Inside Amazon Connect: The evolution of a disruptor

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.

The origin story

Like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon Connect exemplifies Amazon’s ability to transform internal solutions into industry-leading services. The journey began in 2007 when the internal customer service team decided to propose building a new unified solution from scratch to replace three contact center vendors. The vendors were requiring a $3M up-front investment for a hardware upgrade, plus recurring license and maintenance fees. The proposed internal solution was not only less expensive but also supported Amazon’s stated mission of being the Earth’s most customer-centric company.

“We looked around at the time for all of the other products that could work. Nothing was very compelling,” said Jon Jay, who founded the original customer service team and remains one of Connect’s most senior engineering leaders. “None of them had high volume capacity, so we would have needed to manage over a dozen instances of these contact center solutions. They were also extremely expensive and didn’t solve any of the problems we hoped to address in delighting customers.”

After receiving approval from Jeff Wilke, former CEO of Amazon Worldwide Consumer, the team successfully deployed their first pilot in 2007, followed by full deployment in 2008. What started as an internal efficiency project would go on to serve Amazon’s various divisions for years – from customer service to HR and transportation – generating estimated annual savings of $60 million compared to competitive solutions. New acquisitions such as Audible and Zappos also enthusiastically embraced this solution and proved that there was appetite in the market for a uniquely Amazon approach to customer experience.

“When we showed other Amazon teams what we built, it spread like wildfire. Zappos, Audible – they all had the same headaches with traditional contact centers. We’d show them our solution and they’d say ‘Wait – you solved all of our biggest problems,'” said Jay.

Product launch and early success

The decision to make Amazon Connect available to the public came in Q3 2015, with approval from then-AWS CEO Andy Jassy and led by Pasquale DeMaio.

“Talking to potential external customers, it was clear that they faced the same challenges as Amazon,” added Jay. “We saw an opportunity to disrupt a legacy industry with a cloud-based solution that was easy to implement, offered unrivaled velocity of innovation, and could scale with the reliability and security that the largest enterprises require. That’s when we knew we weren’t fixing just Amazon’s problems – we were solving issues the whole industry had been stuck with for decades.”

After just over a year in development as an external service, Amazon Connect made its public debut at Enterprise Connect 2017, quickly gaining traction among large enterprises facing significant scaling challenges. The deep integration with AWS services enabled seamless scaling and rapid feature development, while early adoption of Alexa AI technology through Lex delivered natural language interactive voice response (IVR) capabilities that set Amazon Connect apart.

Early adopters like Capital One, Hilton, and GE were drawn to Connect’s unique value proposition: a cloud-native architecture that eliminated the need for traditional telephony infrastructure. This innovative approach transformed what was traditionally a year-long buildout process into a weekend project for many organizations, dramatically reducing both time-to-market and operational complexity.

“From the very beginning, organizations that wanted our speed of innovation found success partnering with Amazon Connect,” said VP of Amazon Connect, Pasquale DeMaio. “Organizations know that we understand customer experience in a very personal way. It’s one thing to claim to be customer-obsessed. At Amazon, we live it everyday.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Amazon Connect’s cloud-native design proved prescient. Its self-service setup and native work-from-home agent support became crucial advantages as organizations scrambled to maintain customer service operations with remote workforces. The ability to function with just standard internet connections and headsets, eliminating the need for specialized phone equipment, made it an ideal solution for the sudden shift to remote work. By the end of the pandemic, Amazon Connect had tens of thousands of customers.

Leading the AI revolution in customer experience

Amazon Connect’s evolution took a significant leap forward in 2019 with the launch of AI-powered conversational analytics, sentiment analysis, and more, without the complex technical requirements typical of competitors. Customers only needed to select a checkbox to enable these AI features, versus weeks of deployment with other solutions.

In 2023, Amazon Connect achieved a leadership position for the first time in two key industry reports: the Forrester Wave for Contact Center as a Service and Gartner’s Contact Center as a Service Magic Quadrant. Amazon Connect has maintained these leadership positions in subsequent reports through present day.

Additional AI features were rapidly delivered across the customer journey. With the advent of generative AI, the team pivoted their roadmap to embrace Large Language Model (LLM) technologies, enabling features like automated agent wrap-up, call summarization, and LLM-based self-service experiences.

In December 2024, Amazon Connect reported that 6 billion minutes of customer interactions were optimized by AI, showing the scale at which customers were putting AI to work in real scenarios. When Amazon Connect unveiled its “next generation” in March 2025, featuring AI enabled throughout the customer journey, customer response was overwhelmingly positive. Now, Amazon Connect is optimizing 12 billion minutes of customer interactions with AI—double what was announced less than a year ago.

Amazon Connect is delivering innovative and integrated AI solutions at enterprise scale. Recently, multiple global brands have selected Amazon Connect over other providers and emerging AI-native players. In these evaluations, Amazon Connect demonstrated superior performance in critical areas such as intent detection accuracy, AI agent safety, and human-AI collaboration capabilities. These wins demonstrate Connect’s ability to deliver best-in-class AI solutions beyond just a great demo, in a way that enables mission-critical use cases based on technical merit and reliability.

Looking ahead

Amazon Connect’s achievement of a $1 billion revenue run rate milestone positions it as the only usage-based customer experience solution to reach this scale. This pay-as-you-go approach also uniquely positions Amazon Connect for the AI and agentic future.

“We’ve had no shortage of inflection points: first, being a key driver of making cloud-based contact centers the new normal, then enabling businesses to navigate remote work while managing massive swings in demand during COVID, and finally delivering real-world results with Gen AI,” said DeMaio. “Now we face two more: delivering safe and ethical agentic AI at enterprise scale and evolving from reactive to proactive customer engagement—all while expanding into new areas of opportunity to solve customer problems.”

From an internal project to solve Amazon’s own customer service challenges, Amazon Connect evolved into a global service trusted by tens of thousands of customers in 8 years. And, it’s still Day 1. With the same curiosity that sparked its creation and a mission to transform experiences, the team continues to pioneer AI-powered solutions aimed at solving problems and delighting customers.

To learn more about Amazon Connect, visit the Amazon Connect page.
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About the Author

Heidi Elmore is a serial technologist passionate about enterprise communications. She has launched UCaaS, CPaaS, and CCaaS products and led teams across multiple functions. When she’s not obsessing over enterprise software, she rides and shows dressage horses.