Amazon Connect is an AI-powered customer experience solution that enables superior outcomes at a lower cost. Since its 2017 public launch, Amazon Connect has become an AI leader, transforming how organizations of all types interact with their customers.

In the Q3 2025 earnings report last week, Amazon announced a significant milestone: Amazon Connect achieved a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate, with AI optimizing over 12 billion minutes of customer interactions in the previous year. Even with these signals of success, Amazon Connect remains mission-driven, measuring results through satisfied end-customers, fulfilled agents, and delighted business leaders – just as it has since its inception.

Let’s explore the Amazon Connect story – from internal solution to AI pioneer.

🚀 Launch Announcement:  Connect  : Amazon Connect adds conditional logic and real-time updates to Step-by-Step Guides

Amazon Connect Step-by-Step Guides now enables managers to build more dynamic and responsive guided experiences. Managers can create conditional user interfaces that adapt based on user interactions, making workflows more efficient. For example, managers can configure dropdown menus to show or hide fields, change default values, or adjust required fields based on the input in prior fields, creating tailored experiences for different scenarios.

In addition, Step-by-Step Guides can now automatically refresh data from Connect resources such as flow modules at specified intervals, ensuring agents always work with the most current information.

🚀 Launch Announcement:  Connect  : Amazon Connect can now automatically select random samples of agent contacts for evaluation

Amazon Connect can now provide managers with random samples of agent contacts for evaluation, so they can provide fair coaching feedback to agents. Managers can specify how many contacts they need to review per agent, as per union agreements, regulations, or internal guidelines. They then receive the required number of contacts randomly selected from the specified timeframe, for example, 3 contacts per agent from the last week. Additionally, managers can use new filters to ensure that the selected contacts are suitable for evaluation, such as those with audio or screen recordings, transcripts, and exclude previously evaluated contacts.

🚀 Launch Announcement:  Connect   GovCloud  : Amazon Connect now provides agent scheduling metrics in data lake

Amazon Connect now provides agent scheduling metrics in data lake, making it easier for you to generate reports and insights from this data. For example, after publishing schedules for next month, you can access interval level (15 minutes or 30 minutes) metrics such as forecasted headcount, scheduled headcount, and projected service level in Connect analytics data lake. You can view aggregated metrics for an entire business unit (forecast group) or broken down by specific demand segments (demand groups). You can then visualize this data in Amazon Quick Sight or another BI tool of your choice for further analysis, such as identifying periods of over or under-staffing. This eliminates the need for manual reviews of agent schedules thus improving productivity for schedulers and supervisors.

🚀 Launch Announcement:  Connect   GovCloud  : Amazon Connect makes it easier to manage recurring overrides for hours of operation

Amazon Connect now makes it easier to manage contact center operating hours for recurring events like holidays, maintenance windows, and promotional periods, with a visual calendar that provides at-a-glance visibility by day, month, or year. You can set up recurring overrides that automatically take effect weekly, monthly, or every other Friday, and use them to provide customers with personalized experiences, all without having to manually revisit configurations. For example, every January 1st you can automatically greet customers with "Happy New Year!" and route them to a special holiday message before checking if agents are available, then on January 2nd your contact center automatically returns to normal operations.

🚀 Launch Announcement:  Connect  : Amazon Connect Cases now supports AWS CloudFormation

Amazon Connect Cases now supports AWS CloudFormation, enabling you to model, provision, and manage case resources as infrastructure as code. With this launch, administrators can create CloudFormation templates to programmatically deploy and update their Cases configuration—such as templates, fields, and layouts—across Amazon Connect instances, reducing manual setup time and minimizing configuration errors.

🚀 Launch Announcement:  Lex  : Amazon Lex launches improved speech recognition models for English

Amazon Lex now offers a neural automatic speech recognition (ASR) model for English that delivers improved recognition accuracy for your voice bots. Trained on data from multiple English locales, the model excels at recognizing conversational speech patterns across diverse speaking styles, including non-native English speakers and regional accents. This reduces the need for end-customers to repeat themselves and improves self-service success rates. To enable this feature, select "Neural" as the speech recognition option in your bot's locale settings.

🚀 Launch Announcement:  Connect  : Amazon Connect now provides agent screen recording status tracking

Amazon Connect now offers customers the ability to view status of agent screen recordings in near real time in CloudWatch using Amazon EventBridge. With screen recording, supervisors can identify areas for agent coaching (e.g., non-compliance with business processes) by not only listening to customer calls or reviewing chat transcripts, but also watching agents’ actions while handling a contact (i.e., a voice call, chat and task). Using Amazon EventBridge, customers can see status of each agent screen recording including success/failure, failure codes with description, installed client version, agent web browser version, agent operating system, screen recording start and end times from CloudWatch.

Customers can start using Amazon Connect screen recording status tracking by subscribing to Screen Recording Status Changed event type in Amazon EventBridge event bus.

🚀 Launch Announcement:  Connect   Lex  : Amazon Lex launches configurable voice activity detection sensitivity

Amazon Lex now provides three VAD sensitivity levels that can be configured for each bot locale: Default, High, and Maximum. The Default setting is suitable for most environments with typical background noise levels. High is designed for environments with consistent but moderate noise levels, such as busy offices or retail spaces. Maximum provides the highest tolerance for very noisy environments such as manufacturing floors, construction sites, or outdoor locations with significant ambient noise. You can configure VAD sensitivity when creating or updating a bot locale in the Amazon Connect's Conversational AI designer.

🚀 Launch Announcement:  Connect   GovCloud  : Amazon Connect now provides the capability to store nested JSON object and looping arrays

Amazon Connect now enables you to store and work with complex data structures in your flows, making it easy to build dynamic automated experiences that use rich information returned from your internal business systems. You can save complete data records, including nested JSON objects and lists, and reference specific elements within them, such as a particular order from a list of orders returned in JSON format.

Additionally, you can automatically loop through lists of items in your customer service flows, moving through each entry in sequence while tracking the current position in the loop. This allows you to easily access item-level details and present relevant information to end-customers. For example, a travel agency can retrieve all of a customer’s itineraries in a single request and guide the caller through each booking to review or update their reservations. A bank can similarly walk customers through recent transactions one by one using data retrieved securely from its systems. These capabilities reduce the need for repeated calls to your business systems, simplify workflow design, and make it easier to deliver advanced automated experiences that adapt as your business requirements evolve.

Customer Engagement What's New

January 16, 2026
 SES  : How to improve email sender reputation with Amazon SES Email Validation
In this post, we show you how the Amazon SES Email Validation feature can help you to protect your sender reputation using two validation approaches: the Email Validation API for timely checks during registration and Auto Validation to automatically review all outbound email addresses before sending and only deliver messages to recipients that meet your selected validation threshold. Both methods are intended to catch problem addresses before they become bounces, helping to protect your sender reputation.

January 15, 2026
 EUM  : Establishing finops management: Integrating AWS Budgets with WhatsApp using AWS End User Messaging
Today, we're sharing a solution that brings AWS Budgets alerts directly to your WhatsApp using AWS End User Messaging—enabling real-time cost awareness and faster response to budget thresholds wherever you are.

January 13, 2026
 Connect  : How the City of Virginia Beach modernized its emergency and citizen services with Amazon Connect
Read this post to learn how the City of Virginia Beach worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to modernize its Emergency Communications and Citizen Services (ECCS) using Amazon Connect, introducing AI capabilities that help serve citizens faster and reduce dispatcher workloads.

January 07, 2026
 Connect  : How NatWest Simplified Contact Center Analytics with Amazon Connect analytics data lake
Introduction As one of the UK’s leading financial institutions, NatWest Group delivers a wide range of banking services across retail, commercial, and private banking sectors. The bank enhanced its customer service capabilities in 2019 by deploying Amazon Connect across its contact centers. This implementation provided NatWest with comprehensive analytics and detailed insights into customer interactions. […]

January 07, 2026
 EUM  : Automate sender ID registration in AWS End User Messaging
This post explains how to programmatically register sender IDs, which can be used in many countries around the globe. The registration process makes it possible for businesses and organizations to send messages using an alphanumeric identifier instead of a phone number, making communications more professional and recognizable to recipients.

Amazon Contact Center Blogs

January 21, 2026: The Amazon Connect Podcast - Ep.15 - Amazon.com Contact Centres! What can we learn from them?

January 11, 2026: Guidance for Deploying Amazon Connect with Infrastructure as Code on AWS

Please visit @AmazonConnectEnablement on YouTube

January 12, 2026
Recurring events for operating hours
Amazon Connect now makes it easier to manage contact center operating hours using recurring events with a visual calendar that provides at-a-glance visibility. For more information, see Set overrides for extended, reduced, and holiday hours .

Admin Guide Release Notes

For more information visit the Release notes for Amazon Connect

Here's a list of all recent announcements related to Customer Engagement.

Here's a list of all recent announcements related to Amazon Lex.