ACP: The Amazon Connect Podcast

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This week we are discussing recent cybersecurity incidents, including a major PHP-to-shell vulnerability that led some government organizations to take websites offline and drove increased demand to contact centers, and other targeted attacks affecting IoT temperature monitoring devices.

We explore how organizations can communicate with customers and staff when systems are shut down or SSO becomes a single point of failure, arguing that an internal and external contact center should be part of a “minimum viable company” and modern business continuity planning.

We outline practical options such as a low-cost standby Amazon Connect instance, carrier-level call diversion, Amazon Connect global redundancy, and regular continuity testing.

Tom describes a demo using an Amazon Connect AI agent to update recorded internal outage messages via PIN-protected dial-in, plus an idea to use outbound SMS campaigns to reach staff.

As mentioned in this episode, you can download FREE preparedness checklists for “Prepare Now” and the first 72 hours. Go to cloudinteract.io/resilience to get your copies now and keep them in a safe place in case you ever need them.
Find out more about CloudInteract at cloudinteract.io.

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Join us as we welcome AWS senior solutions architect Vikas Prasad to discuss Amazon Connect FCS (forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling) and how it helps match contact center demand to agent supply while improving agent and supervisor quality of life.
We talk about the newly launched shift bidding (preference-based scheduling), enabling agents to rank multiple shift profiles with priority rules and supervisor review, and discuss use cases like covering peak periods with non-contact-center staff. Vikas explains FCS pricing differences between Amazon Connect Basic (per-agent monthly fee) and Connect Customer (included), and outlines AI-driven improvements including variable AHT modeling, a forthcoming natural-language “AI teammate” in beta, and intraday forecasting that refreshes every 50 minutes to predict next-24-hour spikes.

The episode also covers adherence thresholds to reduce false out-of-adherence alerts and notes FCS expansion to tasks and email plus raw data availability in a data lake for BI tools.
Find out more about CloudInteract at cloudinteract.io.

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Join us as we catch-up on Amazon Connect, highlighting major announcements from August–October including:

- the agentic CX designer now generally available,
- Contact Lens information extraction for voice and chat (including how it can help alongside redaction),
- and new agent-to-agent collaboration using the open A2A protocol with voice support and detailed traceability. 
We also discuss the newly GA AI Assistant for querying contact center metrics in plain language, improved dashboard reporting for routing steps and agent proficiencies, and multiple Workforce Management/FCS enhancements such as shift bidding, unplanned shrinkage, refreshed scheduling metrics, 15/30-minute capacity planning, added adherence metrics, and more granular task/email concurrency and interruption limits. 
Additional updates include bulk user management improvements, QA evaluation scoring by points plus AI-assisted PDF QA-form import, Cases/Profiles dashboard metrics and CSV import, cross-region active-active global resiliency, and importing external recordings for Contact Lens analytics.
We also highlight the free Amazon Connect sandbox environments via AWS Builder Center. link: Free Sandbox Environments for Amazon Connect Customer on AWS Builder Center | AWS Contact Center
There's so much that's been happening in Amazon Connect over just the past few months, so this episode is your chance to catch up!
Find out more about CloudInteract at cloudinteract.io.

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This week we welcome Bentley Paton, a Cloud Interact solutions architect, to discuss Amazon Connect’s Agentic CX Designer following AWS’s NLX acquisition and its move from preview to GA.
This isn't just a review of features - it's talking candidly about the good and the bad of the new Agentic CX Designer with someone who is actually building production solutions with it today.

Bentley explains how it combines agentic and deterministic IVR design in a drag-and-drop UI, removes the need to build Lex bots, and is invoked from a single Amazon Connect contact flow block that routes into CX Designer applications and flows. 

We compare prior Connect AI agents and Lex-based approaches, cover when deterministic logic is preferred (e.g., payments) and how AI can invoke deterministic tools, and review integrations (currently REST/API calls often via API Gateway rather than direct Lambda). 

We also talk about built-in chat-based testing, debugging, and automated test replays, note limited live-call audit visibility, discuss environment deployment via aliases, JSON export limits, business-user readability benefits, iteration needs in production, and current pricing understanding, including separate costs for related services and mention of Live Sync.
Find out more about CloudInteract at cloudinteract.io.

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Host Tom Morgan runs a solo episode of the Amazon Connect Podcast to play five unedited recordings of Amazon Connect Customer AI agent calls and explain what’s happening under the hood.
Four clips come from CloudInteract’s multi-industry demo environment and one from a noisy conference floor. Scenarios include airline fare lookup with email capture, retail banking identity verification, transaction clarification, balance and loan payoff (with calculations done via external tools) and a guarded handoff for address change, a retail order address-change handoff showing the value of ID verification and intent capture, healthcare appointment rescheduling with mishearing detection/correction and a safety transfer for medication side effects, and a conference concierge agent that performs well amid background noise.
Tom emphasizes guardrails, tool use, 100% QA via evaluations and rules, AI agent performance metrics, and the GA release of the Agentic CX Designer visual canvas.

Find out more about CloudInteract at cloudinteract.io.