AWS re:Invent 2025 - Maximizing customer outcomes: AWS Partner Led Customer Success (PEX106)

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:

1. 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.

2. 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%.

3. 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.