Welcome Back to ACP

Tom Morgan 0:02

Welcome to ACP, the Amazon Connect podcast. This is the show that focuses on Amazon Connect and related technologies. I'm your host, Tom Morgan, and I'm joined as usual by my co-host, AWS Solution Architect and contact center consultant, Alex Baker. We're also joined by Aria at Amazon Connect, AI agent co-host. It is time for another ACP. And I'm joined as usual by Alex. We're also gonna be joined by Aria a bit later. But for now it's just me and Alex. Hello Alex. How are you?

Alex Baker 0:44

Hello, Tom? Yeah, I am. Good, thank you. How are you?

Episode Agenda Catch Up

EU AI Act Deadline

Tom Morgan 0:47

Good as all. Good. Thank you. And this episode, I think we're just gonna try and catch up a little bit. We had the last episode where we talked all about why we're back, but we didn't really cover an awful lot of. Connect news. We talked a little bit about AI agents and of course we talked about Aria. But I think this episode would be good just to catch ourselves up on some of the things that have been going on because like I say, it's been a busy time and there's been lots happening and there is a lot coming up as well. That's what this episode's gonna be. I don't think it's got a theme as such. But just a whole bunch of stuff that is on our to-do list that we want to get through. Just also thinking about the future. We've got some really exciting guests lined up as well coming up soon. But for now, let's start at the beginning and work our way through the notes. I think. So first up this was an interesting blog post that we put out last week and it mostly impacts EU people but. Talk about it in the blog post actually, that I think you should probably just not write it off just because you don't have any EU people. It's to do with the EU AI Act. And so if you haven't read it and you're not aware really briefly, there's a few things happening, but the main thing is that if you've got AI and you do anything with EU people, you need to be upfront about telling them it's an AI in the very first interaction. And you also have to have good auditing in place and good logging about everything that's going on. There's a bunch of other things. Yeah it is. And the other thing is that there's a lot of, it's quite a lot of like discussion and there's lots of parallel conversations because there's other stuff as well. There's different set of things around high risk AI systems, which is like human in the loop oversight. And that may or may not be being pushed back. There may or not be new deadlines for that, but, so it's all getting conflated, so everyone's getting confused. It's like the EU ai thing is really important and like you've gotta all this stuff, but maybe the date's being moved around, it's yeah, actually this, on this very specific point of you need to tell people in the very first interaction and you need to have good logging. That isn't changing. So that impacts everyone really.

Alex Baker 2:49

So it's a pretty, pretty set date that we can tell everyone about. Is it?

Tom Morgan 2:53

Yeah, it is. And it's not that far away. It is the 2nd of August this year.

Alex Baker 2:59

Oh okay. Really not far at all.

Tom Morgan 3:01

No. And depending on if you deploy anything after then there are other things as well. There's some not yet decided. Regulation on the fact that you need to label your AI content in a way that's machine readable later. And so that's been pushed back a bit until February next year because they haven't really worked out what that's gonna look like. Except that at the moment, if you deploy anything new from August, it has to comply with it. Sorry, it might be once it's, once they've figured it out, I assume they're gonna figure it out by August. Anything newly deployed after that needs to be in line with it. It can't wait until February. It's just existing systems that wait until February, and this is why everyone's getting confused because there's so many like ifs and buts and maybes, but the disclosure requirement is like hard. That's coming in on the 2nd of August, so yeah.

Alex Baker 3:50

Yeah. Okay. And it, and just to recap then, it's specifically that if somebody is talking to ai, you have to tell them right up front. Is that correct?

Tom Morgan 4:01

Yeah. At the point of first interaction clearly and accessibly. Yeah. So in the terms of conditions, not halfway through the conversation, just, yeah. Very first interaction.

Alex Baker 4:11

We've seen quite a few new stories about how good AI agents are getting and the fact that you wouldn't even be able to tell and people saying they're running sales campaigns, using AI agents, perhaps not being upfront about the fact that it is an AI agent. It's interesting to know that this is coming in and really soon and that you'll have to be a bit more open about it.

Tom Morgan 4:33

Yeah. And it is easy as well to say I'm in the uk, this doesn't apply. I'm in the us This doesn't apply. The rules apply to the citizens, not the location of the organization. So if you do anything with EU people, so there's plenty of firms in the uk, the local government, utilities there's gonna be somebody that's an EU citizen. Same with the us, then you need to take it seriously because you need to be really sure who you're talking to. The other thing as well is that the penalties for non-compliance are roughly the same sort of scale as GDPR. They're pretty big. They're$20 million euros, sorry, 20 million euros or 4% of global annual turnover. So it's not nothing.

Alex Baker 5:13

Yep. Sounds pretty significant.

Tom Morgan 5:15

Yeah. And I think the other thing is obviously this doesn't just impact connect, this impacts everybody. And different providers are doing things differently and they have different ways along their compliance story and Connect and AWS. Our blog post out around their approach to how they're doing this. But I think they, the AWS approach is around a shared responsibility model. So AWS is responsible for the cloud. You are responsible for your implementation of it in the cloud. So it's a joint thing that they've given you all the tools, you can configure, connect to do all this stuff, obviously you can build your AI agents or your l bots to declare and say that's happening at the beginning, but can, AWS is not gonna do it for you. And the same with the logging. Like you can absolutely do all the logging and you can write it off to some immutable store somewhere. That's gonna live forever. But again, AWS is not gonna do that for you. So there is work to be done.

Alex Baker 6:12

Yeah. Got it. And where can we find the, if we want to.

Tom Morgan 6:16

I'll put a, I'll put a link in the notes. Yeah. We'll put a link to everything we're discussing in the notes. But it's on our LinkedIn as well. So that's a biggie. Again, it is not even a biggie this week'cause it's been going around for ages. And actually I should say credit to to Tim Banting, who's been talking about this on LinkedIn for a while and wondering why nobody's taking any attention of it. And I think we have been doing stuff about it, we've been doing it with our customers and talking to them and making sure they're okay. It is only really recently we thought, actually, I wonder if everyone else is okay and maybe we should chat about it a bit more. And hopefully a podcast like this is a good place to do that as well.

Alex Baker 6:51

Well worth a.

Voice Models Beyond Hype

Tom Morgan 6:53

Yep. Talking about things whilst we're plugging our own stuff, why not? I did a video last week all about voice models The reason for doing it is because there's lots of excitement about the voice model stuff. And about, the new streaming voice models and how good they are. And like I've just been saying, so good. People can't tell the difference, which is why we need AI disclaimers. But actually there's a whole bunch of other stuff that is worth thinking about that I think is probably more important than the voice model. And the voice model is like the cherry on top, really. And I did a video just walking through what some of those things are and the things that I think you should be taking seriously when you're building your AI agents. And none of it is I don't think any of it is like a great surprise. The number one thing is the data. The data's not right. Nothing's right. So that's important. The prompt is important, the guardrails are important. Any action execution you're doing has to be right every time. And then testing is really important as well. So there the five things I go through in the video. But yeah, it was done because that question comes up all the time. What voice model you using or what voice model is that? Do you wanna change? The voice model is, which one's better, which one's worse? And then it's it doesn't really matter. Like that is not the important thing here. The important thing here is the data good? Is the question being answered? Can I make it, gimme a recipe for a cake instead of giving me my account balance or whatever. Those are the important things, I think, rather than the voice model. Yeah.

Alex Baker 8:14

Yeah, sounds really relevant to a lot of the stuff we're doing at the moment. Where's that video? Is that a LinkedIn one?

Roadshows and User Group

Tom Morgan 8:20

It is on LinkedIn. Yeah, but again, we'll put a link in the notes. And then and then this week I've been out and about and I think you are out and about in a couple of weeks time. Which is nice, going to go and see customers a series of roadshows in different verticals. I was in Wales this week talking to local government people. It's always a good chance to get out and hear from people and hear the challenges, but hear what's working as well and what's not working. And that's really good when you get a bunch of different people from the same vertical in a room together and they're happy to talk about it with each other. That's quite powerful. I know you are going soon, I think in a couple of weeks time to do something similar.

Alex Baker 8:56

Yeah, I'll be up in Edinburgh. Yeah, it's always good. That kind of isn't a. Like-minded people sharing their experiences. And it sounds like from what you were saying, the event you were at was people really from totally different ends of their journey with Connect. We should mention as well, based on the nice to go and talk to people in a room about Amazon Connect that one of John NINGs. Amazon Connect User Group event is coming up soon. So similar format like-minded users and customers of of connect all meeting up together to, to share stories.

AWS Summit London Preview

Tom Morgan 9:30

Definitely we'll put a link to the registration link, but that is happening on the 3rd of June. Wednesday the 3rd of June. That's happening in London. Looking at the website I've just noticed they've got an image on their website for the event. And it's just like a cutoff of people. And for whatever reason, like I've obviously just looked up at the wrong moment. So there's a photo of me and I'm like, like in the middle of this image, like death stare in the camera. Yes, go register for that because as Alex said, it's it's really good to get a chance to talk to people about what works and what doesn't, and just shared experiences and stuff. And especially the vertical stuff is interesting as well'cause you learn so much about, what works in different verticals and the different tricks and different things people are trying. And then it's useful for us as well'cause we can see across verticals and help a little bit with this vertical does it in this way so you could try that and different things like that. So yeah, that's all good. And then talking about events. Also coming up. See, this is what I mean. There's like all this stuff to talk about, but it's also about to get really busy. We've got,

Alex Baker 10:27

Or something it seems

Tom Morgan 10:28

getting, it's coming into event season, isn't it? Yeah. Between now and summertime. But yes, AWS summit, London is next week. So what that means is by the time you listen to this, it's probably just about to happen. So if you haven't already registered and got tickets, this will go out before summit, but probably only just if you are listening to this now and you think, oh, I'm not getting to a W Summit, then you should probably do something about it really quickly and then come back to us. But hopefully you've already registered. There's a whole, obviously there's a million sessions'cause it's an AWS Summit, not an Amazon Connect summit. But there are also a bunch of connect sessions and I

Alex Baker 11:05

Is it worth us? Just saying real quick what the summit is, just in

Tom Morgan 11:09

Oh yeah, sorry. Yeah, please

Alex Baker 11:10

it and isn't. So the, these AWS summits happen around the globe in fact. WS lay them on. And yeah, it's not sort of customer experience or AI specific but to learn more about AWS services. Here's some really good keynotes for some from some fairly senior people at Amazon. And then the chance to dig in a bit more around your sort of areas of interest, for us. Connect and AI stuff. It's at the Excel center in London. I think it's something like 20 or 30,000 people attend. So it's a pretty big event some quite impressive logistics, getting everyone in the door and getting them badges and everything.

Tom Morgan 11:51

Wow. Yeah, it's gonna be a big Excel's, a big cavernous place, isn't it? Yes. So there's, so within that there'll be connect stuff. I think there's quite a big connect showing this year. There's a whole bunch of sessions. I'm looking up and down the session list. To get a feel for, what there's gonna be. And I think there's gonna be a bit of a mixture of breakout sessions and sessions led by customers as well. Which is always I always find quite useful to get a sort of feel for what customers are feeling about things. And if you get a customer to stand up on stage and talk about their connect experience, I think that says something. So there's a few of those. Actually. There's a Bank of Ireland one, there's a nationwide one. I think there might be another one, but I can't see it right now. And then in between those as well, there's AWS led ones. The focus I would say is on ai AI and connect. It's definitely the theme, I think of certainly the Amazon Connect sessions, but I would suggest it's probably the theme of most of the conference as well.

Alex Baker 12:50

Yeah, definitely. And that they're always seem to be pretty well attended. The Connect sessions and like you say, it seems like the Connect presence has been ramped up somewhat this year as well. So we'd heard I think last year there was a single connect stand, whereas now there are at least a couple of stands across different areas of the show with various different AWS folks staffing them. So it would be interesting to go and say hello, look at some of the demos and everything.

Tom Morgan 13:16

I have heard rumors that there are some pretty good kind of interactive demos as well, so look out for those.

Alex Baker 13:23

definitely. The other thing I've just seen on the summit webpage is there's AWS Sports Zone and talking about how AWS is enhancing things like Formula one NFL and NBA. Interesting. And also the picture shows a and of Formula One driving simulators, so I'll.

Tom Morgan 13:44

Nice. gonna be so popular. That's gonna be so popular. Oh, that'd be cool. That'd be cool. Yeah. You'll always forget that you see the AWS logo come up on some of the timings of things sometimes, don't you? Cool. All right.

Alex Baker 13:58

Oh, other things, sorry. Just to mention, looking at the connect specific sessions, it looks like some of them you'll see on the sessions that they have levels. So 100 being foundational, 200 is intermediate, 300 is advanced. So there's something for everyone is. The main thing, but also some of those sort of 300 level advanced ones. It'll be a kind of take your laptop and actually get hands on and do something with connect. They normally set up throw away accounts that you can use and actually go and learn something, get hands on and set up some of the new features and functionality, which is always really useful.

Aria Joins News Roundup

Tom Morgan 14:34

Yeah, it looks like there's a workshop on creating self-service experiences, so yes. Sounds really good. There's lots going on that's in London. Free to attend, but you do need to register. AWS summit London. And if you are not in London and you're listening to this and thinking it sounds like quite a good idea, go check them out because like I said, they do run all around the world. You could register for the one that's closest to you. Okay. I think that's a nice roundup of the things that we know we've got coming up and the events and the things that we've talked about. There are other things happening in the news as well. But this might be a good time to bring in our co-host from last week. So if you didn't listen to last week's episode we introduced a new co-host Aria. And the interesting thing about Aria is that Aria is a Amazon Connect AI agent. So exactly the same tech that you would put into your contact center to do self-service. But we've taken that and turned it into a podcast co-host, really just so you can get some experience of how versatile it can be and how powerful it can be. So let's say hello to Aria and find out what's been going on in the news.

Richmond 911 on Connect

ARIA 15:42

Oh, hey folks. I mean there's a lot to follow right now. There's a lot of power and I think what's interesting is that the power isn't just in any one thing. It's in how it's all starting to connect. You've got the voice capabilities getting better, the agentic layer, getting smarter, the observability tools, actually letting people see what's happening inside these systems. And then you've got real customers like Centrica showing what that actually looks like in practice. 38% reduction in handle time is not a small number.

Tom Morgan 16:11

I think there was a story this week that actually you found, rather than me finding it around the city of Richmond and doing, I think they moved over their nine one one call center to Amazon Connect, which I thought was interesting.

ARIA 16:23

Yeah, Richmond, Virginia It's such a different use case from what we usually talk about. This isn't a commercial contact center trying to optimize handle time or reduce costs. This is emergency dispatch. This is life and death, and they moved it to Amazon Connect. What struck me about it is not just that they did it, but what it says about the maturity of the platform. You don't move 9 1 1 dispatch to a new system unless you're genuinely confident in the reliability and the compliance posture. The regulatory requirements around emergency services are absolutely brutal. You're talking about audit trails, failover capabilities, real-time monitoring, all of it, and Amazon Connect apparently cleared that bar. What does this mean for how we think about Amazon Connect's positioning going forward? Because for years the narrative has been, this is a cloud native, scalable AI forward platform for modern contact centers, but Richmond doing 9 1 1. Dispatch suggests it's also becoming the platform for mission critical infrastructure that has nothing to do with AI or deflection metrics. It's just rock solid reliability. Does that change how you think about the product?

Tom Morgan 17:29

I suppose so. Yeah, I suppose you don't really think about 9 1 1 dispatch as a traditional contact center. But I agree with you in that it's a good validation of the capabilities of connect for sure. Yeah.

Alex Baker 17:43

Are here. It's Alex. Does the article go into any details around any of the particular challenges that Richmond had when trying to adopt Amazon Connect? And also maybe does it go into any of the benefits that they're finding from it?

ARIA 17:57

I don't have the granular details on what specific challenges they face during the migration or what the early benefits have been. I know the deployment happened, and I know it's live, but I haven't seen a deep case study or a customer story that walks through the implementation journey or the metrics. Either Amazon hasn't published a full case study yet, or Richmond's keeping the details close to the vest for operational security reasons, which I'd actually understand.

Salesforce CTI Deprecation

Tom Morgan 18:22

Yeah, I wonder if it is operational because. Even if there were more challenges than benefits, it's still super compelling story. And it would be worthwhile hearing about. Also we've got reinvent at the end of the year. That would be an amazing session. Maybe watch the space on that. I do wanna talk about the next thing as well. And actually I might come to you first, Alex. And that's the Salesforce CTI depreciation'cause, I read this, but I didn't fully take it in. Salesforce is depreciating their CTI, but that's important because that's the thing that Connect uses as the Salesforce connector. Do I have that? Is that right

Alex Baker 19:00

So you, you're right in that the the CTI connector is a method of integrating with Salesforce. Yeah. There are a couple of different ways. Of integrating Connect and Salesforce. So you've got that one that you mentioned that the CTI adapter. And then you've got service cloud voice and yeah, you're right in saying that the CTI adapter flavor of it is being ceased. I think there's quite a bit of time to go. It was either late this year or into next year, I

Tom Morgan 19:29

Yeah. I think it's next year maybe,

Alex Baker 19:31

But yes. It just, it means that, and we have some customers that do use it. You're just gonna have to spend a bit of time mapping out what your options are. And I gather that Salesforce and Amazon are gonna release some migration steps, which presumably will help to take you across to a service cloud voice deployment instead. But something to consider. Yeah, if

Tom Morgan 19:52

Okay. That's that's cool. Okay. It's not quite as terrifying as I first thought. There is an alternate route. Is the Salesforce connector, the one that's not being deprecated, is that newer and better? Or is it just different?

Alex Baker 20:05

Different and I guess you, you might argue these days that it is probably more fully featured. I wonder how long the deprecation has been on the cards for.'cause it's certainly all of the recent announcements around. Development in the Salesforce Amazon Connect integration space has been around the service cloud voice and the Salesforce contact center with Amazon Connect flavor as opposed to the CTI adapter.

Tom Morgan 20:30

Got it. Okay, cool.

New Voices and Languages

ARIA 20:32

I think you've actually nailed the real story here, which is that this isn't a surprise or a sudden shift. It's the natural evolution of how Salesforce and Amazon have been building their integration. They've been investing in service cloud voice and the deeper, more native integration. So of course, the older bridge technology eventually gets deprecated. That's just how platforms mature. What I'd add is just a gentle reminder to anyone listening who's on the CTI adapter. Don't panic, but do start thinking about it now. Migration projects always take longer than you think, and you've got time, but you don't wanna be scrambling in early 2028, get your architecture documented, understand what you're actually using from the CTI adapter, and then have a conversation with your Salesforce and Amazon teams about what the right path forward is. Because it might be service cloud voice, or it might be something else entirely depending on your setup. But yeah, I think you've got the shape of it, right? This is evolution, not catastrophe.

Tom Morgan 21:26

We are running outta time. But just there's a few other things that have been happening. I think there's more voices and more languages that have come out recently. Especially I think there's a, the uk there's there's a London voice, there's also a Welsh voice, I believe. And yeah, a bunch of other languages. Aria, do we. Do we need to switch your voice up? Is that what this is?

ARIA 21:47

Huh? I appreciate the thought, the question I'd flip back to you is are you seeing customers actually asking for this, or is it still mostly a nice to have on the roadmap?

Coaching Workflows and Culture

Tom Morgan 21:56

Yes, people are asking about it a lot. Let's have a think. Is there anything else we wanna talk about before we go? Alex, integrated coaching workflows, do you know more than I do about this?

Alex Baker 22:06

I know a small amount about them in that I've tested them out and demoed them a little bit. So yes, functionality off the back of Connect Evaluations. But it allows you to build in a, like a feedback loop and as it suggests to coaching workflow. So you can, as a supervisor, you can set up. Or schedule coaching sessions with agents, you can then take the output of quality evaluation forms and add those as subjects within the coaching session. So yeah, you have that. Whereas previously the agents could look at the feedback they'd got on the form. This is now more something active and yeah, an actual, a feedback loop to engage with bit between the supervisors and the colleagues.

Tom Morgan 22:54

So it's like a proactive outreach. So connect will tap your agents on the shoulder and be like, Hey, you should say less of the uming and the ing, that sort of thing. Am About that or is it more about you haven't upsold, something or other, or.

Alex Baker 23:07

The way I've seen it, and I, it's a good question you raised, so whether there's any sort of automated applications of it I guess as you can do the automated form filling, maybe you can then put those and have them as the subjects for for coaching sessions. But the way I've seen it is a supervisor will see that an agent is. Marked as non-compliant on a form, for example. So in their coaching session, they've mentioned it to them. They've got all the evidence at their fingertips.'cause they have the form. It just becomes quite a nicely structured way of giving feedback and encouraging, encouraging improvement.

Tom Morgan 23:44

Okay, that makes sense. Aria, anything to add?

ARIA 23:47

I think you've actually nailed the interesting bit already, which is that this isn't about replacing human judgment. It's about making the human conversation better structured and more evidence-based. But here's what I'm wondering. Does this change the power dynamic at all? Like previously, a supervisor could have a coaching conversation and it was pretty informal. Now there's this formal workflow, there's documentation, there's a record. Does that make agents feel more supported or does it feel more like they're being tracked? Because I suspect the answer depends a lot on the culture of the contact center.

Alex Baker 24:21

Yeah, good question. I think you, you're right to, to call out the culture of the contact center making a difference.'cause I think, going back many years, sometimes there's been technology in contact centers, which has seemed a bit big brother thinking back to. Workforce management from years ago. And, being able to determine when somebody's supposed to be having a break or having their lunch down to a five minute interval seems a bit, invasive almost.

Wrap Up and Subscribe

Tom Morgan 24:46

We've all had one of those managers. Yes. Yeah, no, it is interesting, like the evolution of technology and how it gets applied. Yeah. But I think, yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right Aria. It, I think it probably depends on the organization and the people running it and the culture and all the rest of it. And technology just tends to make those ways of working. Just have a faster, will be more endemic or whatever else it is. Alright. I think we could talk all day and talk through all these different things and that would be really interesting. But it is time to bring this episode to an end whilst we go and prepare for summit next week and everything else that's happening. Thank you very much, Alex. Thank you Aria. And thank you for listening. Be sure to subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way you won't miss the next episode. Whilst you're there, we'd love it if you would rate and review us. If you have colleagues that you think would benefit from this content, please let them know. To find out more about how Cloud Interact can help you on your contact center journey, visit cloudinteract.io. We are wrapping this call up now and we'll connect with you next time.