8x8 Analyst Summit Takeaways – Track Some Mud on the Carpet

My favorite line from A Complete Unknown – “Don’t be afraid to track some mud on the carpet”.

My favorite line – and pretty much everybody else’s from the 8x8 event – “We’re on offense now”.

Being a music guy and a film guy, I really enjoyed watching A Complete Unknown on the flight home from 8x8’s event last week, in Southampton, UK. I hadn’t planned to watch it, but am glad I did, as that line really made me think about 8x8.

If you haven’t seen it, the film is about Bob Dylan’s early career, and his realization that he had to move on from the tradition-bound folk scene that nurtured his formative time in New York.

The climax is the famous Newport Folk Festival in 1965, where he makes his definitive break from that all-acoustic world by playing the closing set with electric instruments. The times they were-a-changing, and he wasn’t going to wait around for blessings from the folk establishment.

He still needed a boost of confidence before pulling this off, and he got it from Johnny Cash, who did his own set earlier in the program. Cash was the ultimate outlaw country singer, and by telling Dylan it’s ok to “track some mud on the carpet” before he went on – in the house of folk - he had all the blessings he needed to do his thing, and that’s the moment when Bobby Dylan became Dylan.

When CEO Sam Wilson told us “we’re on offense now” – something we really haven’t heard from 8x8 before – it sure sounds to me like they’re also ready to track some mud on the carpet in the cloud communications space. The company has long been in the shadow of larger players, but is still very much in the game. With the leadership transition from Bryan Martin to Sam Wilson now complete, Sam and his team is ready to execute on a vision they have been carefully honing the past three years.

Time will tell how much mud they’ll be able to track in, but with the cloud communications space so crowded – and so fluid – they’re in as good a position as anyone to chart their own course and change with the times. I’m not alone in liking what they shared with the analyst community, and here are four key themes that tell me they’re ready for their moment.

1. Shift From Defense to Offense

The main way they go on offense is to take a fresh approach to the “blurred lines” state of the cloud communications space. Sam Wilson talked about the growing overlap among CCaaS, UCaaS and CPaaS offerings, where it’s getting harder for buyers to know which platform to adopt. Nothing new there, but it’s all about how you read the landscape.

Rather than focus on which platform the customer should buy, 8x8 is taking an outcomes-based approach to solving business problems. Other vendors are doing this too, but Sam summed up the reality very well by saying that customers don’t think in terms of which of type platform – agreed - so focus instead on the business issues – agreed as well. That’s the language customers understand, and since 8x8 has highly-integrated capabilities across CCaaS, UCaaS and CPaaS, it really doesn’t matter which one you wrap the offering with.

2. Focus on AI-Driven CX

8x8 has fully pivoted now to CX, and while they’re not alone in doing so, they’ve also tied their new branding to CX, so there’s a lot at stake here. The branding messaging is all about this, such as “Power your CX ambitions”, and “CX limits were meant to be broken”. For businesses embracing CX, these messages are aspirational and empowering, and by extension makes 8x8 look like the ideal company to partner with.

While that messaging focuses on how the customer’s customers feel when CX is good/great, there’s a lot of AI behind the scenes making that happen. The new branding is about outcomes for end customers – as it should be – rather than trying to dazzle them with AI magic. The magic, actually, is to not talk about AI, and let the end customer outcomes speak for themselves.

In terms of a key takeaway, it’s important to note that CX is now front-and-center for 8x8, and their fortunes will ride on how well they can compete in this space. UCaaS and CPaaS remain in the mix, but it’s CX that will carry the day. With AI being everywhere now, the challenge will be how well they can make CX be AI-driven, and this takes us to their AI story, along with how the overall portfolio has evolved to support CX.

3. Broader AI Story

There’s a lot to like in their AI story, and as the next section will outline, it’s broader than you might think. All the CCaaS vendors are now using conversational AI and agentic AI for customer service, and it will quickly be difficult to differentiate this way. Aside from what the vendors are doing, AI adoption will ultimately be driven by how fast contact centers can move on their AI journey.

8x8 understands this, arguably better than most, as their customer base has been closer to SMB/mid-market than large enterprise, where new tech adoption happens at a slower pace. Hunter Middleton did a great job articulating this, starting with the fact that most customers are still on their voice journey. Their journeys to digital channels, to AI and for some, even cloud, are further down the tech evolution path.

The good news is that AI can do wonderful things with voice – today – but many contact centers are not willing/able to go all-in yet. However, they recognize the value that can be extracted from voice for improving CX, but don’t know how to get there. Hunter talked about “building an incremental adoption pathway” for AI, where they don’t get overwhelmed by the endless features all the vendors are offering.

8x8 is taking a more practical approach, to help customers “visualize the outcomes with AI”. Hunter used a Lego analogy, where customers will need some hand-holding with pre-built models, but also to give them a blank slate where they can create their own solutions based on what end customers are asking for.

This is where an open, API-based platform comes into play, along with a best-of-breed partner ecosystem. For customers, the end result is to use AI on their terms to advance their voice journey, both for basic modernization, but also to leverage the more advanced capabilities for voice, such as customer sentiment.

Not to be overlooked here is the foundational importance of voice, which Hunter and others rightfully stressed. One of their slides stated that 40% of self-service interactions are voice, and they did a good job connecting the dots between voice and AI. Only with AI, do contact centers have to the tools to capture voice interactions in a way that can help make everything better, and for this reason, they stressed the importance of transcription accuracy. AI outputs will only be as good as the inputs, and they cited a Tolly study showing 8x8 to have the most accurate scores.

To be fair, many vendors have their own studies that show them to be the best, so this always has to be taken with a grain of salt. That aside, the important point is for contact centers still on their voice journey – and there are many – they need to see why AI voice is so central for CX, and how this should be a key criterion for choosing a CX partner.

4. Portfolio Transformation is Done

This theme warrants a separate post, as much of our time with 8x8 was about the platform, the new announcements and the roadmap. While much of this was NDA, the main message is that they have finally evolved from a suite of platforms (XCaaS), to a broad, but highly-integrated set of offerings. As Sam Wilson noted, they have gone from having 2 to 20+ products. While much of it is native technology, they have a “curated set of partners” that are certified and integrated with their core platform. The underlying message here for customers is that 8x8 provides a full set of capabilities, so they don’t have to worry about making all the pieces fit together.

The partner ecosystem itself is interesting, as it reflects the growing need to have an integrated offering to become truly AI-driven. This goes well beyond standard integrations around WFM or CRM, and good examples include Cognigy for agentic AI, Meltwater for social listening, and support for vertical applications, such as SpinSci for healthcare. As AI advances, this ecosystem will expand, and with the right partners, this model will help 8x8 track even more mud on to the carpet. Not only will this broaden the markets they can compete in, but it also helps them develop new offerings that you might not expect from 8x8.

Two examples would be CIDP and RCS. CIDP – Comprehensive Interaction Data Layer – reflects much of their internal AI story, where all interactions are tracked and analyzed to provide a 360 view of the customer. With all that data, the AI piece identifies anomalies that need attention, along with actionable insights across the organization – CX leaders, supervisors and agents. Most CX vendors have similar capabilities now, but coming back to the full integration across UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaaS, CIDP brings rich customer journey orchestration that 8x8’s customers never had before.

RCS – Rich Communication Services - is another interesting piece of the puzzle, as this reflects how mobile-centric CX is becoming. Mainly the domain of brands as an outbound channel to engage customers and prospects, 8x8 sees use cases to make mobile CX better. Instead of static, text-based engagement via SMS, RCS can add video and images for deeper engagement – over a channel that reflects where customers are. RCS may not yet be mainstream in North America, but it’s coming, and will soon become core to the CX landscape.

 Conclusion

There is a lot more to cover, especially around 8x8’s portfolio, and announcements during the event - and for some of that detail, I’ll steer you to fellow BCStrategies colleague, Blair Pleasant. You can find her post here – on our newly refreshed website – which includes some video interviews done at the event.

Overall, it looks like things are coming together in a good way now for 8x8, both in terms of their offerings and the team that’s in place now. Sam Wilson brings a compelling vision, and those around him bring the passion he talked about on Day 1. Those are pretty good building blocks, and if the portfolio resonates with both channels and customers – we got validation from both during the sessions – then 2025 should be a good year for 8x8.

Now let’s hope some of that rubs off on the Southampton Saints, an 8x8 customer that hosted us for the event. If they can somehow leverage all this good technology to make the team better, and perhaps stave off relegation from the EPL, that would be next-level for tracking mud on the carpet, or in this case, the pitch. Nothing is impossible with AI, right?

Before you go, if you want to literally see more about 8x8’s event, I’ve posted a set of photos on my blog, and you can view them here.