It is a reasonable question. It drives a reasonable set of product investments. And according to Pasquale DeMaio, VP of Amazon Connect Customer, it is the wrong question entirely.
Deflection, he argues, is dead. The goal is not containment. It is resolution.
You can hear why he thinks so, and push back if you disagree, at the main stage panel session at CCW Las Vegas on Wednesday June 24 at 4:30 PM in the Academy Ballroom. He will be joined by customer speakers from United Airlines and Citizens Bank, which is rather a good lineup for an argument about whether the customer service industry has been optimizing for the wrong thing.
I am inclined to think the argument is worth having. And I am looking forward to the session for exactly that reason.
What Amazon Connect Customer Is Announcing at CCW
There are two product launches at the event this week, both now in preview.
The first is the Agentic CX Designer. This is Amazon Connect Customer’s no-code visual canvas, built for CX and operations teams rather than development teams. The idea is straightforward: business teams, i.e. the people closest to the customer problem design and deploy the AI interaction themselves, without raising an engineering ticket or waiting for a sprint cycle.
It handles two kinds of AI logic in a single workflow. Agentic reasoning, where the system interprets what a customer needs and responds dynamically, and deterministic logic, where fixed rules apply and the system follows them exactly. Compliance steps. Payment flows. Identity verification. These cannot be improvised. The canvas holds both, governed throughout, without requiring the team that builds it to understand the architecture underneath.
The second launch is Live Sync. Amazon Connect Customer describes it as the only native enterprise technology that synchronizes a voice conversation with a digital, on-screen interface in real time. A customer speaks with an AI agent while simultaneously seeing, on their phone, the options being described. They can tap to confirm, select, or act, all within the same continuous conversation, without switching channels or starting over.
It is patented. The claim is that nobody else does this natively at enterprise scale.
You can see it running in the Amazon Connect Customer booth on an iPad. It is worth a few minutes of your time if you are on the floor this week, because reading about it and experiencing it are genuinely different things.
The Airline That Deployed It First
United Airlines will present the full story in their dedicated session On Thursday June 25 at 12:00 PM in Summit C, Caesars Forum. Hear how they built multimodal agentic automation at enterprise scale to handle Irregular Operations (IRROPs) using Live Sync. Learn specifics on what United built, how quickly, and what it changed for customers on the days when everything goes wrong at once.
The framing they are bringing to CCW is honest and I think it will resonate. Customer service has traditionally treated automation and customer experience as a trade-off. More of one tends to mean less of the other. It is an assumption most vendors have quietly accepted rather than challenged. United went from first build to production in under three months. Their numbers, due to be shared in full at Thursday’s session, make a pointed case that it does not have to work that way.
A Slightly Bigger Shift Than It Sounds
The two launches this week are connected by something beyond the product roadmap.
For most of the last decade, the customer service industry has been trapped inside a technology-first environment operating model. IT decided what got built. Development decided when it shipped. CX and operations teams worked with what they were given, raised tickets for what they needed, and learned to be patient.
The Agentic CX Designer does not just offer a faster path to deployment. It makes a structural argument: that the business teams who understands what a customer needs in a given moment is better placed to design the response than the person who understands the codebase.
You get the sense that Amazon Connect Customer has thought carefully about what that means for the organizations that buy their platform, and also for the ones that build it. . In April, they took a new name. The shift from Amazon Connect to Amazon Connect Customer was not cosmetic. It signals a move to going after the full customer experience. Acquisition, personalization, loyalty, commerce. The launches this week are the product expression of that ambition.
That conversation, between CX teams who want to move faster and IT teams who want to maintain oversight, is one I expect to hear on the floor at CCW in various forms this week.
It is probably the most interesting conversation at the event. It just will not have a session code.
Sessions Worth Your Time This Week
Wednesday, June 24, 4:35 PM – 5:05 PM: Main stage panel with Pasquale DeMaio alongside United Airlines and Citizens Bank. The deflection argument, customer validation from two industries, and what agentic AI looks like when it actually reaches production. CX Today will be filming a video interview with the panel immediately afterwards.
Thursday Jun 25, 12:00 PM – 12:45 PM, Caesars Forum, Summit C: United Airlines present the operational detail of their Amazon Connect Customer deployment, including their Live Sync implementation and what the results have looked like in production. CX Today will also be filming a video interview following this session.
Both videos will be published on CX Today in the days following CCW. If you want to be notified when they go live, the link is below.
I will also be at the Amazon Connect Customer booth on Tuesday if you want to see Live Sync on a screen rather than in a paragraph. Come and find me.
Rob Scott is Publisher of CX Today and will be reporting live from CCW Las Vegas. Follow the coverage at cxtoday.com our LinkedIn channel and on X via @CXTodayNews.
