All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔔 Amazon Connect Chat now supports agent-initiated workflows, allowing agents to send interactive forms and present policies or disclosures directly within an active chat so customers can provide sensitive or general information without leaving the conversation. Agents can trigger workflows at any point, making interactions more dynamic and reducing resolution time. By keeping data collection inside the chat, businesses can better preserve security and compliance controls while improving customer experience. The capability is available now in multiple AWS regions.

📣 Amazon Web Services has added a visual journey builder to Amazon Connect Outbound Campaigns, enabling creation of multi-step, multi-channel engagement journeys directly in the console. You can orchestrate voice, SMS, email, and WhatsApp interactions and combine time- or behavior-triggered flows. Integrations with existing Connect Flows, AI capabilities, and Customer Profiles let you personalize interactions and route customers to live agents when needed. The feature is available in all AWS Regions that support Outbound Campaigns.

🎨 Amazon Connect now enables administrators to apply custom visual themes to the agent workspace, including logos, fonts, and color palettes tailored for both light and dark modes. Organizations can replace the default interface with a branded experience that aligns the workspace with other company applications, making it more familiar and intuitive for agents. A new header bar gives agents quick access to settings and their light/dark preference, which can help improve satisfaction and efficiency during long shifts.

📘 Amazon Connect now supports connecting existing Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases directly to AI agents and allows multiple knowledge bases per agent. You can attach Bedrock KBs in a few clicks with no additional setup or data duplication, and leverage Bedrock connectors such as Adobe Experience Manager, Confluence, SharePoint, and OneDrive. With multiple KBs per agent, AI agents can query several sources in parallel for more comprehensive responses. This capability is available in all AWS Regions where both services are offered.

🔍 Amazon Connect now lets businesses automatically evaluate the quality of self-service interactions and surface aggregated insights to improve customer experience. Managers can define custom criteria and populate evaluations manually or automatically using conversational analytics and other Connect data to detect issues like repeated failures to understand customers, negative sentiment, or transfers to human agents. Insights are available in aggregate and at the individual contact level alongside recordings and transcripts to help identify opportunities to improve AI agent performance.

📧 Amazon Connect now supports automated email responses and routing driven by keyword and phrase conditions. Administrators can add the Get stored content block and combine it with flow constructs such as Check contact attributes and Send message to configure automated replies and routing logic. For example, common queries about product availability or shipment status can be answered without agent involvement, helping increase self‑service, reduce manual handling time, and improve routing accuracy across supported regions.

🤖 Amazon Connect now offers AI-powered case summaries that let agents generate concise, multi-interaction case overviews with a single click. Summaries capture issue background, actions taken, follow-ups, and recommended next steps to reduce manual wrap-up and speed resolutions. Administrators can configure custom prompts and guardrails to enforce organizational style and compliance.

🤖 Amazon Connect now provides AI agents that guide customer service representatives by recommending actions, retrieving information, and executing routine tasks on their behalf. These agents analyze conversation context and customer sentiment in real time to prepare documentation, calculate refunds, and initiate processes such as product returns. Organizations can choose out-of-the-box agents or customize agent behavior and actions to align with business workflows. The automation reduces agent workload, improves consistency, and lets representatives focus on complex, high-value interactions.

🔐 Amazon Connect now offers granular access controls for performance evaluation forms, enabling administrators to restrict who can view, modify, or use specific evaluation templates. Managers can be granted template-specific edit or use permissions aligned to business lines or functions, while agents and managers can be prevented from viewing particular completed evaluations. This reduces the risk of unauthorized access and simplifies form selection during evaluations.

🎙️ Amazon Connect now supports integrating third-party speech providers for end-customer self-service. You can directly use Deepgram for speech-to-text and ElevenLabs for text-to-speech alongside Amazon Connect’s native speech capabilities, orchestration, analytics, and compliance controls. The feature is available with Amazon Connect unlimited AI in all commercial AWS regions. This gives contact center teams more flexibility to tailor voice experiences and choose models that fit accuracy, latency, customization, and cost priorities.

📈 Amazon Connect now enables contact center supervisors to create custom metrics using a simple, no-code interface that applies mathematical operations (for example, addition, subtraction, sum, average) to existing Connect data. Nontechnical users can build tailored KPIs and immediately surface them in dashboards and via APIs without engineering support. Use cases include segmented average handle time, total agent outbound time by product, and queue performance filtered by contact type. The feature is available in all AWS regions offering Amazon Connect.

🔍 Amazon Connect introduces configurable criteria to automatically select relevant contacts for performance evaluations, helping managers target specific interactions for review. Managers can specify attributes such as inbound contacts with no connectivity issues and agent department to trigger a chosen evaluation form. New metric-driven criteria — including agent call avoidance, contact handling efficiency, and audibility — can also automatically populate evaluation fields. This capability is available in all regions where Amazon Connect is offered.

🔗 Amazon Connect now lets agents link related contacts — including email replies, call transfers, persistent chats, and queued callbacks — to an existing case using configurable flows. By enabling follow-up contacts to attach automatically, Amazon Connect Cases removes the need for custom logic or manual linking and helps present a unified customer journey to agents. The capability is available in multiple AWS regions; see the Amazon Connect Cases documentation to get started.

🤖 Amazon Connect introduces agentic self-service capabilities that enable AI agents to understand, reason, and take action across voice and messaging channels to automate routine and complex customer-service tasks. Nova Sonic speech models deliver more natural, expressive, and adaptive voice interactions that respond to customer tone, sentiment, and pacing across languages and accents. The feature supports blending deterministic and agentic experiences, automating tasks like order lookup, refunds, and troubleshooting while allowing escalation to live agents and is commercially available in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) in English and Spanish, with previews for French, Italian, and German.

🤖 Amazon Connect now offers real-time AI agent assistance and automated contact summarization for Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect (SCC-AC). The capability surfaces customer CRM records and knowledge-base articles to AI agents across voice and chat and provides agents with live transcripts and contextual recommendations. Supervisors gain enhanced call monitoring inside Salesforce, and automated post-contact summaries help agents quickly update cases, reducing administrative burden. Administrators can deploy and configure the integrated solution in minutes; it is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect operates.

🤖 Amazon Connect has introduced AI-powered predictive insights in public preview, adding five recommendation algorithms to its Customer Profiles. The capabilities analyze interaction history and behavior to power suggestions across self-service and agent interactions, supporting cross-sell, complementary product suggestions, and intelligent product discovery. The preview is available in multiple AWS regions and uses pay-as-you-go pricing for utilized profiles.

🤖 Amazon Connect now supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling AI-driven customer self-service and employee assistance agents to invoke standardized tools to fetch information and perform actions during interactions. Amazon Connect offers out-of-the-box MCP tools for tasks like updating contact attributes and retrieving case information, and allows flow modules to be exposed as MCP tools so business logic is reusable across deterministic and generative workflows. Organizations can also integrate custom or third-party tools via flow modules or the Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway to automate actions such as order lookups, refunds, and customer-record updates without human intervention.

📊 Amazon Connect now delivers built‑in analytics and monitoring for AI agents across self‑service and agent assist experiences. Administrators can use customizable dashboards to track key metrics such as number of AI‑led interactions, hand‑off rates, conversation turns, and average handle time, and to compare agent versions to find optimal configurations. The release also exposes AI agent traces via APIs and enables rule‑based automation to trigger alerts or actions when conditions like low sentiment transfers occur.

⚡ AWS Glue now supports materialized views stored in Apache Iceberg format and managed in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. Data teams can create views with standard Spark SQL, attach a refresh schedule, and rely on automatic change detection, incremental updates, and managed compute for refresh jobs. Query engines across Athena, EMR, and AWS Glue rewrite queries to use these views, improving performance by up to 8x and lowering compute costs, while SQL tools like Redshift and SageMaker can read the Iceberg tables directly.

🔎 AWS Marketplace introduced Agent mode and AI-enhanced search to speed solution discovery across 30,000+ listings. Agent mode provides a conversational procurement assistant that ingests use cases and uploaded requirements to deliver tailored recommendations and dynamic side-by-side comparisons. Users can refine results through dialogue, generate downloadable purchasing proposals, and initiate purchases directly. AI-enhanced search supplies contextual results with AI-generated summaries, adaptive categories, and AWS Specializations badges to spotlight validated partners.