Amid artificial intelligence concerns related to job loss and content scraping, Amazon Web Services Inc. has chosen to go full steam ahead on implementing agent workforces and AI-powered tools.

AWS believes in the power of AI to transform the workplace, and wants everyone else to buy in too. Otherwise, as tech leaders often suggest, employees who don’t play nice with AI may be left behind.

“We need to be building products that are in the hands of businesses,” said Colleen Aubrey (pictured), senior vice president of applied AI Solutions at AWS. “It’s core to how they operate every day. It’s mission-critical to how they operate. And in this past year, of course, it’s become very, very apparent … that the future of how we work will involve workforces of agents. It will be hybrid, there’ll be people collaborating with AI on a daily business to get the job done.”

Aubrey spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier at the AWS Mid-Year Leadership Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Amazon’s approach to AI in the workplace and new features in Amazon Connect.

Amazon welcomes agent workforces

Companies are still figuring out the complex nature of managing hybrid and agent workforces, according to Aubrey, but she is eager to see AI change both workplace and customer operations. Connect, Amazon’s AI-native contact center, now provides AI support across multiple interactions.

“That last mile work of putting AI to work in your business and getting the results you’re looking for, I think that’s very hard,” Aubrey said. “Your customers are not going to tolerate a 20% error rate. So, I think there’s a lot of work to do on that last mile to have AI working in the way that you want it, delivering the results you’re looking for at the quality with the constraints that you have in your business. With Connect I think we have a very nice starting point.”

AI has started to gain traction in healthcare, where the burden of tracking patient interactions and medical paperwork can prove difficult to handle. Amazon’s One Medical app employs AI tools to improve patient care and take the administrative load off of doctors’ shoulders, Aubrey explained.

“There are many opportunities for us to reduce that toil, improve the customer experience,” she said. “Connect is all about customer experience. We have a really nice base of capabilities there with the AI that is customized to healthcare, to actually put patients more in control of their healthcare and actually to enable providers and many of the knowledge workers that operate in the background.”

Another group to benefit from AI is Aubrey’s own employees. She wants to see Amazon’s teams go AI native and envisions agent workforces and human engineers working side by side in the near future.

“What I’m really pressing my principal engineers on and senior principal engineers is … where are the stories?” she said. “I want them sharing stories with the rest of the group of something that they have done that has taken it from a two-week effort to a one-day effort.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Mid-Year Leadership Summit:

Photo: SiliconANGLE