From acquisitions to more major agentic AI announcements, here are some extracts from our most popular news stories over the last seven days.
AWS Gives Amazon Connect a GenAI Facelift, Makes 10 Big CCaaS Announcements
AWS has embedded a host of generative AI (GenAI) capabilities across its CCaaS platform: Amazon Connect.
The capabilities cover self-service, proactive outreach, conversational analytics, and beyond.
In making the announcement, AWS lays the groundwork for its annual re:Invent conference, starting Monday, December 2.
Summarizing the release in a LinkedIn post, Colleen Aubry, SVP of AWS Solutions, wrote:
We’re putting generative AI to work, improving end-to-end customer experiences with these new features, including proactive and tailored customer communications, advanced self-service experiences with Amazon Q, customizable AI guardrails for safe deployment, and AI-driven agent coaching and contact analysis.
“These innovations will empower organizations to deliver relevant, efficient customer experiences while reducing costs.”
Amazon Q, as noted by Aubry, is the tech giant’s virtual assistant. In Connect, it supports contact center agents in suggesting personalized customer responses.
Now, AWS is making these capabilities customer-facing, cutting out the middle-man and having the virtual assistant converse autonomously with the customer.
As such, AWS may now offer the same “AI Agent” functionality that market rivals – such as Five9 and Cisco Webex – have announced and lauded over recent weeks. (Read on…).
Verint Acquires Cogito, Develops a Bot That Scores Live Customer Conversations
Verint has acquired Cogito, a real-time agent coaching and guidance solutions provider.
A company spokesperson confirmed the roll-up to CX Today, which was finalized in October 2024.
Already, Verint has harnessed Cogito’s technology to release a new bot for scoring customer and agent experiences.
The “CX/EX Scoring Bot” tracks all contact center calls in real time to attach live scores. Supervisors can then leverage these to monitor their team’s performance, with alerts recommending intervention and praise.
Additionally, managers and resource planners may take that insight to make targeted operational decisions that impact the broader team.
Ultimately, several other contact center AI providers have similar agent guidance propositions. However, the sophistication of Cogito’s AI proved to be a differentiator for Verint.
Indeed, Cogito extracts and evaluates 200+ acoustic and lexical signals in “milliseconds” to more accurately interpret the customer-agent conversation and inform the bot’s scores.
Sharing a statement on the acquisition with CX Today, the Verint spokesperson added:
The real-time coaching and CX/EX scoring technology developed by Cogito is an excellent complement to Verint’s CX Automation solutions.
“This is evidenced by our announcement of Verint CX/EX Scoring Bot, running in the Verint Open Platform as the newest addition to our Verint Agent Copilot Bots, which deliver stronger, faster AI business outcomes for leading brands around the world.” (Read on…).
Kore.ai Releases an Agentic AI Platform, Aims to “Transform How Enterprises Operate”
Kore.ai has launched a new Agentic AI Platform: AI for Work.
The vendor typically supports organizations in automating enterprise communications as a conversational AI provider.
However, with this release, Kore.ai is not only automating conversations and the processes behind them, but it’s also mechanizing more of the everyday tasks that run across enterprise communications platforms and into other enterprise applications.
How? With a no-code offering that allows enterprise leaders to build autonomous AI agents. These perform a single task but can collaborate to automate more complex workflows.
The likes of Microsoft, SAP, and Salesforce have already made similar agentic AI announcements.
Yet, Kore.ai isn’t tied to a “core” enterprise tech ecosystem and can drift between environments, which may offer a differentiator – alongside the vendor’s deep AI expertise.
Indeed, Kore.ai is both a Gartner Magic Quadrant and Forrester Wave leader in conversational AI, working with 400+ Fortune 2000 companies.
Differentiators aside, however, these autonomous agents offer teams – both in CX and beyond – significant potential to automate much more of the enterprise. (Read on…).
Twilio Segment Extends Its Linked Audiences Capability Across Amazon Redshift
Twilio has extended its Linked Audiences feature – from Twilio Segment – so it’s available for Amazon Redshift users.
As such, mutual customers may merge their data and layer over an “easy-to-use audience builder”, so brands can segment audiences directly from Amazon Redshift.
From there, they may activate their marketing tools without relying as heavily on data teams.
The feature is now available in beta from Amazon Redshift.
Those that leverage it may better connect customer profiles and “grow personalization at scale.”
Sharing more, Thomas Wyatt, President of Twilio Segment, detailed some of the additional features that the integration will deliver to customers:
“This builds on our existing Segment and AWS product integrations and enables data teams the ability to link Segment unified profiles to critical business entity data that lives in the Redshift warehouse.
Our data graph provides technical marketers with a rich view of the customer that can be used to send dynamic audience payloads that power impactful personalized campaigns in downstream systems.
So, let’s take a closer look at Twilio’s Linked Audiences innovation. (Read on…).
