Konecta, the Spanish customer experience and business process outsourcing group, has opened its first global centre of excellence for generative artificial intelligence in Cairo, wagering that Egypt’s deep pool of multilingual graduates and a widening array of state incentives will speed the deployment of AI across its operations.
The facility, inaugurated on Monday by Egypt’s minister of communications and information technology, Raafat Hindi, anchors a roughly $100m investment that will swell Konecta’s Egyptian workforce from 800 to 3,000 specialists by the end of 2028. The Cairo-based centre is tasked with designing, building and rolling out generative AI and agentic AI solutions that will serve the group’s clients in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas.
Konecta, headquartered in Madrid, employs about 109,000 people across 28 countries and delivers services in 40 languages. Its decision to locate its first global generative AI hub in Egypt underscores how Cairo is leveraging cost-competitive, high-volume technical talent — and an increasingly aggressive incentive regime — to prise higher-margin work away from established offshoring hubs in eastern Europe and Asia.
“Egypt is not just a delivery location for Konecta — it is our regional headquarters and home to our first global Center of Excellence for Generative AI,” said Ahmed El Harany, vice-chairman of Konecta for the Middle East and Africa. “The growth of our team in Egypt reflects the depth of Egyptian talent and the confidence our global clients place in AI-powered digital customer experience delivered from Cairo.”
The inauguration marks the culmination of a memorandum of understanding signed in January 2025 in the presence of Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly between Konecta and the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA), the state body that co-ordinates offshoring investment.
Egypt’s digital services exports have nearly doubled in three years, reaching $4.8bn in 2025, and the government has set a target of $6bn by the end of 2026. That growth has been fuelled not only by traditional call-centre work but by a deliberate pivot toward more complex services — software engineering, data analytics, cybersecurity and now AI development — that command higher margins and are stickier once embedded in a client’s operations.
Konecta’s Cairo workforce already supports seven European languages alongside Arabic, delivering AI-enhanced customer experience, big data analytics and technical support. During a tour of the premises, the minister reviewed Kolibri, Konecta’s agentic AI orchestration platform designed to shepherd enterprises from experimentation to full-scale deployment. Company executives confirmed that Egyptian teams contributed to the development, testing and localisation of the tool.
“The selection of Egypt to host Konecta’s first global Generative AI Center of Excellence aligns with the ministry’s efforts to encourage companies to expand their exports of advanced technology solutions, particularly in artificial intelligence,” Hindi said. “The continued expansion of multinational companies in Egypt’s ICT sector contributes to transferring international expertise to Egyptian talent, creating high-quality employment opportunities, and attracting additional investments.”
A crowded field of investors
Konecta merely joins a growing trend. In recent months, Coca-Cola HBC inaugurated a global digital delivery centre in Cairo that will house 450 software engineers, data scientists and UX designers by 2027, while EY’s Middle East and North Africa consulting arm launched a regional technology hub targeting more than 1,000 high-value jobs. Kuwaiti retail conglomerate Alshaya Group set up an offshoring centre, and Deloitte committed $30m to a global innovation hub in the city.
Behind the corporate announcements lies a state machinery that has been pouring fiscal and infrastructural firepower into the offshoring sector. ITIDA finalised 55 agreements with global and local service providers — including Accenture, Capgemini, Luxoft and Teleperformance — at a November 2025 offshoring summit, binding signatories to create more than 75,000 jobs over three years. The government has ploughed $6bn into digital infrastructure and expanded its technology training pipeline from 4,000 trainees in 2018 to 500,000 positions last fiscal year. Egypt’s universities produce roughly 50,000 information and communications technology graduates annually, supplying a labour market where median salaries remain a fraction of those in rival nearshore destinations such as Poland or Romania.
Ahmed Elzaher, ITIDA’s chief executive, framed the Konecta expansion as part of a deliberate shift. “Hosting a Generative AI Center of Excellence reflects the transition toward high-value digital services and highlights Egypt’s growing capabilities in advanced technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, reinforcing its position as a competitive destination for global digital services delivery,” he said.
Incentives and the high-value play
The Konecta announcement also lands weeks after Egypt broadened its export rebate programme to cover electronics design, semiconductor services and embedded systems. That seven-year framework, signed by ITIDA and the Export Development Fund, allows companies that ship chip design or automotive software from Egypt to tap performance-based cash incentives tied to export growth and job creation. It is the most explicit signal yet that the government wants to embed itself in the front-end of the global technology value chain, moving well beyond voice and low-code services.
That ambition fits the Konecta case neatly. The company’s Cairo generative AI centre is not a back-office cost play; it is positioned to create intellectual property and deploy AI orchestration tools across a global client base. Analysts note that such investments carry greater execution risk, because they demand specialised AI and data science skills that cannot be conjured overnight from fresh graduates, even in large numbers.
Nevertheless, the clustering of global brands around Cairo’s offshoring ecosystem is beginning to look self-reinforcing. As Konecta’s El Harany put it, Egypt is no longer just a delivery location. For a country that until recently was synonymous with rows of headset-wearing call-centre agents, the presence of a global generative AI centre is the most tangible evidence to date that its technology narrative is being redrawn — if it can deliver.