Maximizing Customer Outcomes: AWS Partner-Led Customer Success
The Opportunity and Challenge of AI Adoption
- AI adoption is accelerating rapidly, with 80% of companies deploying AI and $155 billion expected to be spent on agentic AI by 2030.
- However, 75% of companies investing in AI are not seeing tangible business outcomes, and 40% of AI pilots are expected to be cancelled by 2027.
- This "AI investment value gap" represents a significant challenge for companies and partners looking to maximize the impact of their AI initiatives.
The Solution: Partner-Led Customer Success
- When partners and AWS teams work together to define the business case and systematically drive adoption and value realization, the success rate of AI pilots turning into production doubles.
- Customer success has emerged as a critical factor for partner success, ranking higher than AI-enabled transformation, industry-specific capabilities, and core activities.
- Customer success is not just about retention - it is a sustainable growth driver, helping partners win bigger, longer deals and boost revenue.
The Customer Success Framework
The presenters outlined a structured approach to driving customer success:
Activate
- Clear handoff from sales to customer success with documented use cases and a 30-60-90 day plan.
- Focus on quick wins to build confidence while laying technical foundations.
Adopt
- Measure not just feature usage, but tangible business impact - e.g. developer productivity, support ticket resolution, customer satisfaction.
- Expand successful use cases across the enterprise.
Scale
- Take high-volume, easy-to-automate use cases first to put wins on the board.
- Build confidence and technical foundations, then move to more complex workflows.
Customer Success in Action
The presentation provided three customer examples demonstrating the impact of this approach:
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Jima (Brazil Retail/Supply Chain):
- Flexa, an AWS partner, built a platform to democratize data access and decision-making.
- Resulted in 95% reduction in decision-making time and 20% forecasted sales growth.
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Media Corp (Singapore Media Conglomerate):
- Crayon, an AWS partner, instrumented AI pipelines with comprehensive monitoring and enablement.
- Reduced content production time by 6x, improved AI accuracy from 75% to 90%, and reduced infrastructure costs by 85%.
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Tower Insurance (New Zealand):
- Deloitte, an AWS partner, transformed Tower's contact center with Amazon Connect and various AI capabilities.
- Reduced average handling time by 3 minutes per call, driving significant productivity gains.
The Path Forward
- The presenters shared learnings from a partner-led customer success pilot, covering areas like measuring progression, effort required, business models, frameworks/tools, and governance.
- A "value realization toolkit" will be made available in Q1 to help partners implement this approach.
- The presenters encouraged partners to get involved, with an email address provided for those interested in learning more.
