Agentic AI platform Sendbird this week announced a collaboration with AWS that should accelerate its exposure and adoption. This happens on a few levels, including helping AWS expand its agentic AI capabilities and positioning as a launch partner for AWS Marketplace’s AI Agents and Tools category.
Before getting into the AWS deal, what is Sendbird? The company offers customizable AI agents for customer support. That makes it a B2B2C player – an opportune segment of the AI universe – and it already powers 7 billion monthly conversations for 4,000 brands (DoorDash, Hinge, and Yahoo Sports).
This will be a growing category as every consumer-facing brand adopts AI – some faster than others, as it often goes – to streamline and automate their support functions. Gartner forecasts that agentic AI will resolve 80 percent of customer service issues by 2029. That means rapid adoption in the near term.
Meet Them Where They Are
Back to Sendbird’s latest AWS collaborations, the first component of the deal will involve beefing up its agentic AI chops, as noted. The three-year deal will involve technical integrations to elevate agentic AI functions and help the company go deeper into verticals like travel and hospitality and retail.
Specifically, Sendbird will integrate Amazon Nova and Amazon Bedrock into its platform. This will help it process advanced multimodal AI, including text, image, video, and speech. The point is to enable natural customer dialogues across formats – messaging, voice, etc. – to meet them where they are.
This should help Sendbird’s performance metrics, which are already strong. For example, the company reports that it helped P2P property marketplace reduce manual reviews by 80 percent. Fintech player Maya meanwhile achieved 94 percent cost savings by deploying AI-powered messaging.
Amplification Play
On to the second component of the deal, it’s more of a distribution and amplification play for Sendbird. It will be one of the launch partners for AWS Marketplace’s new AI Agent and Tools category. Surprisingly, this category didn’t already exist in AWS Marketplace, and it would seem to have a promising future.
As a sidenote, we often see press releases that companies partnered with Amazon, which is a fancy – sometimes inflated and misleading – way of saying that Amazon has accepted an app in its marketplace. It’s like saying your app’s acceptance to the Apple App Store constitutes a “collaboration” with Apple.
But that arguably disingenuous practice isn’t the case here. Sendbird confirmed to us that this is a collaboration with Amazon’s active participation. Sendbird was selected by Amazon to be among the select few companies featured in the new category. So it’s an active two-way collaboration.
