Amazon Connect evolves the cloud contact center with machine learning

It wasn't until the arrival of cloud and unified communications platforms that contact center innovation took a giant leap forward, culminating with the advent of on-premise vendors like Cisco Systems and Avaya, and cloud-based communications platform like Amazon Connect. Built using the same customer service technology employed by Amazon, Connect was offered by its giant cloud services arm AWS with a pay-as-you-go pricing model that enabled customers to make major cost savings by iteratively adding only the features and applications that they wanted to – allowing savings of up to 80% of the cost of traditional contact centers, according to AWS. Amazon Connect is the first contact center platform built from the ground up with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) as part of the feature set. And at AWS's annual re:Invent virtual conference last week, a slew of new AI and ML-based features were announced that should aid customer service agents who are working remotely while helping them organize and make sense of analytical data in ways that only AI can manage. One of the new Amazon Connect services available in preview mode, Wisdom, uses machine learning to search through several applications and databases as the customer and agent are talking.