Cebu City’s AI automation agency.

Cebu City is the capital of Cebu province, the principal city of Metro Cebu, and the oldest city in the Philippines, widely known as the Queen City of the South. The city proper held about 965,332 people in the 2024 census, and the wider Metro Cebu area reached roughly 3,164,337, the second largest metropolitan area in the country after Metro Manila. Cebu City produced a gross domestic product of about ₱334.48 billion (around USD 5.78 billion) in 2024, and the province contributes close to ₱388.11 billion, about 1.9 percent, to national GDP. Central Visayas was the fastest-growing of the country 18 regions in 2024, expanding 7.3 percent to about ₱1.28 trillion in output.

Cebu is the country second-largest IT-BPM and shared-services destination after Metro Manila. Cebu IT Park, a 24-hectare district in Lahug, hosts more than 100 companies and accounts for over 70 percent of the city BPO sector, with employment in the park growing from about 5,000 jobs in 2005 to more than 55,000 workers by 2023. Accenture, IBM, Concentrix, Teleperformance, JPMorgan Chase, Cognizant, and Qualfon run delivery centres alongside homegrown firms such as AZPIRED and Innovature. Services contributed 70.1 percent of regional output in 2024, with the rebound in tourism, healthcare, and business services anchoring the growth.

The rest of the economy is just as distinctive. Cebu is the gateway to the Visayas beaches, islands, and resorts: Mactan-Cebu International Airport handled 11.32 million passengers in 2024, up 13 percent, including 2.81 million international travellers. The Port of Cebu is the country second-largest seaport, moving 75.873 million metric tons of cargo and 993,756 container TEUs in 2025. Cebu is also the Philippines furniture-export capital, where Cebu Furniture Industries Foundation members ship rattan, wood, and design-led pieces to retailers such as Crate and Barrel, Williams-Sonoma, and Restoration Hardware, while the Mactan Economic Zone in Lapu-Lapu City hosts more than 200 PEZA locators in electronics and precision manufacturing, including Lexmark, NEC, Teradyne, and Epson.

A multilingual, English-proficient workforce, fed by the University of San Carlos, Cebu Institute of Technology-University, Cebu Technological University, and the University of Cebu, gives Cebu the talent to adopt quickly. Cebu firms automating offshore customer support, finance and accounting back offices, export and customs documentation, multilingual guest and booking operations, and high-volume reconciliation are pulling ahead of peers still doing the work by hand. With the Data Privacy Act enforced by the National Privacy Commission and BSP oversight tightening for finance and payments, the organisations that build governed, auditable AI now will be the ones ready as the rules harden.