Several recent surveys show that more than 80% of consumers prefer spending with a credit card over cash. Thanks to advances in AI and machine learning (ML), credit card fraud can be detected quickly, which makes credit cards one of the safest and easiest payment methods to use. The challenge with cards, however, is that in some countries when fraud is suspected the credit card is blocked immediately, which leaves the cardholder without a reason as to why, how, or when. Depending on the situation, it can take anywhere from a few hours to days until the customer is notified and even longer to resolve. With Amazon Connect, a cardholder can be notified immediately of a suspected card fraud and interactively verify if the suspected transactions were indeed fraudulent over the phone.

Amazon Lookout for Vision is a machine learning (ML) service that spots defects and anomalies in visual representations using computer vision (CV). With Amazon Lookout for Vision, manufacturing companies can increase quality and reduce operational costs by quickly identifying differences in images of objects at scale. Many enterprise customers want to identify missing components in products, damage to vehicles or structures, irregularities in production lines, minuscule defects in silicon wafers, and other similar problems. Amazon Lookout for Vision uses ML to see and understand images from any camera as a person would, but with an even higher degree of accuracy and at a much larger scale. Amazon Lookout for Vision eliminates the need for costly and inconsistent manual inspection, while improving quality control, defect and damage assessment, and compliance. In minutes, you can begin using Amazon Lookout for Vision to automate inspection of images and objects--with no ML expertise required.

Over the last few years, there has been a lot of research and discussion in the media over growing concerns that AI is automating away many types of jobs leading to several industries requiring far fewer workers. But, in this article, whose title is of course inspired by Marc Andreessen's classic post, Why Software Is Eating the World, we take a look at a related but not as much talked about phenomenon that has been slowly and silently occuring of late. That phenomenon is the new and perhaps even more impactful trend of AI eating up managerial tasks and replacing the need for supervisory managers. One of the ways to look at the traditional responsibilities of a manager is via the lens of the team management lifecycle -- it starts with building the right team through recruitment activities such as interviewing and hiring people with the right skills, then allocating them appropriate tasks and assignments, making sure they perform their tasks per organizational and regulatory standards and guidelines, and lastly evaluating their performance to provide helpful coaching and feedback as well as taking remedial measures as required. In the following sections, we will explore how there have been several developments over the last few years which have led to radical changes in how each of these areas are performed by AI driven or AI augmented systems. It's probably not a surprise that the hiring process was one of the first to be disrupted by AI.

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.

Among the five new tools are one that uses artificial intelligence to help agents answer questions almost instantaneously and one that aggregates information about the customer from disparate data sources. Another makes it easier for customers to authenticate themselves when talking to an agent. The new features will help customer-service agents who are working from home while managing an increased volume of calls about everything from changes to travel plans to inquiries about unemployment benefits, said Larry Augustin, vice president of business applications for Amazon Web Services. The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. "The idea is to increase productivity for the agent and increase customer satisfaction for people calling in," Mr. Augustin said.

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the general availability of Contact Lens, machine learning powered contact center analytics for Amazon Connect. Amazon Connect is an easy-to-use cloud contact center that helps companies of any size deliver superior customer service at lower cost. With Contact Lens, supervisors and quality assurance managers can easily understand the sentiment, trends, and compliance risks of customer conversations within their contact centers. These insights allow companies to effectively train agents, replicate successful interactions, and identify important customer feedback. With millions of hours of call recordings, contact centers hold valuable insights into the brand perception and customer satisfaction of a company.

Last December during its re:Invent 2019 conference in Las Vegas, Amazon unveiled Contact Lens, a virtual call center product for Amazon Connect that transcribes calls while simultaneously assessing them. After a monthslong preview, Contact Lens today launched in general availability in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt), EU (London), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Amazon Web Services (AWS) regions, with rollouts in additional regions to come later this year. As customer representatives are increasingly ordered to work from home in Manila, the U.S., and elsewhere, companies including John Hancock, Capital One, Intuit, GE, Square, Fujitsu, and Dow Jones are turning to AI solutions like Contact Lens to bridge gaps in service. The solutions aren't perfect -- there's always going to be a need for human teams, even where chatbots are deployed -- but COVID-19 has accelerated the need for AI-powered contact center messaging.

Amazon Connect has always been a curiosity of mine, and I briefly worked in a startup whose primary focus was to make Call Center's life easier for its operators. During that time, I went to Manilla to shadow one of those places, and the amount of energy, effort, and patience to run such a business is fantastic! The first important discussion -- Call Center or Call Centre? Depends if you are British or not… so let's move on… I made different writings here so that everyone is happy:-) So I decided: I am going to build it. What is the use case?

Customer's expectations are the guard rails that guide how their relationships progress with any business. The pandemic has made the predictable unpredictable, erasing marketing personas of the past and re-writing them in real-time. Old guard rails and expectations are changing fast. Having an accurate outside-in view from the customer's perspective is the value VoC programs deliver, with the best ones providing data to guide strategy. Pure e-commerce orders have grown 110% since January, and e-commerce revenue has increased by 96%.

Customer's expectations are the guard rails that guide how their relationships progress with any business. The pandemic has made the predictable unpredictable, erasing marketing personas of the past and re-writing them in real-time. Old guard rails and expectations are changing fast. Having an accurate outside-in view from the customer's perspective is the value VoC programs deliver, with the best ones providing data to guide strategy. Pure e-commerce orders have grown 110% since January, and e-commerce revenue has increased by 96%.