Agents of agility
How agentic AI is helping brands elevate customer experience
Customers want to be recognized, appreciated and treated with respect. They expect clear answers to their questions, swift resolution of their issues and expert guidance that helps them find the right product or solution. Across the marketplace, from B2C to B2B, all brands seek to deliver an exceptional customer experience (CX). Despite advances in CX technology, the bar keeps rising, with consumers continuously demanding better service and more personalized attention.
Many organizations turned to early rule-based AI chatbots to improve CX and handle more customer interactions at a lower cost. The result? Frustration for customers and the businesses that serve them.
As Rob Markey, Co-Creator of the Net Promoter Score (NPS), a core measurement of customer loyalty, put it: “Nothing breaks customer trust faster than a confident wrong answer.”
Transforming CX workflows starts with accuracy, according to Pasquale DeMaio, Vice President of Amazon Connect. “Being able to give customers the information they need, quickly, is the first step toward better CX—and ultimately, new automation.”
“Nothing breaks customer trust faster than a confident wrong answer.”
Now agentic AI offers a compelling new approach to CX workflows. Agentic AI differs from generative AI in ways that make it particularly well-suited for handling complex customer issues beyond providing answers—they can actually resolve problems—like update an order, issue a refund or schedule a callback.
Gartner predicts that by 2029, agentic AI self-service will resolve 80% of common customer service issues without human intervention, resulting in a 30% reduction in operational costs.1
Transforming customer service from frustrating to fantastic is the main reason so many companies are investing heavily in AI. By handling routine but time-consuming actions autonomously, agentic AI elevates self-service, cuts wait times and reduces escalations. It frees human agents to focus on more complex, empathy-driven conversations that build trust and loyalty, creating a better experience for customers and the CX teams that serve them.
Creating a meaningful customer experience—one that enhances a customer’s perception of a brand and its value—happens across multiple touchpoints and relies on a range of channels. Agents enable an end-to-end approach to CX. They can execute complicated multi-step CX workflows through thoughtful and adaptable interactions with people, tools, or other systems—thinking, planning, reasoning, and taking action.
Technically, agents are software systems that can autonomously, or semi-autonomously, accomplish user-defined goals in digital or physical environments. Simply put, while chatbots can just chat, agents can act. A chatbot can tell customers that their flight is canceled and suggest rebooking options, but an AI agent can instantly secure them a seat on the next available flight, arrange ground transportation, book a hotel if needed, and more.
Agents help reimagine a CX hub—the contact center. They learn over time, accessing historic information on the customer to deliver more tailored responses—reducing escalations, speeding resolutions, and ensuring brand-appropriate communication.
They can push lower-complexity inquiries to self-service or direct more complex inquiries—or high-stakes customers—to human agents, while giving them context needed to resolve the issues. And they can work alongside their human colleagues—leaving them more time for creative problem-solving and other situations that need the human touch.
Agentic AI can also derive insights from the massive amounts of unstructured data gathered during customer interactions, spotting trends and anticipating issues proactively. This data can be a goldmine for organizations as they chart their sales, marketing and customer experience strategies.
AI is already creating value at trusted brands in competitive markets where AI native cloud contact centers are a key differentiator—including financial services, healthcare, retail/eCommerce, travel and hospitality. And use of AI agents is expanding rapidly.
Tens of thousands of organizations rely on Amazon Connect, a cloud customer experience solution that helps companies deliver exceptional customer outcomes at lower cost. Well-known for its customer obsession, Amazon leveraged its CX experience to create Amazon Connect, which delivers business impact by putting AI to work across customer self-service, agent assistance and manager experiences.
“From the very beginning, Amazon Connect has been AI native,” says Amazon’s DeMaio.“ Then we were blown away by the opportunities that generative AI opened up for Connect, and quickly moved all of our agent assistance and customer automation into gen AI—now to agentic AI. We’re helping organizations transition to agentic AI at their own pace, with all the necessary safeguards, which is particularly important for regulated industries.”
Connect customers can program and train their own models, or choose a true managed service model that leverages Amazon’s expertise in CX and Al.
“What we’re seeing now is that our customers are figuring out the right layers where they can transform experiences in real time with agentic AI. We help them get started quickly and safely, then ramp up smoothly when they’re ready,” DeMaio says.
“We’re helping organizations transition to agentic AI at their own pace, with all the necessary safeguards, which is particularly important for regulated industries.”
The popularity of Amazon Connect serves as proof of the overwhelming surge in interest in agentic AI for CX. A recent Harvard Business Review survey found 79% of respondents have already implemented—or are exploring using—agentic AI in their customer service and support organizations.2 Beyond Amazon Connect, Amazon is also finding that CX is one of the key use cases for its customers, which use Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Amazon Web Services’ agentic platform, to create agents that enhance CX.
Data security leader Druva relies on agents built on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore to transform its customer service. Its intelligent DruAI Agents can interpret user intent, analyze data, and take autonomous actions, moving beyond traditional query-based AI.
Early results show significant impact, with 63% of customer issues resolved directly through DruAI and 58% faster resolution times for cases requiring human intervention. All with rigorous security controls, data privacy and adherence to rigorous compliance standards. Druva aims to reduce cyber investigation times by 70% and enable 90% of routine data protection tasks through agent interactions.
Raising the bar on CX is a high-stakes challenge. We sat down with Markey, who has spent decades studying and writing about customer service, to ask a few questions about the concerns and issues that CX leaders have about agentic AI.
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#1
What are some common CX issues?
At contact centers, high call volumes, chatbots trapping customers in endless loops, and other painfully slow, ineffective interactions add up to the age-old issue of customer frustration.
But excellent brands in hospitality, B2C, and beyond are using AI in innovative ways to provide fast, personal, empathetic service—the kind that keeps customers close for years.
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#2
What’s a common misconception about agentic AI?
Some people think of it as a headcount-reducer. That’s not necessarily the case. AI represents a significant advance, one that enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of CX dramatically, without requiring new personnel.
With agentic AI, human agents can focus on more strategic interactions, which is better for everyone—customers, customer service groups, and the overall organization. AI can make every person dramatically more effective. So structural cost reduction comes from better service, not fewer people.
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#3
What are corners to watch out for?
Getting customer interactions right is critical. Companies need to ensure transparency across all touchpoints, so they have full visibility into what their agents are doing, correcting course when necessary.
Data privacy and security are crucial. Even non-regulated organizations are going to have to add financial service-level rigorous controls to protect data and maintain customer relationships over time. With AI, effective risk management requires a solid grounding in accurate data with multiple layers of controls to prevent misinformation from undermining customer trust.
Customer experience is no longer just about solving problems. It’s about making every interaction clear, personalized, delightful and consistent with the values of the brand. AI agents are making that possible.
“With agentic AI, we gain the ability to listen to every customer conversation, understand them, and use that feedback to detect issues and make changes,” says DeMaio. “Now organizations can improve their business and their CX every day.”
Agents aren’t experimental or hype. They’re already helping hundreds of thousands of enterprises improve service levels, increase customer satisfaction, and build loyalty—at scale. Beyond efficiency gains, agentic AI is setting a new standard for modern CX, one that’s secure, on brand, hyper-customized—and able to scale to assist and amaze a near-limitless audience of increasingly demanding customers.
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