-standard security practices across all audio hardware configurations and applications that support digital voice communication. For South Africa’s BPO sector, that scale and reliability show what is possible as AI adoption grows.

“South Africa has already proven it can compete with the world’s best CX delivery markets. Voice AI expands the size of that opportunity,” Folloder concluded.