It is a reasonable question. It drives a reasonable set of product investments. And according to Pasquale DeMaio, VP of Amazon Connect Customer, it is the wrong question entirely.
Deflection, he argues, is dead. The goal is not containment. It is resolution.
You can hear why he thinks so, and push back if you disagree, at the main stage panel session at CCW Las Vegas on Wednesday June 24 at 4:30 PM in the Academy Ballroom. He will be joined by customer speakers from United Airlines and Citizens Bank, which is rather a good lineup for an argument about whether the customer service industry has been optimizing for the wrong thing.
I am inclined to think the argument is worth having. And I am looking forward to the session for exactly that reason.
What Amazon Connect Customer Is Announcing at CCW
There are two product launches at the event this week, both now in preview.
The first is the Agentic CX Designer. This is Amazon Connect Customer's no-code visual canvas, built for CX and operations teams rather than development teams. The idea is straightforward: business teams, i.e. the people closest to the customer problem design and deploy the AI interaction themselves, without raising an engineering ticket or waiting for a sprint cycle.
It handles two kinds of AI logic in a single workflow. Agentic reasoning, where the system interprets what a customer needs and responds dynamically, and deterministic logic, where fixed rules apply and the system follows them exactly. Compliance steps. Payment flows. Identity verification. These cannot be improvised. The canvas holds both, governed throughout, without requiring the team that builds it to understand the architecture underneath.
The second launch is Live Sync. Amazon Connect Customer describes it as the only native enterprise technology that synchronizes a voice conversation with a digital, on-screen interface in real time. A customer speaks with an AI agent while simultaneously seeing, on their phone, the options being described. They can tap to confirm, select, or act, all within the same continuous conversation, without switching channels or starting over.
It is patented. The claim is that nobody else does this natively at enterprise scale.
You can see it running in the Amazon Connect Customer booth on an iPad. It is worth a few minutes of your time if you are on the floor this week, because reading about it and experiencing it are genuinely different things.
The Airline That Deployed It First
United Airlines will present the full story in their dedicated session On Thursday June 25 at 12:00 PM in Summit C, Caesars Forum. Hear how they built multimodal agentic automation at enterprise scale to handle Irregular Operations (IRROPs) using Live Sync. Learn specifics on what United built, how quickly, and what it changed for customers on the days when everything goes wrong at once.
The framing they are bringing to CCW is honest and I think it will resonate. Customer service has traditionally treated automation and customer experience as a trade-off. More of one tends to mean less of the other. It is an assumption most vendors have quietly accepted rather than challenged. United went from first build to production in under three months. Their numbers, due to be shared in full at Thursday's session, make a pointed case that it does not have to work that way.