Ep. 307: Is Artificial Intelligence Good Or Bad For Your OFS?
24 Nov 2025 · 4 min
John Jonas examines whether AI helps or hurts Online Filipino Specialists. AI boosts skilled workers' efficiency and output, but applicants using ChatGPT to fake their way through interviews then fail at actual work. The difference: augmenting real skills versus substituting for them.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with online Filipino specialists. This is episode 307, is AI good or bad for your OFS? Okay, so before we get into this, talk about AI, which is so hot right now, I hear about it all the time from people. People want to know, is it going to replace their. Their ofs? Is it going to replace their va? Let me just preface this by saying I. I understand how good ChatGPT is. I. I know what it does. I've used it. I've seen it. I get it. I understand that it can create good summaries and it can write code, but. But it still doesn't think it's AI chatgpt. It still doesn't think. It pretends, but it doesn't think now it's coming. It's just gonna get better. It's gonna do a lot of things in the future, but it's so much better with a human operator behind it. So let's. Let me just talk about this for a minute. AI with your OFS can be good or bad for you and for your business. It can be good if it makes your OFS more efficient, if it makes them more creative, if it helps them to do their job that they're already doing well, better. My team has used AI to generate ideas for when they have to create content, or they use AI to improve their grammar, which is already really good. AI can be bad, though, if you're trying to use it with someone who doesn't know what they're doing. If you're trying to replace something that isn't there, it's just not gonna work. So enhancing someone who's already really good, great. Replacing something that isn't there, not very good. Here's what one of our customers said to me recently about it. Tatiana. She says, and she's talking about an interview process that she had with two different potential employees. I know ChatGPT was used because they, my VAs, both told me. The EA who used it for her interview told me she used it. I thought it was a fantastic idea, but she wasn't able to use it to effectively complete her work. I tried to help her by paying for the premium version of Grammarly, but that still did not work, so we had to move on. The other guy unintentionally admitted to using it for the interview. Q and A. Again, I don't see it as an issue to enhance what's already there. It is a problem, though, if it's Used to supplement what is not there. That's what type of Tatiana says, which is basically my take on this too. Now, just so you know, her position was for someone to use ChatGPT for things in her business, so they were already expecting to be using it. So they use it in the interview process. She was expecting. That came down to them actually doing the. Doing the work in the business. It wasn't working out super well, and I'm going to guess that some of that is just that the interview process wasn't done super well. And I had a conversation with Tatiana about this and it wasn't. It wasn't great. So. So again, this comes back to if an OFS is talented, yeah, AI can improve their work, it can increase their efficiency, it can make things better. But for someone who's untrained and doesn't know what they're doing, if it's not going to replace something that isn't there already. So is it going to get better over time? Yes. Is this going to change and evolve over time? For sure. But to me, AI is best used when there's a human operator behind it because it's. It still doesn't think it's just a prediction algorithm predicting what should be done next. It's not always right. And in fact, every time I use it, it's like, oh, yeah, that was really cool, but I don't want my customers to see this. Like, I wouldn't replace an OFS with this because this is obnoxious. Even though it's really cool and it could be really good, it's not for me. It hasn't quite been there yet. Maybe it'll get.
