CMSWire: Customer Contact Week 2026 — Capturing the AI Announcements (June 23, 2026)

CMSWire's CCW roundup highlights Amazon Connect's Agentic CX Designer and Live Sync alongside announcements from across the industry. The article notes the broader shift: "Multiple CCW announcements center on giving non-technical users direct control over building, testing, and shipping AI-powered customer experiences."

At Customer Contact Week 2026 in Las Vegas, AWS announced two new capabilities for Amazon Connect Customer, now available in preview:

• Agentic CX Designer — A visual tool that allows business teams to build end-to-end conversational AI experiences, blending agentic reasoning and deterministic steps — such as identity verification and payment processing — without writing code. Business users can design, test, and ship customer experiences in the same day.

• Live Sync — A patented technology that synchronizes a voice conversation with a digital on-screen interface in real time, enabling both the conversation and the customer's screen to move together seamlessly.

AWS frames this as a fundamental shift: once foundational infrastructure like API connections and data integrations are built by engineers, the logic of customer experiences can be designed by CX operators — not IT. Early adopter Saks Fifth Avenue reached production in six weeks with a business analyst leading experience design, achieving a sub-1% error rate and under two-second response times per conversational turn.

Building on the acquisition of NLX earlier in 2026, Amazon Connect Customer's agentic capabilities bring nearly a decade of enterprise-scale conversational AI development into the platform.

In a new thought leadership post, Pasquale DeMaio, VP and GM of Amazon Connect, challenges the contact center industry's 30-year obsession with deflection and containment metrics.

"If your goal is deflection, you are deflecting them right to your competitors. And they'll be more than happy to take them."

The piece argues that containment rate is an "empty stat" — it tracks how fast you got rid of someone, not whether they'll come back. DeMaio draws on consumer scenarios, sports analytics analogies, and hard data (32% of customers leave after one bad experience; acquiring a new customer costs 5–25x more than retaining one) to make the case that resolution — not deflection — should be the north star for CX.

"Stop measuring how fast you got rid of someone. Start measuring whether they're coming back."

🚀 Launch Announcement: Connect : Amazon Connect Customer launches Agentic CX designer (NLX) in preview

Amazon Connect Customer now offers Agentic CX designer (NLX) in preview, a no-code canvas for designing and deploying AI-powered self-service experiences. You can build and launch voice and digital experiences that bring agentic and deterministic AI together to transform how you serve customers with the control and reliability enterprises demand. Your business teams can go from designing conversations and integrating with the systems that run your business, to testing and simulating, to launching production-ready experiences in weeks, not months. 

With this launch, you can also guide customers directly inside your web or mobile app with Live Sync. Live Sync drives a customer's web or mobile experience in real time as they speak or type during a voice or chat conversation, turning a spoken exchange into a guided, hands-on experience. A customer calling to start a loan application can receive a link to your website and complete it without leaving the call, asking questions and filling out the form by voice as they go. A customer describing what they want in your mobile app can have the matching product page pulled up instantly without typing a search term. With Live Sync, every interaction, from a simple search to a complex application, becomes a single guided experience.

To learn more about how the Agentic CX designer is reshaping self-service, read our blog .  To learn more about Amazon Connect Customer, an agentic AI solution that helps enterprises deliver exceptional customer experiences, visit the Amazon Connect Customer website .

🚀 Launch Announcement: EUM : Amazon SNS now supports sending SMS in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region

Customers that use Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region can now send text messages (SMS) to subscribers in more than 200 countries and territories.

Amazon SNS is a fully managed pub/sub messaging service that enables message delivery to multiple endpoints including AWS Lambda, Amazon SQS, Amazon Data Firehose, mobile devices, and email. With this launch, customers using SNS in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region can subscribe phone numbers to SNS topics and broadcast SMS messages via AWS End User Messaging .

🚀 Launch Announcement: Connect : Amazon Connect Customer launches the ability to interrupt an agent with an urgent contact

Amazon Connect Customer now supports the ability to interrupt an agent with a contact, overriding their usual routing configuration in case of urgent or time-sensitive work. For example, an agent may be waiting for a time-sensitive callback on their personal extension, while taking customer service calls in the meantime. When that urgent call comes in, it can now ring the agent even if the agent is currently already on another call, so the agent can decide whether to put the first caller on hold to pick up the callback as well.

You can also use this feature to directly assign certain contacts to a specific agent even though that agent has set themselves to a custom status where they normally could not be offered queued contacts. For example, you may want to ensure that a specific agent cannot take customer service calls while in “Back Office Work” but still allow calls to their personal extension to ring through, improving efficiency for urgent contacts.

🚀 Launch Announcement: Connect : AWS announces Amazon Connect Customer Services Competency

AWS announces the Amazon Connect Customer Competency, a new AWS Specialization that helps customers identify Services Partners with proven expertise in transforming enterprise-wide customer experience on Amazon Connect Customer.

Today's customers expect seamless, personalized experiences at every touchpoint, but legacy contact centers fall short — relying on queues, manual routing, and handle-time metrics, with AI added as a separate layer rather than built in from the start.

The Amazon Connect Customer Competency recognizes Services Partners across two categories: Contact Center Transformation and AI-Powered Customer Experience . Partners validated in this Competency have demonstrated technical depth and proven success in migrating legacy contact centers and operationalizing AI at scale on Amazon Connect. Customers gain confidence working with validated Partners who can deliver AI-native transformations spanning voice, chat, email, SMS, and social channels.

This is the first AWS Competency directly aligned to an AWS service, replacing the Amazon Connect Service Delivery Program designation, which will be deprecated on June 1, 2027.

AWS Partners on the Services Path who are validated or differentiated members and have demonstrated customer success with Amazon Connect are encouraged to apply. To learn more and discover validated Partners, visit the Amazon Connect Customer Competency page .

🚀 Launch Announcement: Connect : Amazon Connect Customer now offers AI agent trace details for self-service voice interactions

Amazon Connect Customer now provides AI agent traces for self-service voice interactions, enabling you to understand how AI agents reason, act, and respond during each customer conversation. With this launch, you have full visibility into how the AI agent handled an interaction, so you can confirm what worked, diagnose issues, validate behavior, and deploy agentic experiences with confidence.

For example, if your AI agent fails to resolve a customer request, you can access the step-by-step trace directly in the Connect web UI alongside the full transcript, and see whether it reasoned incorrectly, called a tool with bad parameters, or timed out waiting for a response.

🚀 Launch Announcement: Connect GovCloud : Amazon Connect Customer launches real-time dashboard alerts from conversational analytics

Amazon Connect Customer now enables contact center supervisors to receive real-time alerts directly on the dashboard when specific keywords, phrases, or sentiment patterns are detected during live calls and chats, enabling faster intervention and improved customer outcomes. For example, when a customer says "cancel my account" during a call, a supervisor receives an alert on the real-time dashboard, listens to the live conversation while viewing the real-time transcript and sentiment analysis, and coaches the agent over chat to resolve the issue before the customer churns.

🚀 Launch Announcement: Connect GovCloud : Amazon Connect Customer now supports up to 5,000 agents per schedule

Amazon Connect Customer now supports up to 5,000 agents per schedule, making it easier for you to schedule larger business units or multiple business units that share agents (multi-skilled agents) within a single schedule. Additional scale limit updates include up to 350 agents per staffing group and up to 300 staffing groups per forecast group (for a total of up to 5,000 agents per forecast group). This launch eliminates the need to split scheduling across multiple runs or maintain separate schedules for shared agent pools, thus reducing operational complexity and enabling more accurate schedule optimization across the entire workforce.

🚀 Launch Announcement: Connect GovCloud : Amazon Connect Customer now optimizes placement of ad-hoc activities in agent schedules

Amazon Connect Customer now optimizes placement of ad-hoc activities in agent schedules, making it easier for you to schedule non-productive events while automatically minimizing impact to service level goals. For example, automatically find the optimal time within the next 2 weeks to schedule compliance training for 500 agents. When adding activities such as training or meetings, you can choose one of the following placement methods: (a) anytime within the shift; (b) within a specific time window, for example, 12:00pm–4:00pm; (c) relative to the shift, for example, 1 hour after shift start and 2 hours before shift end. Based on your selected placement method, system automatically identifies optimal time within your specified constraints to schedule the activity while minimizing impact to service levels. This launch eliminates the need for supervisors to manually look for optimal times to schedule these events, thus improving supervisor productivity and ensuring consistent service levels for end customers.

🚀 Launch Announcement: Connect GovCloud : Amazon Connect Customer now provides schedule update notifications

Amazon Connect Customer now provides schedule update notifications, making it easier for you to automatically notify agents when their schedules change. You can define rules to send email or text notifications (via EventBridge) to supervisors and agents when new schedules are published, when existing schedules are updated, as well as when an agent’s leave request has a change in status. For example, you can automatically email all agents when their schedules for next month become available. These automated notifications eliminate manual effort for schedulers to notify workforce when schedules are updated and for agents to continuously monitor their leave request status, improving both scheduler and agent productivity.

🚀 Launch Announcement: SES GovCloud : Amazon SES now supports tenant-level suppression lists

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) now supports tenant-level suppression lists, allowing email senders to isolate bounces and complaints per tenant. Previously, all tenants in an account shared a single suppression list, meaning one tenant's email issues caused emails for other tenants to be suppressed. With this feature, each tenant maintains a separate suppression list, ensuring that bounces and complaints affect only the tenant that generated them.

This capability benefits any sender managing distinct email streams from a single SES account. Key use cases include SaaS providers sending on behalf of multiple customers, enterprises separating transactional and marketing mail across business units, agencies managing campaigns for different brands, or any application where a complaint from one sending program shouldn't suppress delivery for another.

You can configure suppression behavior using two settings: suppression scope (TENANT or ACCOUNT) and suppressed reasons (BOUNCE, COMPLAINT, or both). Amazon SES automatically records bounces and complaints to the appropriate tenant's list. You can also manually manage suppressed addresses using API operations including PutSuppressedDestination, GetSuppressedDestination, DeleteSuppressedDestination, and ListSuppressedDestinations with the TenantName parameter.

🚀 Launch Announcement: SES : Amazon SES now offers inbox placement metrics and blocklist monitoring

Today, Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) launched a new set of deliverability features that help customers get more information about their outbound sending deliverability performance and reputation. Customers can now see the percentage of messages that are placed in recipient spam folders based on samples of industry data, as well as see when their domains and IPs are listed on public email sender block lists. This makes it easier for customers to optimize their sending content to maximize customer engagement.

Previously, customers could use SES' Virtual Deliverability Manager to visualize the full end-to-end journey of email deliverability metrics. This included delivery rates, bounce rates of various types, as well as complaint, open and click rates. Customers did not have visibility into how many emails were placed in the spam folder, making it difficult to estimate how many emails were actually seen by recipients. Now, based on representative data sampled from the industry, customers can see inbox placement rates by sending domain and campaign. Customers can also pro-actively test candidate email content to estimate inbox placement rates at top mailbox providers before sending to any of their target recipients. Finally, customers get peripheral awareness and passive monitoring of industry blocklist activity, helping to identify when a reputation change may affect their ability to send emails to mailbox providers.

SES supports inbox placement rates and blocklist monitoring in all AWS commercial regions where SES is available.

🚀 Launch Announcement: Connect : Amazon Connect Customer now supports scheduling tasks up to 90 days in advance

Amazon Connect Customer now supports scheduling tasks up to 90 days in advance, helping organizations plan, route, and track long-running follow-up work. For example, an insurance team managing an auto repair claim can schedule future tasks for an adjuster visit, parts availability check, and repair completion follow-up, with each task routed to the right team at the right time with relevant claim context. You can schedule tasks using the StartTaskContact API, flows, or the agent workspace.

🚀 Launch Announcement: EUM : AWS End User Messaging RCS for Business now available in 20 additional countries

AWS End User Messaging now supports RCS for Business messaging in 20 additional countries, bringing the total to 22. Businesses can now send verified, branded RCS messages to customers in Austria, Brazil, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, France, Germany, Guatemala, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Poland, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, in addition to the United States and Canada.

Customers can use the existing SendTextMessage API to send RCS messages to these countries with no application changes. Messages are delivered from a recognized
business identity, and when a recipient's device does not support RCS, they automatically fall back to SMS for reliable delivery.

🚀 Launch Announcement: Connect : Amazon Connect’s AI assistant is now available in the UI builder

Amazon Connect Customer Assistant is now integrated within the UI builder, enabling contact center managers to create and modify views using natural language. Managers describe what they need, such as "Create a feedback form with rating and comment fields," and the assistant generates the corresponding UI components for review before publishing. This reduces the time and expertise needed to build Views for Step-by-Step Guides and Workspace pages by up to 70%.

Managers can use conversational prompts to create views, configure layouts with conditional UIs, set component properties, and apply styling without manual work. The assistant recommends components, explains options, and troubleshoots issues to accelerate builds. 

🚀 Launch Announcement: Connect : Amazon Connect Customer expands generative AI-powered post-contact summaries to eight new languages

Amazon Connect Customer now supports generative AI-powered post-contact summaries in eight additional language families: Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Post-contact summaries also now support non-US variations of English, including British English, Australian English, and other regional locales, ensuring summaries reflect locally appropriate spelling and terminology.

Generative AI-powered post-contact summaries provide agents and managers with concise, structured overviews of customer conversations across voice, chat, and email channels, eliminating the need to read full transcripts. With this expansion, organizations can automatically generate summaries in the language of the conversation, helping agents complete after-contact work faster and enabling managers to review contacts across languages. For example, a global support organization can now generate post-contact summaries for calls handled in French, German, or Japanese, giving supervisors visibility into service quality across all regions.

🚀 Launch Announcement: Connect : Amazon Connect Customer now uses generative AI to automatically evaluate self-service interactions

Amazon Connect Customer now enables managers to use generative AI to automatically evaluate self-service interactions, and get aggregated insights to help improve customer experience. Managers can define custom evaluation criteria in natural language within evaluation forms — such as "Were all of the customer issues resolved by the AI agent?" — which generative AI uses to help assess the quality of the self-service interaction. Connect provides detailed reasoning for the evaluation along with relevant reference points from the conversation transcript. Managers can review these insights in aggregate and on individual contacts, alongside self-service interaction recordings and transcripts, to identify opportunities to improve AI agent performance.

🚀 Launch Announcement: Connect GovCloud : Amazon Connect Customer launches granular access controls for the agent login/logout report

Amazon Connect Customer now supports tag-based access controls for the agent login/logout report, enabling you to apply granular access controls to meet compliance and regulatory requirements for data access. Contact center administrators can use resource tags to control who has access to view login and logout information for specific agents in their contact center. For example, you can tag agents with Department:Customer Service to only enable the Customer Service team manager to see login/logout information for these agents.

Customer Engagement What's New

June 25, 2026
EUM : Build an AI-powered real estate assistant on WhatsApp using Strands Agents SDK and AWS End User Messaging
This post shows how to build a WhatsApp assistant that responds instantly. We show you how to build a real estate assistant powered by AI that delivers property discovery, home loan pre-approval, and site visit booking entirely within WhatsApp. The solution uses the Strands Agents SDK to orchestrate specialized AI agents on Amazon Bedrock, with AWS End User Messaging Social for WhatsApp integration. The serverless backend runs on AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB.

June 23, 2026
EUM : Getting your SMS short code production-ready with AWS End User Messaging
In this post, we walk through the setting up AWS End User Messaging SMS, covering 12 configuration steps from compliance through phased traffic migration. The guide to SMS short codes with AWS End User Messaging covers the application and registration process up through provisioning. This post picks up from that point and provides an operational readiness walkthrough that takes you from “Active” status to confidently sending your first production message, including a final validation step to confirm readiness.

June 22, 2026
Connect : Business user is the new architect of customer experience. No code required
Picture a summer thunderstorm in July that grounds flights across a major hub. Hundreds of travelers are stranded overnight. At most hotels, the calls start coming in. People wait on hold to extend a stay, move a checkout, or rebook a room they can no longer reach in time. Lily doesn’t call. The hotel texts […]

June 17, 2026
Connect : Deflection is Dead. Resolution is King.
You’re on vacation and your card gets declined. You’re at dinner with your family in a country you’ve never been to, staring at a bill you can’t pay. You’re wondering if it will work for the cab ride home. No text comes through, no notification, no call. You call your bank. The IVR asks how […]

June 10, 2026
Connect : From Amazon Pinpoint to Amazon Connect With Customer Experience Intact
Platform migrations are technical events with real customer experience consequences. With Amazon Pinpoint reaching end of support on October 30, 2026, teams managing millions of customer touchpoints face an architectural question: where do we go, and how do we bring everything we’ve built with us? The migration isn’t simple. Data has dependencies. Capabilities overlap in […]

June 09, 2026
Connect : Rethinking the Case: How Amazon Connect’s Approach Unlocks the Future of Customer Service
We’re Willing to Be Misunderstood  At Amazon, one of our leadership principles is Customer Obsession and sometimes that means making decisions that feel counterintuitive in the short term but deliver exponential value over time. We’re willing to be misunderstood for long periods if it means building the right foundation for our customers’ future. If you’re […]

June 05, 2026
EUM : Send WhatsApp Business messages with AWS End User Messaging Social
This post is for developers and solutions architects looking to integrate WhatsApp messaging into their customer engagement workflows using AWS. By the end, you will know how to send every supported message type—from straightforward text and media to templates, interactive menus, and WhatsApp Flows—using Python and the AWS End User Messaging Social API.

June 05, 2026
EUM SES : Adding LINE Messenger to your AWS omnichannel fallback solution
In this post, you will learn how to extend an existing omnichannel fallback solution by integrating LINE Messenger, including architecture updates, deployment steps, and testing procedures. The original solution, built with Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), and AWS End User Messaging, delivers messages across SMS, WhatsApp, and email with automatic fallback capabilities.

June 04, 2026
SES : Getting started with Amazon SES Agent Skills for AI-assisted email development
Today, we are releasing Amazon SES Agent Skills, an open source set of agent skills that give AI coding agents the context they need to build email integrations correctly from the start. The skills work with Kiro, Claude Code, and any agent that supports the open Agent Skills format.

June 03, 2026
SES : Using Amazon Mail Manager SMTP to send email via Amazon Simple Email Service
In this post, you configure Amazon SES Mail Manager to send outbound email in a Region that does not offer the classic SES SMTP endpoint. This post uses eusc-de-east-1 (AWS European Sovereign Cloud) as an example, but the same steps apply to AWS Regions where Mail Manager is available and the classic SMTP endpoint is not.

May 28, 2026
Connect : Optimize activity placement in Amazon Connect Customer scheduling
1. Introduction When you manage a contact center schedule, you face a recurring challenge: fitting non-phone activities (coaching sessions, team meetings, training blocks, and one-on-one reviews) into agent schedules without degrading service levels. These activities support agent development, compliance, and operational goals, but every minute an agent spends in a coaching session is a minute […]

May 28, 2026
Connect : Customer First Callback in Amazon Connect Customer: Priority Preservation, Voicemail Detection, and Zero Reserved Agent Capacity
Introduction Modern contact centers face a persistent challenge: traditional callback systems force a tradeoff between customer convenience and agent efficiency. When agents are reserved for scheduled callbacks, they sit idle waiting — and when customers don’t answer, that capacity is simply wasted. Amazon Connect Customer now natively supports customer first callback architecture that eliminates this […]

Amazon Contact Center Blogs

June 12, 2026: How can I set my Amazon Connect outbound caller ID dynamically based on country?

May 26, 2026: How do I make outbound calls to specific countries from my Amazon Connect instance?

Please visit @AmazonWebServices on YouTube

June 09, 2026: Amazon Connect Talent Introduction

June 04, 2026: The Amazon Connect Podcast - Ep.20 - NLX! with Jim Kraeutler

Please visit @AmazonConnectEnablement on YouTube

June 15, 2026
Updated scheduling troubleshooting documentation for shift profile time zones
Updated the scheduling troubleshooting guidance to clarify that shift profiles support any time zone. For more information, see Troubleshooting forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling in Connect Customer .

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.