AWS loads Amazon Connect with customer service AI agents

AWS's take on AI agents for customer service: A few contact centers will attempt total automation. A few will use AI agents only to assist humans. Most will blend the two and meet somewhere in the middle. That is the concept underpinning a bundle of Amazon Connect features and capabilities released today, including contact center-facing agents as well as agent observability and orchestration tools. Among the 29 customer service AI agents and related tools AWS showed -- most live, a few in preview -- were agent-assist tools, including real-time conversation analysis that can suggest answers, complete documentation, and set up digital workspaces by persona, such as agent and manager. Observability features include AI agent evaluation and monitoring tools, as well as testing environments. Also included in the latest AWS release are tools for AI agent orchestration. In this feature set is connectivity to third-party speech-to-text agents from ElevenLabs and Deepgram, which can be orchestrated within Amazon Connect. Right now, customer service vendors such as Salesforce, ServiceNow and others, including Qualtrics, are vying for control of the orchestration of their own AI agents -- and everyone else's. This situation is fluid, and AWS doesn't claim to be "religious" about whose AI or orchestration tools a customer must use, said Pasquale DeMaio, vice president of Amazon Connect at AWS. "My honest take on this is that I think there'll be a number of winners here," DeMaio said. "It's a big space. Some people will make great bets that work out. Some people will make bad bets that don't work out. In any case, there are going to be a lot of bets.… I don't think it's going to be one winner-take-all, but I think we are going to lead the way." AWS's Pasquale DeMaio presenting at re:Invent 2024. AWS also integrated many of its contact center AI capabilities within the Salesforce Service Cloud environment. Joint customers can enable their human agents to access AWS's generative AI agent-assist, predictive suggestions and automated workflows from within Salesforce. Amazon Connect now supports WhatsApp, a popular channel internationally, especially in regions such as India, Latin America, Indonesia and the Philippines. AWS's integrated environment While AWS isn't a first mover in the customer service AI agent space -- several other companies have already introduced their own agents, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, Nice, Genesys and others -- it doesn't have to be, said Ian Jacobs, analyst for Opus Research. The technology is still in its early stages of implementation; many contact centers are just getting started. In fact, Jacobs pointed out that some contact centers are still preparing their environments for AI by cobbling together hardware and cloud software to stand up their first contact center as a service instances. AWS can provide contact centers with scalability, reliability and an integrated cloud environment for agentic AI -- without having to set up numerous add-ons from other vendors for features such as agent observability and management, voice channel integration and Amazon Bedrock machine-learning support for a user's knowledge base. Moreover, AWS gives developer-centric shops the ability to "ship, test and debug AI agents without blowing up your AI bill," as Jacobs put it. "They don't have a first-mover advantage -- [but] boring reliability is a big plus," Jacobs said. "Everybody has AI agents right now. The way that AWS would be able to differentiate is with routing, flexibility, transparency and configurability." AWS's Amazon Connect agents were released in conjunction with the AWS re:Invent conference, held December 1-5 in Las Vegas. Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.