Dive Brief:

• AWS is adding large language model capabilities to its contact center technology, Amazon Connect, the company announced Tuesday during the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. 
• The cloud giant is adding Q, its recently unveiled generative AI chatbot, to Amazon Connect to offer service agents recommended responses and actions they can use to answer real-time customer questions.
• “With just a few clicks, contact center leaders can leverage new capabilities powered by generative AI in Amazon Connect to enhance the more than 15 million customer interactions handled on Amazon Connect every day,” said Pasquale DeMaio, VPt of Amazon Connect, AWS Applications, in the announcement. “With these new capabilities, contact centers can consistently deliver improved customer support at scale.”

Dive Insight:

Since ChatGPT exploded on the scene last year, business leaders have experimented with where it fits in operations. Though overwhelmingly wary of bringing generative AI directly to consumers, companies are beginning to bring the technology to customer-facing workers, especially in contact centers.

Now, AWS is moving generative AI even closer to the customer.

“You can easily chat, generate content and take actions [with Q],” AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said at AWS re:Invent. “It’s all informed by an understanding of your systems, your data repositories and your operations.”

AWS insists that Amazon Q can be tailored to any business, and Selipsky says it has been trained on 17 years’ worth of AWS knowledge.

Q can help call agents address customer needs without help from supervisors, Amazon said, and by doing so, it will increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, all while reducing costs and improving productivity.

Traeger Grills is among Amazon Connect’s customers using Q. Corey Savory, VP of customer experience and service at Traeger Grills, said in the announcement that the company has tested Amazon’s new generative AI features in its call centers with promising results.

“We anticipate Amazon Q in Connect will improve agent efficiency by 20% by providing agents with generated responses and actions that are specific to customer needs,” Savory said.

There is evidence already that generative AI can boost contact center employee productivity. According to a study by Stanford University and MIT, agents who used conversational scripts created by AI increased their productivity by 14% on average. Most of that productivity, which was based on the number of issues resolved per hour, was among newer and less-skilled agents.