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Interview12 Mar 2026 · 2 min read

60-70% of Your Contact Center Calls Could Already Be Handled by AI. So Why Aren't They?

Cloud Interact CEO Simon Leyland on AWS's MDF push, why legacy contact center vendors should be worried, and the data behind that 60–70%.

Rhys Fisher

AWS recently put up to $50,000 in MDF on the table for Amazon Connect implementations, with a further $25,000 tied to its new agentic AI specialization categories.

For Simon Leyland, CEO of Cloud Interact, a business built from day one on Amazon Connect, it confirms something he's been watching build for a while: AWS is treating the contact center market as a top priority, and the industry hasn't fully caught on yet.

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Leyland's argument is that plenty of organizations with serious AWS spend are still running legacy contact center infrastructure and simply haven't looked in that direction.

Global telephony, a pay-as-you-go model, and hundreds of billions in AI investment make it a credible rival to any of the established players - yet it still gets overlooked, partly because AWS's natural foothold is in IT teams rather than the operational side of the business where contact center decisions tend to get made.

On AI deflection, Leyland points to Cloud Interact's own deployment data: across organizations of different sizes and industries, 60–70% of inbound voice calls are consistently simple enough to handle without a human.

The industry currently sits at around 10% automation. Closing that gap requires getting on a modern platform, consolidating data, and integrating CRM and ERP systems before an agentic layer can realistically do its job.

He's also clear-eyed about what separates agentic AI in a contact center from back-end process automation: it picks up the phone. That visibility demands guardrails, a phased rollout, and realistic expectations. It's a point Leyland underlines with a stark analogy:

"I think the contact center industry might be in the same place that newspapers were maybe 2010 - the contact center suppliers are like hey, we don't just do contact center, we can do AI. Well, the world kind of came collapsing in on that newspaper industry."

A client that went live this week was on the phone to Cloud Interact within 24 hours asking to extend to round-the-clock coverage.

Leyland's challenge to any CX or operations leader is a simple one: are you moving fast enough, and are you being bold enough?

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