MarTech360: Amazon Connect Uses GenAI to Enhance Customer Experiences (April 8, 2026)

MarTech360 highlights how Amazon Connect is leveraging generative AI to deliver more personalized, efficient, and proactive customer service. The article features a quote from Pasquale DeMaio, VP and GM of Amazon Connect: "With Amazon Connect, in addition to evolving customer service, we're also fundamentally reimagining how organizations build, nurture, and sustain customer relationships."

Key capabilities covered include automated segmentation for proactive outreach, customizable AI guardrails for Amazon Q in Connect, and AI-powered agent evaluations.

CXFoundation: AWS Introduces Predictive Insights to Modernize Customer Support Models (March 10, 2026)

CXFoundation explores how Predictive Insights is challenging the industry's long-standing view of the contact center as a cost center. The article highlights how this may "turn service reps into sales reps, suggesting additional products the customer appears to need, based on cross-departmental data, in real time."

Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, notes: "The introduction of a unified manager interface and expanded simulation capabilities addresses the 'trust gap' that has stalled enterprise AI adoption."

CXToday: Amazon Connect Wants to Kill Call Deflection as a Success Metric (March 10, 2026)

CXToday provides in-depth coverage of Amazon Connect's four Enterprise Connect 2026 releases — Predictive Insights, Assistant for Managers, Testing & Simulation, and Contact Lens for Email — arguing that Amazon Connect is pushing further into intelligent operations territory, well beyond its roots as a routing and telephony platform.

The article notes: "Predictive Insights is built around the idea that deflection is the wrong goal." Instead, Amazon Connect is using its unified data layer to turn "customer service from a cost center into a relationship-building engine."

🚀 Launch Announcement: Connect : Amazon Connect Outbound Campaigns now supports contact priority ordering

Amazon Connect Outbound Campaigns now allows you to dial contacts in configurable priority order based on up to 10 profile attributes for voice campaigns and voice activities in journeys. This helps you focus agent time on the most valuable customers or time-sensitive opportunities, improving campaign effectiveness and conversion rates.

With contact priority ordering, you can sort segments on attributes such as customer lifetime value, account tier, or appointment date. For example, a financial services team can prioritize outreach to high-value accounts nearing contract renewal, or a healthcare provider can ensure patients with the earliest upcoming appointments are contacted first. Initial dial attempts always take precedence over reattempts, ensuring your priority order is maintained throughout campaign execution.

🚀 Launch Announcement: Connect : Amazon Connect expands agentic voice speech-to-speech experiences to three new AWS Regions and ten locales

Amazon Connect now expands agentic voice speech-to-speech experiences to three additional AWS Regions: Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Europe (Frankfurt), along with new locales including Australian English, British English, Singaporean English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Korean. With these updates, you can deliver natural, human-like voice AI experiences to a broader range of customers across more regions and languages.

Amazon Connect's agentic self-service capabilities enable AI agents to understand, reason, and take action across voice and messaging channels to automate routine and complex service tasks. Connect's agentic speech-to-speech voice AI agents understand not only what your customers say but how they say it, adapting voice responses to match tone and sentiment while maintaining natural conversational pace.

🚀 Launch Announcement: Connect : Amazon Connect adds touchtone buffering for AI-powered self-service

Amazon Connect now enables you to automatically pass customer context to personalize self-service experiences from the moment a call connects. When a customer initiates a call from a website, mobile app, or notification link, you can automatically pass context, such as customer IDs, session references, and campaign codes, into the call. AI agents use this context to recognize the caller, understand the reason for the call, take action, and resolve issues without requiring callers to re-identify themselves or repeat why they are calling.

🚀 Launch Announcement: Connect : Amazon Connect outbound campaigns now supports hourly segment refresh

Amazon Connect Outbound Campaigns now allows you to refresh campaign segments as frequently as every hour, reduced from the previous minimum of 24 hours. This enables campaigns to reach newly eligible customers throughout the day rather than waiting for the next daily run.

With hourly segment refresh, your campaigns stay current with changing business conditions across all campaign types. A collections team can start outreach to newly delinquent accounts the same afternoon they are flagged. A healthcare provider can begin appointment reminder calls within an hour of a new booking. A multi-step journey, such as sending an SMS reminder followed by a voice call if the customer doesn't respond, can enroll new customers throughout the day instead of in a single daily batch.

🚀 Launch Announcement: Connect : Amazon Connect flow modules now work across all flow types and within other modules

Amazon Connect now supports the use of flow modules across all Connect flows, allowing you to reuse common logic and functionality beyond inbound customer experiences. Flow modules organize repeatable logic and create common reusable functions across the customer experiences you build with flows. For example, you can now use a module to share information about a customer’s recent transactions in an agent whisper flow, preparing the agent with relevant details and leveraging functionality that was previously only available as part of inbound flows.

Additionally, you can now use flow modules within other modules, enabling you to build complex logic by stitching together pre-built intermediary steps under a single module. For example, a credit card eligibility module can invoke other modules that check credit scores, verify income, and review payment history before making a final determination. This modular approach allows you to build reusable components that can be combined and extended as your business requirements evolve.

🚀 Launch Announcement: SES : Amazon SES Mail Manager adds new features for enhanced security and email processing

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) Mail Manager now offers enhancements to email security and processing while simplifying email infrastructure migrations. These enhancements include optional TLS and certificate-based authentication (mTLS) support in Ingress Endpoint, and two new rule actions: Invoke Lambda function and Bounce.

These enhancements benefit organizations seeking to maintain compatibility with legacy systems while implementing stronger security controls, and advanced email routing capabilities. For example customers can now configure STARTTLS as an optional TLS configuration, enabling legacy systems that don't support STARTTLS to connect to Mail Manager. With Mutual TLS (mTLS) in Ingress Endpoint customers can now used certificate-based authentication for enhanced security. The Invoke Lambda function rule action allows direct invocation of AWS Lambda functions from rule sets, enabling custom email processing workflows and the Bounce rule action provides RFC-compliant SMTP responses to sending servers.

🚀 Launch Announcement: Chime : AWS Service Availability Updates

We’re announcing availability changes to the following AWS services and features.

Services moving to Maintenance

Services moving to maintenance will no longer be accessible to new customers starting April 30, 2026. Customers already using these services and features can continue to do so. AWS will continue to operate and support these services and features. We recommend that customers learn about the changes in the product pages and documentation.

• Amazon Application Recovery Controller (ARC) - Readiness Check Feature
• Amazon Comprehend - Topic Modeling, Event Detection, and Prompt Safety Classification Features
• Amazon Rekognition - Streaming Events and Batch Image Content Moderation Features
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) - Message Data Protection (MDP) Feature
• AWS App Runner
• AWS Audit Manager
• AWS CloudTrail Lake  (CloudTrail Lake will stop accepting new customers on May 31, 2026)
• AWS Glue - Ray Jobs Feature
• AWS IoT FleetWise

Services entering Sunset

The following services are entering sunset, and we are announcing the date upon which we will end operations and support of the service. Customers using these services should click on the links below to understand the sunset timeline and begin planning migration to alternatives as recommended in the updated service web pages and documentation.

• Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle
• Amazon WorkMail
• Amazon WorkSpaces Thin Client
• AWS Service Management Connector

Services reaching End of Support

The following feature has reached end of support and is no longer available as of March 31, 2026.

• Amazon Chime SDK – Proxy Sessions

For customers affected by these changes, we've prepared comprehensive migration guides, and our support teams are ready to assist with your transition. Visit  AWS Product Lifecycle Page  to learn more, and subscribe to the RSS feed for future updates. 

🚀 Launch Announcement: Connect : Amazon Connect now expands testing and simulation capabilities to chats

Amazon Connect now allows you to test and simulate chat experiences in just a few clicks, making it easy to validate self-service chat interactions, customer service workflows, and their outcomes. For each test, you can configure the test parameters including the channel as chat, customer attributes, the reason for the chat (such as "I need to check my order status"), the expected responses (such as "Your request has been processed"), and business conditions like after-hours scenarios or full queues. After executing tests, results show success or failure based on your defined criteria, along with the path taken by the simulated interaction and detailed logs to quickly diagnose potential issues.

With this launch, you can run multiple tests simultaneously to validate your chat workflows at scale, reducing testing time. Companies can view test results and identify common failure patterns across all their tests in Connect's analytics dashboards. These capabilities enable you to confidently deploy new experiences and quickly adapt to your ever-changing business needs.

🚀 Launch Announcement: EUM : AWS End User Messaging now supports RCS for Business

Today, AWS End User Messaging announces support for Rich Communication Services (RCS) for Business. Traditional SMS arrives from a generic phone number that customers may not recognize, making it harder for businesses to build trust. RCS solves this by delivering messages through the same messaging app your customers already use, with a verified business identity that displays your name and logo. AWS End User Messaging provides a scalable, cost-effective way to integrate RCS into your applications. Beyond common use cases like one-time passcodes, appointment reminders, and delivery notifications, RCS enables rich conversational experiences that can transform how customers interact with your brand.

With RCS for Business, you can create and manage RCS agents (the resources used for RCS messaging) directly in the AWS End User Messaging console or through APIs. RCS includes automated SMS fallback, ensuring messages are delivered as SMS when a recipient's device doesn't support RCS with no additional logic required in your application.

RCS integrates with AWS services the same way SMS does today. Events route to Amazon EventBridge, Amazon CloudWatch, or Amazon Data Firehose, and inbound messages are delivered via Amazon SNS to destinations like AWS Lambda or AI agents powered by Amazon Bedrock. This enables you to build bidirectional, AI-powered conversational experiences directly in your applications, transforming text messaging from a notification channel into an interactive experience.

🚀 Launch Announcement: EUM : AWS announces End User Messaging Notify

Businesses want to send one-time passcodes (OTPs) because they are often the easiest and fastest way for customers to verify who they are. However, businesses are often surprised when it takes weeks or months to get phone numbers, complete carrier registrations, and set up sender IDs. Today, AWS announces AWS End User Messaging Notify to change all of this. Within minutes, a developer can use phone numbers and sender IDs owned by AWS to power their OTP use case and start sending right away.

With Notify, you set up a configuration with your brand name, turn on SMS, voice, or both, and begin sending OTP messages to over 200 countries using ready-to-use templates. You can customize your brand name, code format, and how long a code stays valid. Every API call includes built-in SMS fraud protection through AWS End User Messaging SMS Protect at no extra cost, catching and blocking suspicious traffic before messages incur costs. Spend limits give you another layer of protection by pausing delivery if your account hits its set threshold.

Customer Engagement What's New

April 14, 2026
Connect : Configure Schedule Adherence Thresholds in Amazon Connect to Account for Operational Variances
1. Introduction 1.1. What are adherence thresholds and why do they matter Schedule adherence is a Workforce Management (WFM) metric that measures how closely agents follow their assigned work schedules. Every contact center, however, operates with a degree of expected operational variance — agents finishing calls before transitioning to breaks, or handoffs running slightly long. […]

April 14, 2026
EUM : Upgrade business messaging with RCS on AWS
In this post, we show you how RCS on AWS End User Messaging solves customer engagement challenges through verified branding, interactive features, and automatic SMS fallback. You get a branded messaging experience with the reliability of SMS built in.

March 31, 2026
SES : Building an AI powered system for compliance evidence collection
In this post, we show you how to build a similar system for your organization. You will learn the architecture decisions, implementation details, and deployment process that can help you automate your own compliance workflows.

March 30, 2026
Lex : How Ring scales global customer support with Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases
In this post, you'll learn how Ring implemented metadata-driven filtering for Region-specific content, separated content management into ingestion, evaluation and promotion workflows, and achieved cost savings while scaling up.

March 30, 2026
Polly : AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS AI/ML Scholars program, Agent Plugin for AWS Serverless, and more (March 30, 2026)
Last week, what excited me most was the launch of the 2026 AWS AI & ML Scholars program by Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of AWS Agentic AI, to provide free AI education to up to 100,000 learners worldwide. The program has two phases: a Challenge phase where you’ll learn foundational generative AI skills, followed by a […]

Amazon Contact Center Blogs

Amazon Connect AI Agents (300 - Advanced Level, 3 hours Duration)
Build action-oriented customer experiences with Amazon Connect AI Agents. Configure Orchestration AI Agents that invoke tools via MCP to automate interactions. Two tracks: Self-Service (voice/chat automation with escalation) and Agent Assistance (real-time recommendations, note-taking). Covers knowledge bases, AgentCore Gateway, contact flows, Cases AI, Customer Profiles, and Email AI capabilities.

Amazon Connect Global Resiliency (300 - Advanced Level, 1 hours Duration)
The purpose of this workshop is to understand the steps required to enable Amazon Connect Global Resiliency and initiate a failover.

Getting started with Amazon Connect (200 - Intermediate Level, 4 hours Duration)
In this series of labs, we’ll build cloud based contact center using AWS Amazon Connect service and explore integration with other AWS services such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Lex and AWS Lambda to build modern and robust contact center.

Amazon Connect Workshops

April 14, 2026: The Amazon Connect Podcast - Ep.18 - AI Forward Deployment with Ayesha Borker

April 02, 2026: The Amazon Connect Podcast - Ep.17 - Amazon Connect Health with Sunil Menon

March 31, 2026: How to Configure Adherence Thresholds - Amazon Connect Forecasting, Capacity Planning and Scheduling

Please visit @AmazonConnectEnablement on YouTube

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.