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| en:ecrit:articles-en [2025/09/15 12:30] – [AI shakes up the call center industry, but some tasks are still better left to the humans] natasha | en:ecrit:articles-en [2026/01/27 15:51] (current) – [English articles] natasha |
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| It's useful to read articles in English, even if you don't understand every word - it will help you increase your vocabulary and keep up to date with things happening in English-speaking countries! | It's useful to read articles in English, even if you don't understand every word - it will help you increase your vocabulary and keep up to date with things happening in English-speaking countries! |
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| //This page will be updated on **Mondays**. The first article is aimed at a B1 and upwards level and the second article is aimed at a B2 and upwards level // | //This page will ** not longer be updated**. We are working onf inding a solution. In the meantime time, you can use the archive to access older articles. The first article is aimed at a B1 and upwards level and the second article is aimed at a B2 and upwards level // |
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| ===== US electric grids under pressure from energy-hungry data centers are changing strategy ===== | ===== King Charles III leads Britain's Remembrance Sunday ceremony for war dead ===== |
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| By MARC LEVY Associated Press | By JILL LAWLESS Associated Press |
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| HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — With the explosive growth of Big Tech's data centers threatening to overload U.S. electricity grids, policymakers are taking a hard look at a tough-love solution: bumping the energy-hungry data centers off grids during power emergencies. | LONDON (AP) — King Charles III led Britain's annual ceremony of remembrance for the country's war dead on Sunday, under November sunshine and the shadow cast across Europe by the almost 4-year-old war in Ukraine. |
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| Texas moved first, as state lawmakers try to protect residents in the data-center hotspot from another deadly blackout, like the winter storm in 2021 when dozens died. | As Parliament's Big Ben bell tolled 11 a.m., thousands of military personnel, veterans and members of the public gathered in central London fell still for two minutes of silence, broken by a single artillery blast and Royal Marines buglers sounding "The Last Post." |
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| Now the concept is emerging in the 13-state mid-Atlantic grid and elsewhere as massive data centers are coming online faster than power plants can be built and connected to grids. That has elicited pushback from data centers and Big Tech, for whom a steady power supply is vital. | The 76-year-old king, dressed in the uniform of an army field marshal, laid a wreath of red paper poppies on a black background at the base of the Cenotaph war memorial. Erected over a century ago to honor the British and allied troops killed in World War I, it has become the focus of annual ceremonies for members of military and civilian services killed in that war and subsequent conflicts. |
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| Like many other states, Texas wants to attract data centers as an economic boon, but it faces the challenge of meeting the huge volumes of electricity the centers demand. Lawmakers there passed a bill in June that, among other things, orders up standards for power emergencies when utilities must disconnect big electric users. | The national ceremony of remembrance is held every year on the nearest Sunday to the anniversary of the end of World War I on Nov. 11, 1918, at 11 a.m. Similar memorial services are held in dozens of towns and cities across Britain and at U.K. military bases overseas. |
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| That, in theory, would save enough electricity to avoid a broad blackout on the handful of days during the year when it is hottest or coldest and power consumption pushes grids to their limits or beyond. | A military band played as heir to the throne Prince William followed his father in laying a wreath on the simple Portland stone monument inscribed with the words "the glorious dead." |
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| Texas was first, but it won't be the last, analysts say, now that the late 2022 debut of OpenAI's ChatGPT ignited worldwide demand for chatbots and other generative AI products that typically require large amounts of computing power to train and operate. | Wreaths were also laid by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, other political leaders and diplomats from across the Commonwealth of Britain's former colonies. |
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| "We're going to see that kind of thing pop up everywhere," said Michael Webber, a University of Texas engineering professor who specializes in energy. "Data center flexibility will be expected, required, encouraged, mandated, whatever it is." | Queen Camilla, the Princess of Wales and other members of the royal family watched from their traditional place on a balcony of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. |
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| **Data centers are threatening grids** | Many of the wreaths were made of poppies, and most people in attendance wore paper poppies on their lapels. The scarlet flowers that bloomed on the muddy battlefields and makeshift graveyards of northern France and Belgium during World War I — made famous by the poem "In Flanders Fields" — have become a symbol of remembrance in Britain and other countries. |
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| That's because grids can't keep up with the fast-growing number of data center projects unfolding in Texas and perhaps 20 other states as the U.S. competes in a race against China for artificial intelligence superiority. | Like many other NATO members, Britain has increased its defense spending since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Britain says it will spend 3.5% of GDP on defense by 2035. |
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| Grid operators in Texas, the Great Plains states and the mid-Atlantic region have produced eye-popping projections showing that electricity demand in the coming years will spike, largely due to data centers. | After the wreath-laying, some 10,000 military veterans with gleaming medals marched past the Cenotaph, accompanied by jaunty military music and applauded by well-wishers lining the sidewalks. Among them, in wheelchairs, were about 20 of the dwindling band of WWII veterans, the youngest of them 98 years old. |
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| A proposal similar to Texas' has emerged from the nation's biggest grid operator, PJM Interconnection, which runs the mid-Atlantic grid that serves 65 million people and data-center hotspots in Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania. | Donald Poole, 101, who served in as a Royal Army Ordnance Corps explosives handler in the conflict that ended 80 years ago, said it was "a great honor to be able to pay tribute to the poor souls who have died in all conflicts. |
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| The CEO of the Southwest Power Pool, which operates the grid that serves 18 million people primarily in Kansas, Oklahoma and other Great Plains states, said it has no choice but to expand power-reduction programs — likely for the biggest power users — to meet growing demand. | "I know how lucky I am to still be here thanks to all those who have fought and served, past and present," he said. "I also want to pay tribute to the civilian services who suffered during the Second World War, particularly the fire service, who saved so many lives during the Blitz — many of whom lost their own." |
| | ===== With pharaoh-like fanfare, Egypt unveils a huge new museum dedicated to its ancient civilization ===== |
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| The proposals are cropping up at a time when electricity bills nationally are rising fast — twice the rate of inflation, according to federal data — and growing evidence suggests that the bills of some regular Americans are rising to subsidize the gargantuan energy needs of Big Tech. | ---- |
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| Analysts say power plant construction cannot keep up with the growth of data center demand, and that something must change. | {{:en:ecrit:ap25302660101503.jpg?300 |}} |
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| "Data center load has the potential to overwhelm the grid, and I think it is on its way to doing that," said Joe Bowring, who heads Monitoring Analytics, the independent market watchdog in the mid-Atlantic grid. | By SAMY MAGDY Associated Press |
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| **Data centers might have to adjust** | CAIRO (AP) — In an extravaganza of pharaonic imagery with a drone light show depicting ancient gods and pyramids in the sky, Egypt on Saturday inaugurated its long-delayed Grand Egyptian Museum, a megaproject aiming to give the country's millennia-old heritage a rich, modern display. |
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| Big Tech is trying to make their data centers more energy efficient. They are also installing backup generators, typically fueled by diesel, to ensure an uninterrupted power supply if there's a power outage. | Two decades in the making, the museum located near the Giza Pyramids and the Sphinx is the centerpiece of the government's bid to boost Egypt's tourism industry and bring cash into the troubled economy. |
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| Data center operators, however, say they hadn't anticipated needing that backup power supply to help grid operators meet demand and are closely watching how utility regulators in Texas write the regulations. | At the elaborate grand opening ceremony, attended by a number of European and Arab royals and other presidents and prime ministers, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi sought to give the event an international scale. |
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| The Data Center Coalition, which represents Big Tech companies and data center developers, wants the standards to be flexible, since some data centers may not be able to switch to backup power as easily or as quickly as others. | He called on attendees to "make this museum a platform for dialogue, a destination for knowledge, a forum for humanity, and a beacon for all who love life and believe in the value of humankind." |
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| The grid operator also should balance that system with financial rewards for data centers that voluntarily shut down during emergencies, said Dan Diorio of the Data Center Coalition. | **A bid to join the ranks of the world's top museums** |
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| **Nation's largest grid operator has a proposal** | The museum, known as GEM, is one of several megaprojects championed by el-Sissi since he took office in 2014, embarking on massive investments in infrastructure with the aim of reviving an economy weakened by decades of stagnation and battered by the unrest that followed the 2011 Arab Spring uprising. |
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| PJM's just-released proposal revolves around a concept in which proposed data centers may not be guaranteed to receive electricity during a power emergency. | Egypt's pharaonic history has long made it a tourist magnet. But it has also long struggled to organize and display the sheer huge amount of artifacts — everything from tiny pieces of jewelry and colorful tomb murals to towering statues of pharaohs and animal-headed gods, with more as discoveries are constantly being made across the country. |
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| That's caused a stir among power plant owners and the tech industry. | Touted as the world's biggest museum dedicated to a single ancient civilization, the new building, in contemporary style is a stark contrast. Its large, open halls give space for some 50,000 artifacts on display, along with virtual reality exhibits. It displays the entire collection of treasures from the tomb of the famed King Tutankhamun for the first time since its discovery in 1922. |
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| Many questioned PJM's legal authority to enforce it or warned of destabilizing energy markets and states scaring off investors and developers with uncertainty and risk. | The museum replaces the Egyptian Museum, housed in building more than a century old in downtown Cairo that — while elegant in its Neo-Classical style — had become antiquated and was often compared to a warehouse, overpacked with artifacts with little explanation. |
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| "This is particularly concerning given that states within PJM's footprint actively compete with other U.S. regions for data center and digital infrastructure investment," the Digital Power Network, a group of Bitcoin miners and data center developers, said in written comments to PJM. | |
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| The governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois and Maryland said they worried that it's too unpredictable to provide a permanent solution and that it should at least be accompanied by incentives for data centers to build new power sources and voluntarily reduce electricity use. | |
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| Others, including consumer advocates, warned that it won't lower electric bills and that PJM should instead pursue a "bring your own generation" requirement for data centers to, in essence, build their own power source. | |
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| **A deal is shrouded in secrecy** | |
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| In Indiana, Google took a voluntary route. | |
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| Last month, the electric utility, Indiana & Michigan Power, and the tech giant filed a power-supply contract with Indiana regulators for a proposed $2 billion data center planned in Fort Wayne in which Google agreed to reduce electricity use there when the grid is stressed. The data center would, it said, reduce electricity use by delaying non-urgent tasks to when the electric grid is under less stress. | |
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| However, important details are being kept from the public and Ben Inskeep of the Citizens Action Coalition, a consumer advocacy group, said that leaves it unclear how valuable the arrangement really is, if at all. | |
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| **A new way of thinking about electricity** | |
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| To an extent, bumping big users off the grid during high-demand periods presents a new approach to electricity. | |
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| It could save money for regular ratepayers, since power is most expensive during peak usage periods. | |
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| Abe Silverman, an energy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, said that data centers can and do use all the electricity they want on most days. | |
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| But taking data centers off the grid for those handful of hours during the most extreme heat or cold would mean not having to spend billions of dollars to build a bunch of power plants, he said. | |
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| "And the question is, is that worth it? Is it worth it for society to build those 10 new power plants just to serve the data centers for five hours a year?" Silverman said. "Or is there a better way to do it?" | |
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| Follow Marc Levy on X at: https://x.com/timelywriter | |
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| ===== US electric grids under pressure from energy-hungry data centers are changing strategy ===== | |
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| {{:en:ecrit:ap25254502230745.jpg?300 |}} | Construction on the $1 billion project began in 2005 under then-President Hosni Mubarak. But work was interrupted by turmoil surrounding the 2011 uprising that brought down the Egyptian strongman. Further delays ensued, and a planned grand opening over the summer had to be put off after the 12-day-long war between Israel and Iran erupted in June. |
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| By KEN SWEET AP Business Writer | GEM is expected to attract 5 million visitors annually, said Egypt's tourism and antiquities minister, Sherif Fathy. That would put it in the realm of the most popular museums in the world. In 2024, by comparison, Paris's Louvre brought in 8.7 million, the British Museum 6.5 million and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York 5.7 million. |
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| NEW YORK (AP) — Armen Kirakosian remembers the frustrations of his first job as a call center agent nearly 10 years ago: the aggravated customers, the constant searching through menus for information and the notes he had to physically write for each call he handled. | **An elaborate opening ceremony** |
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| Thanks to artificial intelligence, the 29-year-old from Athens, Greece, is no longer writing notes or clicking on countless menus. He often has full customer profiles in front of him when a person calls in and may already know what problem the customer has before even saying "hello." He can spend more time actually serving the customer. | Saturday night's grand opening stoked the pharaoh-mania. |
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| "A.I. has taken (the) robot out of us," Kirakosian said. | As an orchestra played fanfares, lines of actors dressed in ancient Egyptian garb arrayed around the museum, the pyramids and the Sphinx. Hundreds of drones created a light show in the sky, depicting well-known Egyptian gods like Isis and Osiris and the pyramids. |
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| Roughly 3 million Americans work in call center jobs, and millions more work in call centers around the world, answering billions of inquiries a year about everything from broken iPhones to orders for shoes. Kirakosian works for TTEC, a company that provides third party customer service lines in 22 countries to companies in industries such as autos and banking that need extra capacity or have outsourced their call center operations. | El-Sissi posed with delegates from more than 70 countries, including members of the royal families from Belgium, Spain, Denmark, Jordan, Gulf Arab nations and Japan, and a number of European and regional presidents and prime ministers. It was a throwback to the grand opening of another megaproject in Egypt, the 1869 inauguration of the Suez Canal, when Egypt's rulers gathered a host of European royal families. |
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| Answering these calls can be thankless work. Roughly half of all customer service agents leave the job after a year, according to McKinsey, with stress and monotonous work being among the reasons employees quit. | **Ramses the Great and King Tut** |
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| Much of what these agents deal with is referred to in the industry as "break/fix," which means something is broken — or wrong or confusing — and the customer expects the person on the phone to fix the problem. Now, it's a question of who will be tasked with the fix: a human, a computer, or a human augmented by a computer. | The museum boasts a towering, triangular glass façade imitating the nearby pyramids, with 24,000 square meters (258,000 square feet) of permanent exhibition space. |
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| Already, AI agents have taken over more routine call center tasks. Some jobs have been lost and there have been dire forecasts about the future job market for these individuals, ranging from modest single-percentage point losses, to as many as half of all call center jobs going away in the next decade. The drop likely won't match the more dire predictions, however, because it's become evident that the industry will still need humans, perhaps with even higher levels of learning and training, as some customer service issues become increasingly harder to solve. | It opens to a granite colossus of Ramses the Great, one of ancient Egypt's most powerful pharaohs who reigned for around 60 years, from 1279-1213 B.C., and is credited with expanding ancient Egypt's reach as far as modern Syria to the east and present-day Sudan to the south. The statue greets visitors once they step inside the museum's angular atrium. |
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| Some finance companies have already experimented with going in heavily with AI for their customer service issues. | The museum's 12 main galleries, which opened last year, exhibit antiquities spanning from prehistoric times to the Roman era, organized by eras and by themes. |
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| Klarna, the Swedish buy now, pay later company, replaced 700 of their roughly 3,000 customer service agents with chatbots and AI in 2024. The results were mixed. While the company did save money, Klarna found there was still a need for higher skilled human agents in certain circumstances, such as complicated issues related to identity theft. Earlier this year, Klarna hired seven internal freelancers to handle these issues. | Two halls that will be opened for the first time after Saturday are dedicated to the 5,000 artifacts from the collection of King Tutankhamun — a boy pharaoh who ruled from 1361-1352 B.C. The tomb was discovered by British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922 in the southern city of Luxor. The old Egyptian Museum did not have enough room to display the whole collection. |
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| Earlier this year, Klarna hired a handful of customer service employees back to the firm, acknowledging there were certain issues that AI couldn't handle as well as a real person, like identity theft. | The collection includes the boy pharaoh's three funeral beds and six chariots, his golden throne, his gold-covered sarcophagus and his burial mask, made of gold, quartzite, lapis lazuli and colored glass. |
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| "Our vision of an AI-first contact center, where AI agents handle the majority of conversations and fewer, better trained and better paid human agents support only the most complex tasks, is quickly becoming a reality," said Gadi Shamia of Replicant, an AI-software company that trains chatbots to sound more human, in an interview with consultants at McKinsey. | Zahi Hawass, Egypt's most renowned archaeologist and former minister of antiquities, said the Tutankhamun collection is the museum's masterpiece. |
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| The call center customer's experience, while improved, is still far from perfect. | "Why this museum is so important, and everyone is waiting for the opening?" he told The Associated Press. "Because of Tutankhamun." |
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| The initial customer service call has long been handled through interactive voice response systems, known in the industry as IVR. Customers interact with IVR when they're told "press one for sales, press two for support, press five for billing." These crude systems got an update in the 2010s, when customers could prompt the system by saying "sales" or "support" or simple phrases like "I'd like to pay a bill" instead of navigating through a labyrinthian set of menu options. | **Boost to tourism and economy** |
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| But customers have little patience for these menus, leading them to "zero out," which is call center slang for when a customer hits the zero button on their their keypad in hopes of reaching a human. It's also not uncommon that after a customer "zeros out" they will be put on hold and transferred because they did not end up in the right place for their request. | Officials hope the museum will draw more tourists who will stay for longer periods and provide the foreign currency needed to shore up Egypt's battered economy. |
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| Aware of Americans' collective impatience with IVR, Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Republican Jim Justice of West Virginia have introduced the "Keep Call Centers in America Act," which would require clear ways to reach a human agent, and provide incentives to companies that keep call center jobs in the U.S. | The government has also revamped the area around the museum and the nearby pyramids and the Sphinx. New highways were built, and a metro station is being constructed nearby. An airport, Sphinx International Airport, has also opened west of Cairo — 40 minutes from the museum. |
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| Companies are trying to roll out telephone systems that broadly understand customer service requests and predict where to send a customer without navigating a menu. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is coming out with its "ChatGPT Agent" service for users that's able to understand phrases like "I need to find a hotel for a wedding next year, please give me options for clothing and gifts." | The tourism sector has suffered during years of political turmoil and violence following the 2011 uprising. In recent years, the sector has started to recover after the coronavirus pandemic and amid Russia's war on Ukraine — both countries are major sources of tourists visiting Egypt. |
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| Bank of America says it has had increasing success in integrating such features into "Erica," its chatbot that debuted in 2018. When Erica cannot handle a request, the agent transfers the customer directly to the right department. Erica is now also predictive and analytical, and knows for instance that a customer may repeatedly have a low balance and may need better help budgeting or may have multiple subscriptions to the same service. | A record number of about 15.7 million tourists visited Egypt in 2024, contributing about 8% of the country's GDP, according to official figures. Fathy, the tourism minister, said about 18 million tourists are expected this year, with authorities hoping for 30 million visitors annually by 2032. |
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| Bank of America said this month that Erica has been used 3 billion times since its creation and is increasingly taking on a higher case load of customer service requests. The chatbot's moniker comes from the last five letters of the company's name. | This will translate into more jobs and pump foreign currency into the economy, said Walid el-Batouty, a tour guide. |
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| James Bednar, vice president of product and innovation at TTEC, has spent much of his career trying to make customer service calls less painful for the caller as well as the company. He said these tools could eventually kill off IVR for good, ending the need for anyone to "zero out." | "It will be boost the economy of Egypt tremendously not just the hotels and the museum itself," he said. Whenever a tourist rides a cab or even just buys a bottle of water, "that is pumping money" into Egypt's coffers, he added. |
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| "We're getting to the point where AI will get you to the right person for your problem without you having to route through those menus," Bednar said. | Associated Press journalist Ahmed Hatem in Cairo contributed to this report. |
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