It has been just under a decade since Amazon Web Services Inc. launched Amazon Connect, taking its own internal contact center-as-a-service solution and commercialized it. At the time, there were many doubts about whether it could succeed in a mature market with several established vendors. The company loaded Connect up with artificial intelligence features long before AI was cool, and a unique utilization-based pricing model to disrupt, and it rapidly gained traction.
The DP World Tour will become the first professional sports organization to use Amazon Leo as its official satellite connectivity partner, deploying low Earth orbit or LEO terminals at tournament venues starting in 2026. The network uses more than 3,000 LEO satellites to deliver high-speed internet to locations underserved — or completely unserved — by terrestrial infrastructure.
In the world of professional sports, “data-driven” is often a term tossed around to describe basic box scores. But for the National Football League, the last 10 years have represented a fundamental shift in how the game is measured, analyzed and even played. This week, as the league reflects on a decade of its Next Gen Stats or NGS platform, the story isn’t just about football — it’s an excellent example of how cloud-native infrastructure and machine learning can transform an industry in real time.
I’m a big fan of any technology that makes our lives easier. One example of this is Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology, which I consider to be the easiest check out experience available today. Customers tap their credit card on a reader, walk in a store, pick up whatever they want and then, as the name suggests, just walk out of the store and everything is charged to your account.
Amazon Web Services Inc. Chief Executive Matt Garman’s keynote at AWS re:Invent was filled with product updates with vision sprinkled in to help customers understand why the innovation matters. To no surprise, this year’s keynote had a strong focus on the explosion of artificial intelligence and agents.