Earlier this month, Amazon Web Services (AWS) held its inaugural Amazon Connect Horizons industry analyst conference.
Like most analyst events, AWS used the forum to share its vision of the industry and provide attendees with a roadmap of what’s to come for its contact center solution.
While I can’t go into product-level information, as much of it was under NDA, there were several key takeaways from the event worth sharing.
Below are my top four takeaways from Amazon Connect Horizons:
1. AI Agents Will Work in Harmony with Humans
Regardless of which event I attend, I inevitably hear about the rise of agentic agents with contact centers being viewed as the ‘low hanging fruit,’ as every organization is looking to improve the way it interacts with customers.
This always raises the questions of whether AI agents will replace humans, and the answer is yes and no, with it really depending on the type of interaction.
If one plots all the possible interactions between customers and a brand on a 2x2 grid with the axes being frequency and complexity, anything high-frequency and low-complexity is ideally suited for an AI agent.
This includes password resets, account balances, shipping status, and other mundane things people don’t like doing.
The rest of the more complex interactions will be handled by human agents, but these conversations will still have some element of AI in them. The conversation may start with an AI agent or AI could advise the human agent on what to say.
Over time, an AI agent will be a standard part of a contact center agent’s toolkit and will work with the human to provide upleveled interactions.
While I can’t get into the specifics of the information shared at the event, I can say this topic of bringing people and AI together was a big focus for Amazon Connect Horizons.
During my time there, I had a chance to talk to Pasquale DeMaio, VP of Amazon Connect, to get his thoughts.
DeMaio said:“We believe a full agentic solution on top of Connect is the key to the future of everything we will do in customer service.”
“That doesn’t mean every interaction will be fully agentic. In fact, we believe that a human-centric experience is absolutely essential, and customers need the ability to seamlessly move back and forth across human and AI agents.”
2. Amazon Connect Is Not Just for Builders
The biggest misconception regarding Amazon Connect is that it’s only for builders.
That was true when the company launched Amazon Connect, but that was many years ago.
As DeMaio put it, Amazon “has always had more UX than API,” but the company does offer a best-in-class developer experience, as one would expect with it being an AWS product.
One of the ironies of this point is that because of the pre-built integrations Amazon Connect has, there is often less developer time required with some of its competitors.
One of the system integrators I talked with at the event told me that when going from Genesys on-prem to a cloud solution, the migration path to Amazon Connect is easier than with Genesys Cloud, because so much of it is integrated.
I asked DeMaio about developer-led customers versus out-of-the-box customers, and he explained that “the broad majority of our customers are not doing any or minimal development.”
He added, “I don’t want to dissuade customers from developing, but for almost everything we do, we have low-code and no-code interfaces making customization easy.”
This is consistent with the experiences of the customers I have talked to, as almost all of them have set up Amazon Connect with just a few mouse clicks.
3. Utilization Pricing Will Be the Norm in the Norm AI Era
One of the unique aspects of Amazon Connect is that it uses utilization-based pricing.