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AWS bets on agentic AI to power the next-gen contact center
As enterprises seek to modernize customer engagement, the demand for a sophisticated agentic contact center platform is driving innovation in the service industry.
Amazon Connect — an example of such a platform — is expanding its offering to meet that demand, unveiling 29 new features at this year’s re:Invent conference, according to Pasquale DeMaio (pictured), vice president of Amazon Connect at Amazon Web Services Inc. These capabilities come after the platform’s explosive growth, doubling its output to 12 billion minutes of artificial intelligence-enhanced experiences in the past year.
“We’ve moved to a size of a system where AI is touching every touch point across the entire journey of a customer,” DeMaio told theCUBE. “Whether that starts in some place where they’re self-servicing and getting helped by AI — now they can do it with a fully agentic AI — all the way to a human being who is on the other side.”
DeMaio spoke with John Furrier at AWS re:Invent, for an exclusive interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Amazon Connect’s exponential growth and the integration of AI.
Building the agentic contact center platform
The adoption of AI in the contact center is shifting from simple automation to creating AI “teammates” that empower human agents. This is happening so rapidly that the distinction of “agentic” versus otherwise will soon disappear as the technology becomes ubiquitous within the enterprise infrastructure, DeMaio explained.
“In two years I don’t think people will talk about agentic AI at all,” DeMaio said. “But in the interim, we’re all going to become agentic AI companies where that agentic AI is acting as a teammate to help improve the performance of the people.”
Amazon Connect is currently optimizing for “time to outcome,” ensuring that businesses can deploy sophisticated AI solutions without lengthy integration periods, DeMaio noted. This includes new capabilities like the bidirectional speech-to-speech integration with Nova, AWS’s in-house family of frontier AI models.
“I want to have it so you can set up and take a call and that call feels magical in less than an hour,” DeMaio said. “That’s what I’m challenging my team to go do.”
Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent:
Photo: SiliconANGLE
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