The conversation shouldn’t be about keeping jobs in or out of America. It should be about building the most competitive, customer-focused service model possible.
A year ago, a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers introduced the Keep Call Centers in America Act.
What exactly is this Act?
Essentially, it is a bill designed to discourage companies from moving call center operations offshore.
It proposed stricter reporting requirements and restricted access to federal grants and loans. Additionally, this Act compiled a public list of companies sending jobs overseas.
Supporters framed it as a defense of American workers. And furthermore, the proposed solution was an implicit push toward AI-first customer service as the alternative.
Where is this bill 12 months later?
The bill remains exactly where it started: referred to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, with no further action.
That stall is worth paying attention to.
Because the closer you look at the global customer service landscape in 2026, the more complex - and counterproductive - the bill’s core assumptions become.
Onshore call centers in the USA come with significantly higher operating costs.
The primary culprits?
Wages, compliance overhead, and real estate.
Industry benchmarks consistently show that U.S. customer service agents earn three to five times more than their offshore counterparts.
Those costs don't disappear.
They just get passed on.
In an environment where businesses and consumers alike are managing sustained cost pressure, raising the price of customer service is not a neutral decision.
Offshoring has long provided a proven way to deliver quality service at scale - without raising prices or cutting hours.
Mandate an end to it?
Now companies face three difficult choices:
-Reduce availability
-Automate aggressively
-Pass higher costs downstream
None of those outcomes benefit the business - and much less, the customer.
U.S. operations come with wages, compliance, and real estate costs 3–5x higher.
AI can deflect 41.2% of queries on average—humans are still essential.
Offshore markets offer deep, skilled, and multilingual talent ecosystems at scale.
Offshore hubs lead in AI, CX platforms, and digital-first service innovation.
Scalability, coverage, specialization, and innovation fuel better CX and business growth.
Companies grow. Customers get better service. Agents build careers.
Supporters of the Act often position AI as the logical, domestic replacement for offshore labor.
Okay, yes - conversational AI has made real strides.
Chatbots can handle routing, standard queries, and high-volume tier-one deflection at scale.
No one is arguing with this.
But when you really look at it, the numbers tell a fuller story.
According to Zendesk's CX Trends 2026 report, the median AI deflection rate across enterprise customer service programs sits at 41.2%.That means more than half of all customer interactions still require a human being.
Billing disputes, compliance-sensitive conversations, emotionally charged moments: these require empathy, adaptability, and judgement that no algorithm reliably replicates at scale.
Let’s look at the other side for a second.
Forrester's 2026 analysis predicts that AI could displace up to half of all customer service roles by 2030 - but that's a four-year projection, not a present-day solution.
The businesses treating AI as a ready replacement for human agents aren't just cutting costs.
They're taking a measurable risk with customer trust.
The moral of the story?
AI is a powerful amplifier. It is not yet a replacement for the human connection that defines great customer service.
Looking beyond cost, offshoring solves something practical and often overlooked:
Access to people.
The U.S. labor market has faced persistent shortages in customer service.
High turnover and genuine difficulty attracting workers to high-volume entry-level roles have made staffing onshore centers incredibly challenging, and it is not expected to be resolved soon.
Meanwhile, offshore and nearshore regions - Colombia, the Philippines, South Africa, India, Kenya, and across Latin America — have built something more than a labor pool.
They've built ecosystems:
Mature, multilingual, domain-specialized workforces with years of expertise across healthcare, financial services, e-commerce, and technology.
These aren't backup options.
They are very real talent hubs.
And the flexibility they enable, from part-time to project-based staffing models, allows businesses to scale rapidly during peak demand without carrying the cost of idle staff in quieter periods.
Cutting off access to these markets doesn't protect American jobs.
It limits American companies.
There's a less-discussed cost to geographic restriction:
Falling behind.
Much of the most compelling innovation in customer experience platforms, AI tooling, and digital-first service design is happening offshore.
India and the Philippines aren't only service providers - they're accelerators.
Nearshore hubs across Latin America are increasingly running digital-first, AI-augmented operations that are reshaping what great CX looks like.
By retreating from offshore participation, U.S. businesses risk being excluded from those innovation pipelines at exactly the moment they need them most.
Customer service is also no longer a domestic transaction.
Customers are global - particularly in travel, e-commerce, and technology.
Teams with multilingual capability, cultural range, and international context don't just serve those customers adequately.
They understand them.
The persistent misconception about offshoring is that it's purely a cost-cutting exercise.
It isn't.
It's a strategy for resilience, scalability, and competitive range.
Scalability
The ability to ramp up or down without structural disruption.
Coverage
24/7 service without stretching a single domestic team to burnout.
Specialization
Niche expertise developed over years, from healthcare compliance to technical support.
Innovation
Global best practices feeding back into U.S. operations, not away from them.
Offshore centers are not a threat to U.S. competitiveness. They are an extension of its potential.
The Keep Call Centers in America Act may be well-intentioned, but it oversimplifies the reality of a global industry.
The future of customer service won't be decided by an onshore-vs-offshore debate, or by AI-vs-human arguments.
It will be built on the smart integration of all of the above.
The businesses that win the next decade of customer operations will be the ones that blend:
Onshore leadership.
Offshore depth.
AI efficiency.
At Resolv, this is exactly what we build.
Our model operates across Mexico, Colombia, Kenya, Albania, Egypt, South Africa, Uzbekistan, India, the Philippines, and North America - not about cost, because we are looking for the best talent, the right coverage, and genuine innovation.
And over decades of experience among our leadership team, we know that these factors aren't confined to one geography.
The future of customer operations is global, distributed, and AI-augmented.
The market already knows, and policy will catch up.
