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By STEFANIE DAZIO and MALIN HAARALA

KIRUNA, Sweden (AP) — High atop the Luossavaara Mountain in northern Sweden, Sami reindeer herder Lars-Marcus Kuhmunen mapped out a bleak future for himself and other Indigenous people whose reindeer have roamed this land for thousands of years.

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An expanding iron-ore mine and a deposit of rare-earth minerals are fragmenting the land and altering ancient reindeer migration routes. But with the Arctic warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, herders say they need more geographic flexibility, not less, to ensure the animals’ survival.

If a mine is established at the deposit of rare-earth minerals called Per Geijer, which Sweden heralds as Europe’s largest, Kuhmunen said it could completely cut off the migration routes used by the Sami village of Gabna.

That would be the end of the Indigenous way of life for Kuhmunen, his children and their fellow Sami reindeer herders, he said, in this far-north corner of Sweden some 124 miles above the Arctic Circle.

“The reindeer is the fundamental base of the Sami culture in Sweden,” Kuhmunen said. “Everything is founded around the reindeers: The food, the language, the knowledge of mountains. Everything is founded around the reindeer herding. If that ceases to exist, the Sami culture will also cease to exist.”

Sami reindeer herders follow generations of tradition

Sami herders are descended from a once-nomadic people scattered across a region spanning the far north of Sweden, Norway, Finland and the northwestern corner of Russia. Until the 1960s, members of this Indigenous minority were discouraged from reindeer herding, and the church and state suppressed their language and culture.

Lars-Marcus Kuhmunen, a Sami reindeer herder and chairman of Sami village of Gabna, grimaces in Kiruna, Sweden, Sunday, Aug. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Malin Haarala)

In Sweden alone there are at least 20,000 people with Sami heritage, though an official count does not exist because an ethnicity-based census is against the law. Today, a Sami village called a sameby is a business entity dictated by the state, which determines how many semi-domesticated reindeer each village can have and where they can roam.

“It’s getting more and more a problem to have a sort of sustainable reindeer husbandry and to be able to have the reindeers to survive the Arctic winter and into the next year,” said Stefan Mikaelsson, a member of the Sami Parliament.

In the Gabna village, Kuhmunen oversees about 2,500 to 3,000 reindeer and 15 to 20 herders. Their families, some 150 people in total, depend on the bottom line of the business.

The mining area where a proposed mine would cut off ancient reindeer migration routes in Kiruna, Sweden, Sunday, Aug. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Malin Haarala)

Even before the discovery of the Per Geijer deposit, they had to contend with the expanding footprint of Kiirunavaara. The world’s largest underground, iron-ore mine has forced the village’s herders to lead their reindeer through a longer and harder migration route.

Mining could reduce dependence on China but hurt Sami herders

Swedish officials and LKAB, the state-owned mining company, say the proposed Per Geijer mine could reduce Europe’s reliance on China for rare-earth minerals. LKAB hopes to begin mining there in the 2030s.

Besides being essential to many kinds of consumer technology, including cellphones, hard drives and electric and hybrid vehicles, rare-earth minerals also are considered crucial to shifting the economy away from fossil fuels toward electricity and renewable energy.

But if work on Per Geijer goes forward, Kuhmunen said there will be no other routes for the Gabna herders to take the reindeer east from the mountains in the summer to the grazing pastures full of nutrient-rich lichen in the winter.

Darren Wilson, LKAB’s senior vice president of special products, gestures next to a model of existing mines, in Kiruna, Sweden, Monday, Aug. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Malin Haarala)

The village will contest the mine in court but Kuhmunen said he is not optimistic.

“It’s really difficult to fight a mine. They have all the resources, they have all the means. They have the money. We don’t have that,” Kuhmunen said. “We only have our will to exist. To pass these grazing lands to our children.”

Darren Wilson, LKAB’s senior vice president of special products, said the mining company is seeking solutions to assist the Sami herders, though he would not speculate on what they might be.

“There are potential things that we can do and we can explore and we have to keep engaging,” he said. “But I’m not underestimating the challenge of doing that.”

Climate change’s impact on reindeer husbandry

Climate change is wreaking havoc on traditional Sami reindeer husbandry.

Reindeer stand at a farm in Lulea, Sweden, Saturday, Aug. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Malin Haarala)

Global warming has brought rain instead of snow during the winter in Swedish Lapland. The freezing rain then traps lichen under a thick layer of ice where hungry reindeer can’t reach the food, according to Anna Skarin, a reindeer husbandry expert and Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences professor.

In the summer, mountain temperatures have risen to 86 Fahrenheit and left reindeer over-heated and unable to graze enough to gain the weight needed to sustain them in winter.

Some in Sweden suggest putting the reindeer onto trucks to ferry them between grazing lands if the Per Geijer mine is built. But Skarin said that isn’t feasible because the animals eat on the move and the relocation would deny them food to be grazed while walking from one area to another.

“So you’re kind of both taking away the migration route that they have used traditionally over hundreds and thousands of years,” she said, “and you would also take away that forage resource that they should have used during that time.”

For Kuhmunen, it would also mean the end of Sami traditions passed down by generations of reindeer herders on this land.

“How can you tell your people that what we’re doing now, it will cease to exist in the near future?” he said.

Pietro De Cristofaro in Kiruna, Sweden, contributed to this report.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find the AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Delray Beach wants the Florida Department of Transportation’s chief engineer tasked with deciding the fate of the city’s Pride rainbow crosswalk to disqualify herself from the role, arguing that email exchanges between her and other FDOT officials show bias against the city.

Last month, FDOT demanded that Delray Beach remove its LGTBQ+ Pride intersection at Northeast Second Avenue and Northeast First Street by Sept. 3 because it violates the state’s traffic control device standards. If the city didn’t comply, the Aug. 15 letter said the state would remove it for them, and the city would still have to pay the bill.

Rather than immediately complying, Delray Beach commissioners chose instead to attend an informal hearing with FDOT in Orlando, one day before the deadline to remove the crosswalk art, where they pleaded their case to keep it.

Jennifer Marshall, FDOT’s chief engineer of production, was appointed on Aug. 18 to be the presiding officer and will make the ultimate decision on Delray’s crosswalk. At the Sept. 2 hearing, attorneys for both sides made their arguments and were told to file proposed final orders by last Friday.

Attorney Howard DuBosar, representing Delray Beach, argued in a motion to disqualify Marshall filed Friday that multiple email exchanges between Marshall and other FDOT employees and executives prior to the informal hearing showed Marshall’s “predisposition to find the crosswalks non-compliant with FDOT’s traffic control device standards — the very basis that forms the crux of this matter.” The emails are included in the motion.

Marshall “in the interest of candor” disclosed the email exchanges the city takes issue with to both sides’ attorneys at the informal hearing and were sent before she was appointed presiding officer, according to a transcript of the hearing, also included in the motion. The emails were related to the crosswalks in Delray Beach and Key West.

Marshall was one of three FDOT executives who was copied on the Aug. 15 notice that Delray Beach officials received demanding the crosswalk’s removal.

“It is evidently concerning that the designated presiding officer is one of the three executives privy to the notice of non-compliance, especially when FDOT had twelve other executives they could have selected,” attorney DuBosar wrote in his Sept. 5 motion.

DuBosar noted a July 31 email FDOT District Secretary Daniel Iglesias sent Marshall asking that she share information about enforcement that he could share with officials in Key West. On Aug. 13, Marshall forwarded that email to another FDOT chief engineer and wrote, “Is there anything that I can assist with?” related to enforcement. That email exchange shows Marshall and others were planning to talk about enforcement at an upcoming staff meeting before she was appointed to be the presiding officer, DuBosar wrote.

Pedestrians walk across the LGBTQ+ pride intersection of Northeast First Street and Northeast Second Avenue in Delray Beach on Monday, Aug. 18, 2025. (Carline Jean/South Florida Sun Sentinel)

“Simply put, Ms. Marshall’s comments and conduct demonstrate that she has traded her role as an impartial decision-maker for a prosecutorial role,” DuBosar wrote in his motion.

Gina Carter, a spokesperson for Delray Beach, said in an emailed statement Monday: “The City believes that recent disclosures of communications involving the presiding officer raise reasonable concerns about impartiality and due process. Our goal is to ensure that this matter is reviewed in a fair and unbiased manner, consistent with Florida law and the principles of administrative justice.”

Michael Williams, FDOT communications director, in an email to the South Florida Sun Sentinel said the agency does not comment on pending litigation but said, procedurally, “it is the responsibility of the agency who administers an informal hearing to appoint a hearing officer to preside over the hearing. It is a routine practice for any agency to appoint an agency employee to this role.”

Denise Johnson, an attorney representing FDOT in the matter, did not respond to an email Monday afternoon seeking a response to the city’s motion.

FDOT filed its proposed final order on Friday, arguing that the crosswalk markings “clearly violate” the state’s provisions and that FDOT has the authority to order their removal.

By KEN SWEET

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.

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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.

“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.