Welcome to ACP

Speaker 3 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. Find out more about Cloud Interact by visiting us at cloudinteract.io.

Train to London

Tom Morgan 0:34

It's time for another ACP, and a special one this time as you find us on the 6:00 AM train to London. I'm here with Alex. Alex is commuting with me. Good morning.

Alex Baker 0:45

Good morning. Yes. Yeah, nice early start for us this morning.

Tom Morgan 0:48

The reason we're both sitting on a train together is that we are headed to the Amazon Connect Customer Community event. Now, it's a two-day event in London. Alex was there yesterday. I am joining him for today. Alex, nine years ago when Amazon Connect first started and you first got involved with it, did you ever imagine that you would be sitting on a train heading to a Amazon Connect customer, regional event, one of many being held around the world?

Alex Baker 1:17

No No, I guess not. And yeah, thinking back to then, it was definitely something new and exciting, but really in its infancy. And I guess it's impressive the changes that have been made over those nine years and the sort of constant velocity of change as well is really impressive. A- and I've mentioned it quite a few times before, but the fact that there was that sort of game-changing moment when you realized that you could just go and set up a contact center yourself and go and experiment with it I think that always made it stand out for me. But yes, not necessarily. But yeah, pleased to be here, and it's been an interesting first day at the event yesterday.

Tom Morgan 1:54

Yeah, absolutely.

Technical Day Highlights

Tom Morgan 1:55

And so yesterday was all technical day, and today is more business track focused. So I guess, I know you didn't get to go to a lot of the sessions 'cause we had a stand as well and you were on the stand. But what was the... the general kind of feeling? What was the atmosphere like during that technical day and your thoughts

Alex Baker 2:13

yeah, great atmosphere. It, it was, I think because it was the technical track day, there was a focus o- on allowing the more technically minded people to go and find out more about the product and do some learning. So there were a couple of really good workshop sessions around setting up Agentic AI and also around automating evaluations and quality monitoring. But yes, all in all, it was a really good, well-run day. A packed agenda, and it looks like today's even more it's it's starting at 9:00, and it runs all the way through, I think, till 6:00 with session after session. So hopefully we will get a chance to duck in and see a few of those today.

Tom Morgan 2:50

Excellent. Definitely getting our money's worth. All right. So we're gonna have a couple more coffees, I think, to get us ready. And then we're just gonna, we're gonna be there throughout the day, try and give you a bit of a sense of the day.

Post Event Reflections

Tom Morgan 3:04

So it's a couple of days on from the event, and we're back. We've had a bit of time to think about it and a bit of distance to reflect on the event. So this episode is going to be for you if you didn't attend, I think, and you want to really understand, what happened there and what mattered and why it's important.

AI Takes Center Stage

Tom Morgan 3:22

Let's start, I think, with biggest takeaways. So for me, I think the most interesting thing of the whole event was that, gosh, there was a lot of AI. If you came to this hoping to have a conversation and hear some sessions about call flows and channels and queues, you would-- a bit disappointed, I think. This was all about AI and Amazon Connect, and that was probably the biggest, If we d- if we needed it, the biggest reality check, I think, of where Amazon Connect is really focusing its efforts right now.

Alex Baker 3:50

Yeah. It makes sense, doesn't it? In terms of the whole, the re-- almost rebranding of Amazon Connect as the agentic AI service within AWS. But yeah, agree. I guess I probably wasn't thinking I'd go there and not hear anything about AI, but yes, it was completely front and center, wasn't it? Unsurprisingly.

Tom Morgan 4:10

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and you're right. Yeah, of course there was gonna be AI, but yeah, I was surprised that it was purely AI, and that seems to be the only thing that matters right now. And I know that's not actually true. If you look at engineering effort and stuff, all of the other stuff is important and keeps evolving. But in terms of what AWS are talking about right now, it's all AI all the time, and not just AWS, all the partners as well. Yes. What was your biggest takeaway from-

Alex Baker 4:35

AI themed as well. Again, perhaps unsurprisingly, but there was a lot around the sort of the increasing move towards AI agents acting as colleagues or coworkers. So there, there was quite a good bit in one of the keynotes around looking at it as an activity where I do it versus let's do it together versus you do it for me with your AI agent or agents. Yeah, possibly even agents. So a single agent may be orchestrating multiple other agents to go and do things for you. But it's moving away from maybe a year and a bit ago, it was the sort of the fairly-- the rigid almost chatbot format, wasn't it? Y- your ChatGPT type thing. Whereas now it's becoming much more of a sophisticated sort of hookup of different agents doing different things and acting as a almost a co-collaborator with you.

Tom Morgan 5:29

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, that was really interesting.

Ministry of Sound Vibe

Speaker 5:38

We've just arrived. We arrived a little bit early to set up our stand, 'cause we are one of the exhibitors here today, and I'm just unpacking a few bits and pieces. But the thing that really struck me is two things really. The first this is held at the Ministry of Sound, so it's everything you think it's gonna be It's like being in a nightclub, and there's some... There's a DJ. There's music. It's relatively loud. There's so high energy, which is really nice. There's a massive glitter ball above my head. There is cool lighting everywhere. There are there's some really cool stuff on the wall. But there's also breakfast pastries and coffee and yogurts and granola and all those sort of things that you'd have at a conference. So it's this really interesting juxtaposition. I really like whoever organizes certainly the UK Amazon Connect events that we've been to, because they all have this kind of similar vibe. They're super high energy, modern slightly edgy. But it makes for a great atmosphere I think, and much more interesting than just a bland conference venue. The other interesting thing that I've noticed is how many AWS people are here, and just listening to conversations and also people I know, there's people from the UK. There's people from the US as well. There's a whole bunch of US people that have flown over. I think that's a really strong signal as well about this event, and so really looking forward to catching up with some of them as well as the day progresses.

AWS Focus and Investment

Tom Morgan 6:55

As I said, lots of AWS people came in from the US. Why do you think that matters? Like, why do you think that's important, an event like this?

Alex Baker 7:06

It just shows the massive focus that Amazon Con-Connect is getting from the wider AWS organization at the moment. It's-- I think they've said a few times over the last couple of years it's one of the biggest growing services. We had that headline again within probably the, or certainly the last year where it exceeded the billion-dollar a year run rate or billion-dollar run rate anyway. But yeah I think it's, it just shows that it's really important to, to AWS, I think.

Tom Morgan 7:39

Yeah, definitely. I think there's definitely a thing you can use to find out or to work out, and it's not rocket science, but work out how big organizations probably tech org-- well, definitely tech organizations. This is probably applicable to other organizations as well, but I've noticed it with tech organizations. You can really tell where their focus is commercially by how much budget they get for things like events, for swag, for branded, whatever it is and for events and all that kind of stuff. And that's really obvious, and it's really obvious when it's cut as well. You can really tell what's important and what's not. And yeah, there was-- there's a lot of Amazon Connect people, there was a lot of Amazon Connect swag. Amazon Connect is having its time at the moment, I think. And that's-- I think that's-- that sends some signals about, where Amazon Connect sits inside AWS right now

Alex Baker 8:27

I guess it, it's probably a shrewd move if you think back historically, how often people do change their contact center stack. It's a pretty involved, pr-pretty big decision to make, and it's not like people tend to do it every year or two. It tends to be maybe five, seven, 10, 10-year change cycles. So them investing a lot upfront and trying to get as many people onto the platform is probably going to s- set them in good stead for the, yeah the next, five to 10 years in terms of ongoing revenue with some pretty big enterprises.

Tom Morgan 9:02

Yeah, definitely.

Workshop Deep Dive

Tom Morgan 9:04

Let's talk a bit through the sort of technical day which was the day before the one w-we were both at. I know you were there, but I wasn't there. So it was a bit more technical, and there were some workshops as well. An agentic AI setup one and a automatic evaluation, like a QM-based one. I know you managed to get your head into both of them, not completely, but you had other things to do. But from what you saw, what was being taught in those sessions, in those workshops? What, if people were going there, what were they getting out of it?

Alex Baker 9:32

Yeah. And one thing, and I have-- I've mentioned the workshops before on the podcast, and I am a big fan of them, and they always come across as pretty slick when they're being run in a big event like this, 'cause you've got I don't know how many people were, but, maybe 100 people, say, in the evaluation forms one. It's, it all seems to run pretty well. They set up environments for everyone, which are just throwaway environments. You get all the collateral so that you can run the workshop on the day, but you can also... you basically, you'll end up going home with a CloudFormation template to rebuild whatever you've built in the workshop. And it just, it always works, and it's well presented by the presenters. They take time to have somebody going around and checking people are okay with it and that they're not having issues. So yeah I think it was, it's a really good, it's a really good opportunity to go and just learn and immerse yourself in the whatever element of the product it was for a couple of hours.

Tom Morgan 10:35

I think it's interesting that it was those two sessions that they chose to run. Thinking about all the things they could have, the workshops they could have chosen to run, they chose those two. I think it makes maybe, AWS think that there's a friction right now for technical people in standing agents up because they're relatively new, so getting people upskilled in how to do that, and then also knowing whether they're any good once they're live, doing that evaluation part, which is it's slightly unglamorous, honestly, compared to, setting up the evaluations, but it's so important, and we know that from our work as well. And not only is it important because it's important to get things right and know when your AI agent is not getting things right, but it's a huge confidence builder as well, and I think that's holding, that's holding a lot of people back, is the fear of what if it goes wrong? What if it, tells my customers bad things? That's where evaluations can really help. So it's interesting to look at, the choices they made in setting up those workshops

Alex Baker 11:29

Yeah, it's a good point, actually. And I suppose one of my takeaways was that and like you say I hold my hands up and say I did only poke my head in the door of the AI agent one. I just thought it was important to mention that, yes, it is possible to set up your own agent in a short time, like in the workshop. And yes, of course, it will be extremely capable, but do definitely bear in mind that it isn't just a one-and-done thing. We're finding it so important to continuously monitor and track what the agent is doing and monitor your statistics a-a-around how it's, tool use, for example, how it's dealing with the queries, what types of queries is it not able to deal with. And that is more of an ongoing iterative process rather than a, I'll just set it up and and, let it crack on really.

Tom Morgan 12:19

Yeah. And that, that can be a bit of a problem with some of those workshops sometimes, is that the, in practice it's a little bit harder than they make it sound. And not always technically, but for some of those reasons that you say, is that y- you're not one and done. There is a whole bunch of things to do, but it when you're in the workshop in the moment it makes it seem very simple. You've just stepped through it, you've done it inside of an hour. Of course, you could just go back and do this and have something working inside of an hour. So it's, that's one of those areas where the workshops I think are really helpful, but you do need to position them against reality sometimes, and I think that's important

Alex Baker 12:53

Yeah. Agreed. Yeah. A-and like I say, I'm big fan of them, and I do think they and those ones in particular were run in a very slick way, and you do get something pretty cool and tangible to take away from it. But yeah, j-I just thought it was important to mention that. It's like it, it's and things like the business change aspect of it yes, it's great to go and do the technical setup, but there are a whole load of other things that are important, is what I'm saying.

Tom Morgan 13:19

Yeah, and that's related to something else we heard during the conference actually, which we'll play now.

Keynote AI Bosses

Tom Morgan 13:30

We're well into the event now mid-morning. We've been through the keynote and a couple of sessions. Alex, I thought the keynote was really interesting for kind of talking more generally about how we work with agents and with AI and not everything is fully autonomous. It's more about working out where AI makes the most sense and how to evolve your organizations to deal with it. I thought that was interesting.

Alex Baker 13:52

Yeah. And the- there was some interesting takeaways, weren't there? For instance, the prediction o- of AI agents being more sort of part of your org chart going forward. And the another interesting one was that you may have an AI boss sooner than you have an AI colleague I thought was quite interesting.

Tom Morgan 14:08

Yeah. That, that definitely there was a ripple of something around the room there. I'm not sure if it was nervous laughter or what, so we had lots of conversations at the demo stand, some really good conversations with people. But we did manage to get some sessions as well, as you heard. And I wanna get your take on this idea around, we could have an AI boss before we have an AI colleague. Is that realistic or is it something you say at a conference to get everybody, make sure everyone's listening and, get some social media interest?

Alex Baker 14:40

Yeah, th-th-that was, and I think that it came up again in the keynote from Matias Anduraga. Apologies Matias if I've pronounced your name incorrectly. But yeah he had some great points, didn't he? That around having an AI boss before an AI colleague, it sounds from what I'm hearing ,on places like LinkedIn that yes that's definitely possible and definitely happening. I can't remember which organiz-ization it was, but they categorized people into sort of builders and so measurers was another category, and measurers was, I guess your sort of broadly middle management, and it was that area that was being cut back in and you can imagine, yes, probably being replaced with some degree of AI. So yeah, it sounds like it's definitely possible and most likely happening in places.

Tom Morgan 15:33

Yeah. It's fascinating really, and it's-- I can't work out if it's deliberately provocative or whether it's a reaction to, the kind of top-down, you hear it from less educated or just less aware, CEOs and high-level managers are like, "Oh, we're gonna replace all coding jobs," and stuff like that. Whether it's a kind of reaction to that, it's actually, we're probably gonna replace all the management jobs first if that's all right because it turns out that might be easier. It's fascinating really. I'm reminded actually of somebody-- something somebody said to me like very early in my career. and I was a very junior dev and I was grumbling about a development manager because I didn't think he was very good And a more senior developer pulled me aside and was like, "He's probably paid less than you are." I was like, "Really? But he's the development manager." He's "Yeah, but he's just managing people." Just managing people is a whole job, right? It's not-- But he's not super technical, and he was quite technical, but he's not a developer. And so there was that... For me, that was a real like light bulb moment as a, inexperienced developer railing against the world. You don't think like that, but actually, yes, it's a different, it's a, just because you're managing a bunch of people you're not necessarily the best version of the best of all those people, it's a different discipline. Yeah, really interesting.

Alex Baker 16:40

A-and we've I'm probably just thinking about what order our podcasts are coming up in and don't wanna d- any sort of hit any spoiler alerts, but we have had discussions around Amazon Connect Talent recently. And the alm- almost like a glimpse into the sort of dystopian future of recruitment was quite an eye-opener there, where you can potentially just a-automate the whole recruitment process. It, yeah you can definitely see that the whole AI boss thing is not a stretch of the

Tom Morgan 17:11

No, and you've got to imagine Mateus is coming from that place of having had those conversations for six months and having spoken to enterprises about this for three months probably to get soundings on the ground. So actually to bring it out in a public place at a conference, yeah, you're right. Maybe it's sooner than we think. Yeah, really interesting. I came into this discussion thinking I'm not sure I'd buy that, but actually now that we've now that we've chatted it through, I'm like actually maybe I do. But it's, yeah. Okay.

Machine Customers Future

Tom Morgan 17:39

Interesting.

Alex Baker 17:39

other one I thought, a-again from Matthias's his keynote but mentioned in, in a couple of other places, a couple of other presentations, but the fact that your future customer might be a piece of code as well, I thought that was quite interesting. So not only is your boss potentially going to be AI, but also your customer is going to be AI. And it might look at the resources that your company has available, and it might make a pretty snap judgment on whether or not it will be your customer, and it will be that straightforward and simple.

Tom Morgan 18:10

Yeah, machine customers was the term. there was a speaker towards the end of the day called Clare Muscutt from Women in CX. Really good session, but introduced that term. I'd not heard that before. But it's, the idea that, yes, you will have-- on behalf of your u- your users, they will be using their own AI. So actually o-one of your customers might be an AI on behalf of a user. So this idea of machine customers and making the experience good for them because they will choose... they, they don't have loyalty particularly. They will choose the most efficient mechanism. So if you've got a terrible onboarding experience or whatever it is that's hostile to, to agents, then that's not gonna go down very well.

Alex Baker 18:50

Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting. O-one, one other point that I found mildly amusing as well, and it's another one of Matthias', but the fact that he suggested kids will look at the browser the way we look at the fax machine, and that it resonated with me 'cause I, I remember as a a sort of junior consultant going 'round and trying to trying to plug fax machines into analog gateways and just being perplexed by why the hell would anyone use these things these days. Not to say that people don't still use them 'cause we do. We see that every now and then. But yeah, I just thought it was amusing that thinking about our kids, they, they might have the same level of perplexity looking at a browser and thinking, "What's this? What's this for?"

Tom Morgan 19:33

Absolutely. I'm already noticing my browser use has dropped off considerably, and I expect, as not to cross over different technologies, but as Siri gets its game on, this year and through next year that'll drop even more. So yeah, really interesting.

CEO Simon on Momentum

Tom Morgan 19:51

I've managed to grab Simon, our CEO and leader. Alex and I were just talking about your your talk just now, and I said to Alex, it really feels like AI agents are having their moment at the moment.

Simon Leyland 20:02

Yeah, absolutely, Tom. We're seeing that in our business over the last probably three to six months now. Whereas maybe if you have 100 deals, 80 would be migrations, 20 would be AI agents six months ago, and that ratio's pretty much flipped, hasn't it? Yeah. Yeah,

Tom Morgan 20:18

definitely. Yeah, it's been s- loads of and loads of talk as well actually afterwards. I thought that was really interesting. There's loads of interest, which is, it's a risk at an event like this, right? 'Cause we're sponsoring it and, that's expensive. But actually I think in those conversations, that's where the value is as well, right?

Simon Leyland 20:32

Yeah, and I think- the industry's been talking about AI for, since ChatGPT, which was November '23? Yeah. Yeah, so- It

Tom Morgan 20:40

feels like a lifetime ago, right?

Simon Leyland 20:41

Yeah. So there's- they've had a lot of time to think about it, and now, as I said in the presentation, you need- you're probably at the stage of should we do it? Could we do it? How do we do it? I think in six months' time, you're gonna get pressure from everywhere going, "We have to do it," because it's real. It's a real impact. Customer experience is one of the best Obviously coding is a, is an amazing area, and, we've all seen that over the last few months. But customer experience is one of the first business ones that should go. And again, not cutting staff, but actually increasing capabilities to be able to talk to your customers and service your customers as well. Yeah, definitely. Yeah,

Tom Morgan 21:18

yeah. It, yeah it's mad in a way to think even a couple of years ago you wouldn't imagine that Amazon Connect would have their own regional series of road shows, right? Of multi-day events.

Simon Leyland 21:28

Yeah. There's two things there, isn't there? There's the one where Amazon Connect was this amazing service amongst 200 services which, let's be honest, probably got a little bit lost in the conversations with AWS account managers and their customers. And now it's right at the front number one, let's go. So that's great. But then the second thing is the technology is there now, right? Whereas, we I know we've had some discussions, quite passionate internal discussions about, is the agent good enough? Is the voice good enough? And I think we're there now. Is it perfect? Probably not, but it's absolutely good enough to implement in the wild.

Tom Morgan 22:01

I think people get really hung up about the quality of the voice, right? Is it human enough? Is it realistic enough? And it's yeah, but can you understand it? Can it understand you? Can you get your job done?

Simon Leyland 22:11

And we're also seeing, aren't we, Tom, we're seeing different requirements from different businesses. Yeah. So some businesses are saying, "We definitely want to, have an AI agent. We want it to sound like an AI agent, and declare it's an AI agent." And then we're also seeing businesses say, "Actually, we want it to sound as human as possible." Yeah. And, there are pros and cons of both, and we're the, we're there to help on both, 'cause like I see, EU Act, that's g- is that gonna be delayed now

Tom Morgan 22:36

or? Yeah. From what I understand, bits of it are s- are, I think, are still happening. The requirement to say that you're gonna be recording something, I think that still stands.

Simon Leyland 22:44

Okay. And I think that's, I think declaring, "Hey, I'm an AI agent, I'm here to help," I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

Tom Morgan 22:51

And finally, I think, I guess for people who are on the fence about jumping into this AI world, and also aren't necessarily at this event, but they're listening to this what's the next thing they should do? Is there value to them in coming to events like this? Is that, does that help? And 'cause it feels like everyone here is talking that story, but not every- it's not as if everybody's got it all sorted and has all the answers, right?

Simon Leyland 23:14

Yeah. So this is gonna be a difficult answer, 'cause I'm gonna sound absolutely one thing we all know about Cloud Interact and this broadcast is we don't wanna do a sales pitch at all, but you genuinely need to go and speak to experts. Yeah. And you need to, and you need to ask your AWS ac- account team to get you the experts in this area, whether it's us or somebody else. But you do need to speak to them, because there are lots of little things that can go wrong, and lots of little things that you need to do that, that is, is to do it right. So e- engage with people. And I felt a bit of a dummy actually, 'cause I kinda said, "Let's not do demos," and But actually, and you know better than anyone, Tom, don't you? With the AI that, with the, we use internally now, we can demo within one or two days, as opposed to 90 days. Yeah. Yeah. So we can show it people. So engage with us, we'll show it, we'll demonstrate it, and then we can get you in a 12-week process that actually gets you to production.

Why Attend Next Time

Tom Morgan 24:10

Okay, so if you weren't at the event and you're thinking about whether you should go for the next event, hopefully we can help sway you. So if you didn't go, I think for me, the biggest thing that you missed was genuine interaction with important people. And that's, people from AWS, but people from the community as well partners, and people that can answer your questions and talk honestly and openly about, what's working and what's not. And I think that interaction is really important. Alex, what about you?

Alex Baker 24:42

Oh, I totally agree. And, w-without having compared notes, that was going to be my takeaway from it as well. We remote work most of the time, and it is always quite a treat these days to go out and especially to an event like that with... It was a really cool venue. It was-- it seemed incredibly well-organized and slick. But like you say, there were loads of great people there old faces, new people to talk to but all super interested in Amazon Connect and it, yeah, having a community around it is really important, I think

Tom Morgan 25:17

Yeah, definitely. I think the other thing you probably missed if you didn't go was the real feel for the AI is here right now. And I think the audience was probably divided by people that are already doing this and are sharing their stories, and then a bunch of people that are not doing it and are starting to feel like they're being a bit left behind. That's the sense I got. I don't know about you

Alex Baker 25:39

Yeah yeah, good point actually. That's worth mentioning. There were a lot of people I thought that were there as Connect customers or users and probably having a bit of the, "Oh, what's next?" Or, how do we tackle agentic AI?" And I think they were there for that knowledge share and to get some inspiration from other people in the community.

Tom Morgan 26:00

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It's a good chance as well to see the state of the possible. Th- that's what the demos are good for. They're showing you what's possible. And I think the demos did a good job from everyone really of showing what's possible today, and I don't think there was anything in there that's unachievable. So they weren't, far out, future thinking, marketing mock-ups or anything like that. They were real demos using the technology because, yeah, because it's ready, as we keep saying. The technology is there. It's all the business change stuff that needs to happen, but that takes time. So I think for the next 12 months yeah, I think you need to have started this already, probably. I think if you wanna keep maintaining a competitive advantage would be my biggest takeaway from last week. Was yes, this stuff takes time, but everybody's started it. So if you haven't started it, don't panic, I wouldn't say. But it's, don't delay, probably. And there's, there's different ways to do that. Go find somebody talk to AWS, go find an expert to talk to But I think do make a start. If you've got any kind of thinking that AI and agentic AI could change how you work for the positive, and I think that's most industries, then you probably ought to have made a start by now

Alex Baker 27:11

Yeah, that's a good point

Final Thoughts and Wrap

Tom Morgan 27:13

We could talk about this all day, and I'm sure we will keep chatting to each other about the the good bits and the bad bits from last week. But it is time to bring this episode to an end. Thank you very much, Alex, for your time and your thoughts and also for spending the day. It was a really good day to to spend with you last week. Thank you everyone for listening. Be sure to subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way you won't miss it. 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're wrapping this call up now, and we'll connect with you next time.