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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.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.“A.I. has taken (the) robot out of us,” Kirakosian said.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.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.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.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.Some finance companies have already experimented with going in heavily with AI for their customer service issues.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.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.“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.The call center customer’s experience, while improved, is still far from perfect.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.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.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.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.”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.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.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.”“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. Ken Sweet, AP Business Writer
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E-Commerce
StubHub Holdings, the secondary ticketing marketplace, just threw its hat back in the ring to list on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) after postponing its initial public offering (IPO) plans earlier this year. According to a September 8 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the company is now eyeing a valuation of around $9 billion. In the filing, StubHub reported that it plans to offer just over 34 million shares of Class A stock for an estimated price of between $22 and $25 per share. If approved, the company will join the NYSE under the ticker symbol STUB. No listing date was shared in the filing, but according to a source familiar with the company, it could come as early as next week. StubHub has been eyeing a solid IPO date for months. The company paused its initial IPO plans in early July amid uncertainties around tariffs and a cooling IPO market, according to media reports. However, in the wake of exciting recent listings from companies such as Figma, Bullish, and others, investor interest in IPOs is back upand StubHub is giving it another go. Why investors want StubHub to go public StubHub was created in 2000 after founder and CEO Eric Baker faced a very particular problem: He was unable to purchase tickets to a sold-out showing of The Lion King on Broadway. The box office was a dead end, and he had no idea who to call for help, the SEC filing recalls in a section on the companys history. Should he canvas the streets around Times Square and hope to find someone with a tickets for sale sign? With no clear answers, he found himself at the mercy of an opaque market. To solve this problem, Baker founded StubHub at a time when secondary ticketing existed only as a fragmented offline market. Today, StubHub believes that it operates the largest global secondary ticketing market for live events, selling over 40 million tickets to buyers in more than 200 countries in 2024. After merging with the rival ticketing platform viagogo (also founded by Baker) in 2022, StubHub has been actively working with JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs to solidify its IPO listing plans. In its SEC filing, StubHub said its revenue jumped from $1.37 billion to $1.77 billion between 2023 and 2024. IPOs are back in the spotlight after a rough patch StubHub was initially planning to list on the NYSE sometime in the early summer, but it reportedly put its IPO on hold in the midst of economic uncertainty brought on by President Trumps tariff regime. At the time, a source familiar with the company cited stagnant market conditions and a lack of major consumer IPOs as two of the main reasons for the delay, according to CNBC. The fintech startup Klarna similarly paused its long-awaited IPO earlier this year. Now, though, as the market has held relatively steady despite new tariffs, both Klarna and StubHub are reentering the IPO game. Successful recent IPOs from companies including the design software startup Figma, the crypto exchange Bullish, and the stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Group have put public listings back into the spotlight and stoked investors interest.
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E-Commerce
The 82nd Venice Film Festival may be over, but the conversations on the films that premiered, the things people said, the clothes they wore, and how it affects the Oscar race are still going.Here’s a rundown of the big moments and takeaways from this year’s edition. What won big at the Venice Film Festival? Jim Jarmusch’s quiet film “Father Mother Sister Brother” took the top prize, the Golden Lion. It was a surprise to many who expected that honor to go to “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” which ended up with the runner up award, or “No Other Choice.”Aside from Benny Safdie’s best director win for “The Smashing Machine,” Hollywood players were largely shut out of the awards in favor of a diverse, international selection. Chinese actor Xin Zhilei won best actress for Cai Shangjun’s “The Sun Rises on Us All,” Italian icon Toni Servillo won best actor for “La Grazia” and Swiss actor Luna Wedler took the up-and-comer prize, the Marcello Mastroianni Award, for “Silent Friend.” Who might be an Oscars player? The awards didn’t give many hints, but Venice has been known to launch several best actor campaigns including Joaquin Phoenix in “Joker,”Brendan Fraser in “The Whale” and Adrien Brody in “The Brutalist.” This year the most obvious heavyweight to follow is Dwayne Johnson for his turn as MMA fighter Mark Kerr in “The Smashing Machine.”Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons were also strange and fierce as kidnapped and kidnapper in Yorgos Lanthimos’s provocative “Bugonia.” Oscar Isaac portrayed Victor Frankenstein as a romantic madman and Jacob Elordi was nave and raw as the monster. Amanda Seyfried put a human, feminist, face to the religious sect the shakers in “The Testament of Ann Lee,” and Julia Roberts flexed her acting muscles as a Yale philosophy professor in the midst of a misconduct accusation against a colleague in “After the Hunt.”Filmmakers like Kathryn Bigelow and previous Golden Lion winners Guillermo del Toro and Yorgos Lanthimos will also likely be in the conversation for months to come. Why was Seth Rogen everywhere? There’s always some unexpected Hollywood person at the Venice Film Festival who doesn’t seem to be associated with any one film. Sometimes they’ve come in for amfAR, sometimes they’ve been invited by one of the festival’s sponsors. But text chains started blowing up when Seth Rogen started popping up everywhere: Red carpets, press conferences, parties. Don’t be surprised if there’s a Venice episode of “The Studio” in the works: This trip was research, and maybe even a little more. Julia Roberts and Amanda Seyfried’s sisterhood of the traveling Versace? In a cute, unexpected (possibly highly staged) moment during the festival, Amanda Seyfried commented on Julia Roberts’ Instagram asking to “please let me wear the same outfit.” Three days later, Seyfried was also rocking the Versace blazer, jeans, button up and belt, just with different shoes. It helps that they share a stylist, Elizabeth Stewart. There was a record standing ovation First, let’s just make clear that entertainment trade publications only started tracking Venice standing ovations recently. This year, audiences at the premiere of “The Voice of Hind Rajab” applauded for 22-minutes, surpassing the 18-minute record set last year by “The Room Next Door,” which went on to win the Golden Lion. Even with a limited data set, that’s a long time to clap after a movie.Other standing ovation times from the 82nd festival: “After the Hunt” ((tilde)5 minutes), “Bugonia” ((tilde)6 minutes), “No Other Choice” ((tilde)7 minutes), “Jay Kelly” ((tilde)9 minutes), “The Wizard of the Kremlin” ((tilde)10 minutes), “A House of Dynamite” ((tilde)11 minutes), “Frankenstein” ((tilde)14 minutes), “The Testament of Ann Lee” ((tilde)15 minutes), “The Smashing Machine” ((tilde)15 minutes). Politics and war on the big screen The festival might not take political stances, but politics, and filmmakers grappling with the state of the world, from the Israel-Hamas conflict to nuclear weapons, were clearly top of mind. Kathryn Bigelow set off a warning shot about nuclear weapons and the apparatus of decision making with her urgent, and distressingly realistic, thriller “A House of Dynamite.” Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania made an essential document of the human toll in Gaza with “The Voice of Hind Rajab.” And Olivier Assayas charted the rise of Vladimir Putin in “The Wizard of the Kremlin.”Gaza also dominated conversations off screen too, from a protest that drew an estimated 10,000 people, to awards speeches. Best quotes from the 2025 Venice Film Festival “The real monsters are the men in suits.” Jacob Elordi, who plays Frankenstein’s monster in a big budget Netflix film.“I’ve been very fortunate to have the career that I’ve had and make the films that I have, but there was just this voice inside of me, this little voice, like what if I can do more.” Dwayne Johnson on his transformative, serious turn as MMA fighter Mark Kerr in “The Smashing Machine.”“I consider pretty much all corporate money is dirty money.” Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, when asked about Mubi’s relationship with Sequoia Capital.“How is annihilating the world a good defensive measure? I mean, what are you defending?” Filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow on the nuclear stockpiles.“Humanity is facing a reckoning very soon. People need to choose the right path, otherwise, I don’t know how much time we have.” Filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos on the relevance of “Bugonia.”“Everyone comes out with all these different feelings and emotions and points of views. And you realize what you believe in strongly and what your convictions are because we stir it all up for you. So, you’re welcome.” Julia Roberts on the debates stirred by “After the Hunt.”“It’s time at the end of your life to put the puzzle pieces together and make them fit.” Kim Novak, 92, on receiving the festival’s lifetime achievement award. For more coverage of the Venice Film Festival, visit https://apnews.com/hub/venice-film-festival. Lindsey Bahr, AP Film Writer
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