Why Companies Are Choosing Private LLMs Over Public AI Models in 2025

Our own LLM!

By DrVoIP — Where IT Meets AI, in the Cloud

Introduction: The Shift Toward Private Intelligence

AI has moved from “interesting demo” to mission-critical infrastructure. As organizations push AI deeper into customer interactions, agent assistance, knowledge operations, and forecasting, the uncomfortable truth becomes clear:

You can’t run your business on someone else’s brain.

Below are the top reasons enterprises are shifting from public, shared AI models to private, domain-trained LLMs deployed on platforms like Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, HuggingFace, ECS, EKS, or on-prem GPU infrastructure.


1. Security: Your Data Stays Inside Your Walls

Public LLMs require that your prompts and context be sent to a third-party model host. Even with “no training” guarantees, the risk profile remains.

  • Controlled data paths
  • No external logging
  • Compliance with HIPAA, PCI, SOX, FedRAMP
  • Private VPC deployment with IAM + KMS protection

For Contact Centers handling customer PII, private models are no longer optional.


2. Confidentiality: Your IP Is a Strategic Asset

Your internal knowledge is part of your competitive moat—price lists, contracts, troubleshooting workflows, customer history, engineering diagrams, HR processes.

A private LLM ensures this data never crosses a public AI boundary.


3. Pre-Training Advantages: A Private Model Speaks Your Language

Public LLMs are brilliant generalists. Your organization is not.

A private model can be:

  • Pre-trained on your domain data
  • Fine-tuned on historical conversations
  • Aligned with your brand voice
  • Optimized for Amazon Connect, Lex, Q, Bedrock KBs, or internal APIs

Public LLMs are smart. Private LLMs are smart for your business.


4. Predictable Costs & Lower Long-Term Spend

Public LLM costs spike with usage—long prompts, concurrency surges, large context windows.

Private LLMs offer:

  • Predictable inference cost
  • Control over hardware (GPU / CPU)
  • Scaling designed for your traffic patterns
  • Sharable infrastructure across business units

Heavy users (contact centers, finance, healthcare) see major savings.


5. Governance, Compliance & Control

Businesses require:

  • Audit logs
  • Model versioning
  • Content guardrails
  • Explainability
  • Responsible-AI policies
  • Data residency guarantees

Public LLMs simply cannot satisfy all enterprise controls. Private deployments can.


6. Performance: Faster, Closer, and Tuned for Real-Time Systems

Deploying a private LLM in your AWS Region—or even inside your VPC—results in:

  • Lower latency
  • Higher throughput
  • Custom prompt flows
  • Ability to embed proprietary knowledge directly

For Amazon Connect agent assistance and customer self-service, latency is everything.


7. Independence From Vendor Roadmaps

Public LLMs come with strings:

  • Model changes outside your control
  • Pricing changes
  • Content restrictions
  • Outages
  • Usage limits

A private LLM frees you from third-party constraints.


8. Strategic Advantage: Your Model Becomes a Business Asset

A private LLM becomes a:

  • Productivity engine
  • Knowledge hub
  • Agent assistant
  • Training system
  • CX multiplier
  • Competitive moat

This AI capability becomes part of your intellectual property, not something rented.


9. Compute Reality Check: Running Your Own LLM Is Easier in 2025

Modern optimizations make private models practical without massive infrastructure:

  • Quantization
  • MLX, llama.cpp, vLLM, TGI
  • Smaller 1B–7B domain models
  • AWS-managed deployments (Bedrock Custom Models, SageMaker Endpoints)

You no longer need racks of GPUs—just smart engineering.


Conclusion

Public LLMs are excellent for experimentation. But running your business on them is like storing your customer database on a public Google Doc.

Private LLMs offer:

  • Security
  • Confidentiality
  • Performance
  • Lower long-term cost
  • Operational control
  • A genuine strategic advantage

If your organization is exploring private or hybrid LLM architectures, DrVoIP can help you design a strategy that fits your business, budget, and existing cloud investments.

Where IT Meets AI — in the Cloud.

AI in Amazon Connect: How Bedrock, Lex, and SageMaker Work Together

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming customer service — but figuring out how it actually fits into Amazon Connect can feel like drinking from a firehose. If you’ve heard about Amazon Bedrock, Lex, and SageMaker, and wondered which one you need (and when), this guide breaks it down in plain English.


🚀 The Big Picture: Smarter Contact Centers

Today’s contact centers are getting a serious AI upgrade. Instead of static IVR menus (“Press 1 for Sales”), companies are rolling out virtual agents that can answer customer questions, find information, and even summarize conversations for live agents.

Amazon Connect now offers multiple ways to build these smart assistants:

  • Amazon Lex – the conversational interface (your bot’s “voice” or “chat”).
  • Amazon Bedrock – access to powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) like Anthropic Claude or Amazon Titan.
  • Amazon SageMaker – the build-your-own lab for advanced machine learning models.
  • Amazon Q – a new generative AI assistant that plugs directly into Connect.

💡 When to Use Bedrock with a Knowledge Base

If your goal is to give customers or agents access to your company’s existing knowledge — like product FAQs, documentation, or policy manuals — then Bedrock with a Knowledge Base is your best friend.

This approach uses a technique called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). In simple terms, it means the AI doesn’t “make up” answers — it finds the relevant content in your data (from S3, SharePoint, Confluence, etc.) and uses that to respond accurately.

Example: a Lex bot built with Bedrock can answer questions like “What’s your return policy?” by pulling the answer straight from your latest documents, without anyone coding that response.

Why it works:

  • No need to train or fine-tune anything.
  • Updates automatically when you add new documents.
  • Secure – your data stays in AWS.
  • Low cost – you pay only for what you use.

🔬 When to Use SageMaker (Train Your Own Model)

On the other hand, Amazon SageMaker comes into play when you need something truly custom — like predicting call outcomes, detecting fraud, or creating a model that understands your company’s specific tone or workflow.

For instance, DoorDash uses a SageMaker model to detect fraud risk during customer claims, working alongside an Amazon Q bot that gathers call information. SageMaker models can also handle specialized tasks like classifying customer sentiment or summarizing long call transcripts.

Why it works:

  • Full control over how your model learns and behaves.
  • Ideal for predictive analytics or deep domain expertise.
  • Perfect for compliance-sensitive environments where you must control the model environment.

But: it’s more work. You’ll need data science skills, ongoing maintenance, and enough traffic to justify training costs.


⚖️ Quick Comparison

Feature Bedrock + Knowledge Base Custom Model (SageMaker)
Setup Plug-and-play, no training needed Full ML pipeline setup
Updates Auto-syncs with new data Requires retraining
Cost Pay-per-use Pay for compute time + hosting
Best For FAQs, self-service bots, knowledge lookup Predictions, analytics, custom use cases
Maintenance Low – managed by AWS High – you manage everything

🏗️ Recommended Architecture: Hybrid Wins

The smartest approach for most organizations? A hybrid strategy:

  1. Use Lex (or Amazon Q) with Bedrock Knowledge Base to handle FAQs, basic troubleshooting, and natural conversations.
  2. Let Bedrock access your private data using RAG to keep responses factual and up-to-date.
  3. When you need specialized tasks (like fraud scoring or call summarization), integrate SageMaker models via Lambda into your Connect flows.
  4. If the bot can’t resolve the issue, hand it off to a live agent — along with the AI-generated conversation summary.

This way, you combine the flexibility of managed AI with the power of custom intelligence — a true “AI assist” for both customers and agents.


🎯 The Bottom Line

For most Amazon Connect deployments, start simple: use Bedrock and Lex (or Amazon Q) with a Knowledge Base to create an intelligent, self-updating FAQ or customer assistant. Once you’re ready for advanced automation — like predictive scoring or call analytics — bring SageMaker into the mix.

Either way, the goal is the same: make every customer interaction faster, smarter, and more human.


💬 Need Help Bringing AI to Your Amazon Connect?

DrVoIP can help design and deploy AI-powered contact centers that combine the best of AWS — Connect, Lex, Bedrock, and SageMaker — to fit your business goals.

📧 Contact us at grace@drvoip.com or visit DrVoIP.com to get started.


Amazon Connect Campaign Dialer: Why Clean Lists Mean More Connections

Amazon Connect Campaign Dialer: Why Clean Lists Mean More Connections

The Hidden Challenge Behind Every Dialer Deployment

When organizations launch Amazon Connect V2 Campaign Dialer, the excitement is all about automation, scalability, and speed. But here’s the quiet truth our DrVoIP engineers have learned: the biggest obstacle to a successful campaign isn’t the dialer — it’s the list hygiene.

Most outbound lists are stitched together from CRMs, help desks, and third-party data brokers. Before you know it, your “target audience” includes duplicates, missing data, and invalid numbers. Bad lists lead to failed calls, frustrated agents, and compliance headaches. Clean lists lead to productivity, precision, and profit.

Data Hygiene Is Not a One-Time Event

Keeping your campaign lists clean isn’t something you do once — it’s an ongoing process. It mirrors the machine learning lifecycle: collect, clean, validate, and repeat. Yet this critical task often lands on the IT team instead of the call center management where it belongs.

That’s why DrVoIP has been exploring AWS tools to automate and simplify this workflow. Our goal: let your team focus on connecting with customers, not cleaning CSV files.

Testing the Tools: From SageMaker Data Wrangler to Glue DataBrew

We first tried AWS SageMaker Data Wrangler — a world-class solution for preparing large datasets used in machine learning. It worked beautifully but was too expensive and too complex for everyday dialer list management.

Then we discovered AWS Glue DataBrew — a cost-effective, no-code tool for cleaning, normalizing, and validating data stored in Amazon S3. Think of it as a “data washing machine” that removes duplicates, fixes missing information, and standardizes phone numbers to the required E.164 format.

Essential Steps for Campaign List Hygiene

Regardless of which AWS tool you use, these hygiene steps should always happen before uploading a list into your Campaign Dialer:

  • Normalize Phone Numbers: Convert all numbers to E.164 format (+1 for US, etc.) to avoid rejection or failed calls.
  • Validate Every Number: Use Amazon Pinpoint’s phone number validation API to confirm if a number is valid and identify whether it’s mobile, landline, or VoIP.
  • Scrub Against DNC Lists: Stay compliant by checking both national and internal Do-Not-Call registries. Pinpoint or your third-party DNC provider can help here.
  • Infer Time Zones: Campaign Dialer can determine a contact’s time zone from their address or phone number — if that data is accurate. Validate and fill missing fields.
  • Encrypt and Protect Data: Always store contact data in encrypted S3 buckets with AWS KMS for compliance and security.

How It All Fits Together

At DrVoIP, we’ve built a simple, repeatable architecture that keeps list hygiene both affordable and automated:

Amazon S3 (Raw List)Glue DataBrew (clean & format) → Lambda Function (Pinpoint validation & filtering) → DNC ScrubAmazon S3 (Cleaned List)Amazon Connect Campaign Dialer.

This keeps costs low, reduces manual labor, and ensures every dialable number in your list is verified, compliant, and ready for use.

The DrVoIP Bottom Line

For machine learning projects, SageMaker Data Wrangler is a great fit. But for day-to-day Amazon Connect V2 campaigns, Glue DataBrew + Lambda + Pinpoint delivers the perfect balance of cost, simplicity, and scalability. It’s a practical solution that keeps your campaigns compliant and your agents productive.

In short, clean lists create confident dialing — and confident dialing drives conversions. Treat list hygiene as your competitive advantage, not a cleanup chore.


Ready to automate your list hygiene process? Contact Grace@DrVoIP.com and learn how DrVoIP can help you build a data-driven campaign workflow powered by AWS.

2025 DrVoIP Contact Center Planning Guide!

Rethinking Your Amazon Connect Contact Center: Start with the Experience, Not the Technology

When planning a new Amazon Connect contact center, the temptation is to jump straight into the technology — menus, routing profiles, integrations. But the truth is, great contact centers start with the caller’s journey, not the IVR script.

If your plan is to copy the same call tree you built a decade ago, you’re missing the opportunity to create a modern, frictionless customer experience. Today’s customers expect faster resolutions, smarter routing, and a personal touch — not endless menu options.

That’s where the DrVoIP Amazon Connect Planning Guide comes in. It walks you through the critical questions that must be answered before a single line of code is written or a design spec is handed to the implementation engineers. Questions about:

  • How will calls, chats, and messages be routed based on customer needs?
  • What self-service options make sense — and where should live agents step in?
  • How will you measure success from day one?

As an Amazon Certified Delivery Partner, DrVoIP brings the expertise to turn your vision into a contact center that’s on time, on budget, and delivering the highest customer satisfaction scores.



Want the full Planning Guide? We’re offering the DrVoIP Amazon Connect Planning Guide free of charge.

Just contact Grace@DrVoIP.com, call, or textto get your copy.

Why Your Website and Call Center Should Be Besties: The Amazon Connect Love Story!

Ever feel like your website and call center are two ships passing in the night? One’s all flashy and interactive, the other’s stuck in a queue playing elevator music. Well, buckle up, because integrating them with Amazon Connect is like giving them a matchmaking app – sparks fly, efficiency soars, and your customers? They’re the ones getting the happy ending!

The Perks of Playing Matchmaker

Picture this: A customer lands on your site, browses your killer products, but hits a snag. Instead of rage-quitting to a competitor, they click a chat button and – poof! – instant help. No more “hold please” nightmares. With Amazon Connect, you get:

  • Seamless Chat Integration: Start with text-based chit-chat right on your site. It’s like whispering sweet nothings to your customers without the awkward small talk.
  • Escalation Shenanigans: Chat not cutting it? Escalate to voice, video, or even desktop sharing. Imagine screen-sharing a troubleshooting session – it’s like having a virtual IT genie pop out of your browser!
  • AI-Powered Wit: Our AWS Lex bots handle the basics, answering product queries with the charm of a stand-up comedian. “What’s the warranty on that widget?” Boom, answered faster than you can say “human agent.” Only escalate when things get real – saving time, money, and sanity.

The benefits? Happier customers who feel heard (literally), lower abandonment rates, and agents freed up for the tough stuff. It’s not just integration; it’s a full-on bromance between digital and human touchpoints.

How DrVoIP Makes the Magic Happen

At DrVoIP, we’re the wizards behind Amazon Connect deployments. We weave in AWS AI to make your Lex bot smarter than your average bear – or at least smarter than that one uncle who thinks he’s tech-savvy. From chat to video escalation, we ensure your setup is as smooth as a well-oiled meme machine. No more siloed systems; everything chats, calls, and collaborates like they’re at a family reunion (minus the drama).

Wrap It Up: Don’t Leave Your Site Hanging

Integrating your website with your call center via Amazon Connect isn’t just smart – it’s hilarious how much easier life gets. Customers get help without the hassle, your team avoids burnout, and your bottom line? It does a happy dance. Ready to play cupid? Demo by clicking the chat icon below or Hit us up at DrVoIP.com – we’ll connect the dots (and the calls)!

Campaign Dialer History and the Current State of the Art in Amazon Connect

A Brief History

Amazon Connect was introduced in 2017 as a revolutionary, cloud-native contact center solution from AWS. That same year, DrVoIP installed its first Amazon Connect instance for a paying client. Having decades of experience building call center solutions with platforms like Cisco, we had developed a clear set of expectations for what a modern contact center should offer.

Initially, Amazon Connect lacked a native campaign dialer, a core requirement for outbound calling environments like telemarketing. This gap limited its early adoption in outbound-heavy verticals. While third-party integrations existed, our goal was to deliver a one-vendor solution built entirely on AWS.

Building with StartOutboundVoiceContact

In the absence of a native campaign dialer, early adopters had to get creative. The StartOutboundVoiceContact API enabled basic outbound calling, but required architects to develop extensive backend logic using Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, and Connect flows.

DrVoIP built a foundational DIY dialer framework, managing contact lists, pacing logic, retries, and reporting through custom code. It worked—but was resource intensive and fragile under scale.

Third-Party Solutions Fill the Gap

As Amazon Connect gained traction, third-party dialer providers stepped in. Platforms from VoiceFoundry, Xaqt, and others offered robust outbound functionality, but came with additional costs, integration complexity, and vendor management burdens—contrary to AWS’s promise of simplicity and scalability.

The Arrival of Campaign Dialer V1

AWS quietly released Campaign Dialer V1, leveraging Amazon Pinpoint as the backend. It introduced basic campaign capabilities, including email, SMS, and voice. However, it suffered from major limitations:

  • No agent-aware dialing logic.
  • Lack of built-in retry policies.
  • Every contact was pushed to Customer Profiles, bloating CRM databases with unqualified leads.
  • Minimal real-time reporting or call disposition visibility.

V1 was a step forward, but it wasn’t production-grade for enterprise outbound needs.

Campaign Dialer V2: A Mature Offering

Campaign Dialer V2 brought substantial improvements:

  • Integrated directly with Amazon Connect, eliminating reliance on Pinpoint.
  • Introduced progressive dialing tied to agent availability.
  • Allowed custom retry logic and contact attribute handling.
  • Accepted CSV and API-based campaign data ingestion.
  • Empowered dynamic screen pops and routing via contact flows.

Despite these advancements, challenges remain:

  • Limited out-of-the-box analytics.
  • Inflexible call recording controls.
  • No native lead scoring or prioritization tools.

The Road Ahead: Event-Driven and AI-Powered Campaigns

We anticipate a future where outbound engagement in Amazon Connect is:

  • Event-triggered using Amazon EventBridge.
  • AI-enhanced via Amazon Bedrock or SageMaker.
  • Dynamically paced based on real-time Connect Streams API data.
  • Seamlessly integrated with Lex bots and CRM systems.

Why DrVoIP?

At DrVoIP LLC, we’ve led the evolution of Amazon Connect since day one. As an AWS Partner focused exclusively on contact center innovation, we:

  • Deliver on time, on budget deployments.
  • Maintain top-tier customer satisfaction scores.
  • Specialize in outbound campaigns, AI integrations, and real-time analytics.

Let’s build your next-gen contact center together.

📞 www.drvoip.com
📧 contactcenter@drvoip.com


Would you answer a call from a toll free number?

Campaign Dialer Feature Request?

We are often asked to comment on how to increase answer rates on cold calls.   Calls either made manually by an Agent in an outbound contact center, or an auto dialer or campaign dialer.   Generally, in the era of smartphones, we generally reject calls from unknown numbers and all 800. numbers are unknown!   Some of the strategies we have developed include matching the area code of the number we are calling.  If we are calling someone with a 212 area code, we present a 212 area code in our outbound number.  Not fool proof, but it does increase the answer rate.   Historically, sip trunks were used to fake outbound caller id.  It was a simple trick to make it appear that Bill Clinton was calling you!  Now, with calling number ID restrictions, it is much more difficult to “fake” caller id and you must use a number that you actually own!

If you cant match the area code with a number you have, the second strategy is almost effective.  Do not use a toll free number!  Use a DID number and even though it may not be known by the individual being called, it peeks enough curiosity to have the call answered.   Generally, Amazon Connect will not allow you to present a caller ID that is not a phone number on your contact center.   AWS has made an accommodation, by allowing you to display a caller id  in which you have provided documentation that supports your ownership of the number.  In that case, even though the number is not directly on your contact center, they will let you display it on an outbound call.

Lambda and Dynamodb to the Rescue!

To accommodate the change of caller id on an outbound call, we need to apply some software engineering.  First, we need a database of phone numbers that we legitimately own.  Index the database by area code and it is a simple task for a python function to take the number dialed, look it up, and then return it as an attribute to an Amazon Connect contact flow.  Change the default outbound contact flow, to invoke the lambda function that looks up the dialed number, and return it to a caller id  attribute that is displayed to the called party.  This simple strategy increases answer rate measurably more than using an 800 number.

Amazon Connect Campaign Dialer?

The V2 of the Amazon Connect campaign dialer is an astonishing step forward from the previous “high density outbound calling” solution.   Though there is still a requirement that non-technical managers need to have permissions in the AWS Console to configure and load lists into Pinpoint,  the V2  configuration is almost entirely accomplished through the Amazon Connect dashboard.    Generally managers of a call center would need to contact the IT team to load lists, as security concerns abbreviated  the assignment of  IAM permissions to none technical users accessing the  AWS Console!  V2 all but eliminates this concern.

Unfortunately CID is fixed!

The Lambda strategy for area code swapping discussed above, will not work with the V2 campaign dialer as of the date of this publication.   (Things move quickly in AWS, so this is subject to change, check often).   When you create a campaign you select the number the system should use to place each phone call.  We are not currently able to change that number as we can with a manually dialed number.   From our desk, this is a serious short coming in the world of campaign dialing!  The only option currently available is to divide the “list” into smaller lists segmented by area code.   This increases the administrative burden on list creation.

We are hopeful that AWS will address this market requirement while making DNC and list scrubbing an important subset of the campaign dialer feature set!

 

Free Trial Demo Center !

Amazon Connect Demo Center

We offer a complete Amazon Connect Contact center with all the bells and whistles free for you to try with up to 5 of your own team members.  We provide a dedicated phone number, a custom greeting with your company messages.  Test drive the contact center, experience the call quality and the feature set.   In less than an hour or so, we can have you setup and operational.

  • Dedicated phone number
  • Voice Inbound
  • US outbound calling
  • SMS
  • Email
  • Video and Screen sharing
  • Advanced Agent Dashboard
  • Real time metrics
  • Supervisor Console
  • Call Recording with Transcription

Click, call or email and we will get you setup, its the only way to fully understand a cloud based contact center


Contact grace@drvoip.com or call#114 and talk to her!

Amazon Connect 2025 Update Tutorial

Amazon Connect 2025 Update!

During the past year and as we enter 2025, Amazon Connect has made some significant changes.  AWS has added new channels including SMS, Video and Email, many new features including AI assistance and a refreshing new look and feel to the cloud console in general and the Amazon Connect portal in particular.   We have been generating YouTube tutorials on Amazon Connect since our first deployment in 2017!    As new features were released we would update our tutorials and our blog, but the changes are so dramatic this year, that we plan to just create a new tutorial series on the DrVoIP YouTube Channel.

There is a Youtube video covering this material!

Our goal is to create and release a “soup to nuts” tutorial series that will walk you through the creation of an Amazon Connect contact center, complete with all you might need to execute your own solution.   We start with a very basic, but working Contact Center and then with each succeeding Videos, we will slowly increase the functionality and efficiency of the Call center.   We will add new channels, BOTS, Messaging and review many of the most popular CRM and Practice Management software integrations.   First using only Amazon Connect contact flow resources and then, as requirements develop, we will begin to make use of other AWS services including lambda, dynamodb and other resources.

Amazon Connect has always been a work in progress but 2025 is set to be an amazing year for Amazon Connect!  So stay tuned, as we continue to help you stay abreast of all the new capabilities of this already amazing technology! – DrVoIP