Standing on the expo floor at AWS re:Invent 2025, you get used to the noise. It is loud. It is energetic. It is packed.
But the loudest thing I heard wasn’t a keynote announcement or a demo. It was a quiet observation from ZK Research’s Zeus Kerravala about the fragility of the contact center market.
While most of us were looking at the new agentic AI features, Zeus was looking at the balance sheets. I began to wonder if the industry is ready for the financial reality check he described. He thinks the traditional “$100 per agent” model is about to cause a lot of trouble.
You get the sense that the old way of doing business is becoming rather awkward.
The “Frankenstein” Dilemma
Zeus pointed out something interesting about the legacy vendors. They have spent years acquiring companies and stitching them together. He calls it the “Frankenstein” approach. It works, but it is heavy.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), conversely, built Amazon Connect from scratch. They didn’t have to protect a legacy revenue stream. This gave them a “clean sheet” to price things differently from day one.
“They built all that tooling themselves… unlike others who Frankenstein their contact center. That gave them an interesting inherent advantage as they look to disrupt the industry, because they can play around with pricing… If you were a standalone company, that would be very detrimental to the business.”
Amazon can afford to experiment. For a standalone vendor reliant on monthly seat licenses, that kind of experimentation is dangerous.
Stop Paying Salaries to Software
This is where the logic of the old model falls apart. We are moving toward a world of AI agents. But legacy vendors are still trying to charge for them as if they were human employees sitting in seats.
Zeus put it bluntly. An AI isn’t a virtual employee. It is code. It seems a bit odd to pay a salary for a script.
“It’s not really a virtual agent, it’s just a computer program. So charging by utilization, I think, is the fairest way to do it.”
If you have a busy season, you pay more. If you have a quiet week, you pay less. It is fair. But fairness is disruptive.
The Wall Street Jitters
Investors love predictability. They love knowing that 5,000 seats equals a specific amount of revenue next month. Consumption models are spiky. They go up and down. That uncertainty terrifies Wall Street, and it puts legacy vendors in a bind.
They have to change to survive the AI shift. But their investors hate the change.
“The investor community, for the most part, doesn’t like the space. They hate it because they know this disruption is coming… What does that do to an industry that’s heavily reliant on selling $100 agent seats? I think it’s maybe the biggest disruption we’ve seen.”
It leaves the traditional market in a rather precarious position. If they don’t pivot, they lose customers to Amazon. If they do pivot, they lose the confidence of their shareholders.
It is going to be a messy few years.
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