AWS turned re:Invent earlier this month into a platform to accelerate its Agentic AI strategy. The cloud leader has taken a fast-follower approach in the Agentic AI race, launching toolkits and frameworks designed for enterprise-scale deployment and adoption.
Amazon Connect, fresh off crossing the $1B ARR mark, centered its announcements on packaging AI agents for its contact center suite.
For human agents, it offers prebuilt AI agents that support Q&A, case summarization, task automation, real-time recommendations, automated note-taking, and message writing. In one year, AI-enhanced interactions doubled from 6 billion to 12 billion minutes over a 12-month period.
For self-service, Amazon Connect has expanded its capabilities with AI agents and the ability to combine deterministic and agentic workflows. It also introduced integration with AWS’s homegrown voice AI model, Nova Sonic, delivering near-human voice quality with low-latency speech-to-speech performance. Paired with its per-minute, all-inclusive AI pricing unveiled at Enterprise Connect, it underscores an aggressive move to modernize voice self-service IVRs. Notably, ElevenLabs cut its pricing by 50% two weeks later, signaling a broader industry push for voice AI adoption as we enter 2026.
Another significant feature introduced is Journeys, multi-step experiences that can be campaign-driven or event-triggered. Building on the proactive service vision unveiled at last year’s re:Invent, Journeys lets businesses engage customers interactively via voice, email, SMS, or WhatsApp. Proactive service has long been elusive for customer service organizations. With AI, it is now both feasible and essential as self-service and automation de-intermediate brands from customers. This positions Amazon Connect at the forefront of a major industry trend.
In 2024, AWS shifted the Amazon Connect positioning from a composable suite to an all-in-one solution, highlighting its out-of-the-box capabilities. This led to the renaming of individual components into capabilities. Contact Lens, for example, is being subsumed into Amazon Connect AI-powered conversational analytics. Reference architectures, previously featured in nearly every presentation, were largely absent from the 25+ Amazon Connect sessions.
The composable suite remains a key strength of Amazon Connect, driving adoption among large enterprises and system integrators. At $1B ARR, expanding into the midmarket represents a logical growth path. This further aligns with Amazon Connect’s positioning within AWS Applied AI Solutions, a group with a core mission to democratize access to AWS’s AI services.
One related development is the OEM relationship with Zendesk. At the event, the customer and employee service specialist was named AWS Customer Experience Partner of the Year (Technology) – Global, and the companies announced a strategic collaboration agreement enabling the vendor to assemble a cohesive solution, Zendesk Contact Center, on top of its Resolution Platform. This zero-middleware solution extends Amazon Connect’s reach in the small and midmarket segments. Leveraging Zendesk’s positioning and track record of simplifying customer service is a smart move from AWS.
At re:Invent, AWS not only unveiled Amazon Connect’s agentic capabilities but also positioned its customer experience suite at the forefront of its strategy to drive adoption of its AI services.