I don’t know the first thing about call centers, but I do know that the newly announced
Amazon Connect platform could be a very big deal. Nearly every company—and
every large enterprise—has a call center, and nearly every company is probably considering moving to the cloud. If I’m reading between the lines correctly on all the talk about using AI to automate call centers, a lot of companies consider them to be cost centers, as well.
With Connect, Amazon is offering those companies the chance to kill two birds with one stone. They can automate their call centers (without going full robo-representative) and offload an expensive, if not mission-critical, process to the cloud. Better yet, Amazon claims Connect is simple enough for businesspeople to set up, which is critical to driving the type of bottom-up adoption that made AWS so successful.
Oh, and speaking of AWS, Amazon gets to reap the rewards as Connect customers gobble up all those AWS resources on the backend.
When you start looking at Amazon’s string of non-compute services as a whole—Connect,
Chime, WorkSpaces, WorkMail and more—you see a cloud provider that really wants to evolve into a full-on business platform. A lot of people
are rightfully high on Microsoft Azure right now, but Amazon is somewhat sneakily trying to usurp Microsoft’s business-friendly reputation. Directly competing with Microsoft (and Google) on things like email might just be a check in a box, but coming from the side with services like Connect could prove an effective, and sticky, strategy.
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On a somewhat-related note, Google has
released the internal documentation it uses for starting and managing open source projects. Earlier this month, I complained about the first day of Google’s cloud conference being too enterprise-y without really distinguishing Google from the competition. On the third day, I think it nailed a big part of its message, which is essentially Google is the
open cloud. Sharing its OSS protocol is another good step toward making that message stick.
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Finally, watch the video explanation (below) of a robotics and machine learning paper, performed by the robots themselves rapping about the study’s methods. You might learn something, and if you’re nerdy enough you’ll certainly smile. Just click on the image to watch on YouTube.
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