Enterprise Connect 2025 – A Farewell to the Gaylord Palms

It was another whirlwind Enterprise Connect, with tons of announcements and news – especially around AI.

Analysts are in high demand at this event, as it’s a great way for vendors to spend time with many of the analysts in attendance. I participated in 20 1:1 vendor meetings, attended 10 analyst breakfasts/dinners/receptions, and only had time for a few keynotes and a couple sessions. I also moderated two sessions -

Harnessing the Combined Power of UCaaS amp; CCaaS for Enhanced EX and CX: A Customer Case Study with Reggie Scales of Vonage, and GAF’s Christine Baumeister
Re-tool Your Teams (and Users) for AI with representatives from Microsoft, Google, and Miratech discussing the need for upskilling IT teams, AI training and training programs for both IT teams and end users and driving user adoption.

By now you know that the major theme of the event was AI, and the word of the week was “Agentic,” as in Agentic AI and AI Agents. Every vendor meeting and keynote included discussions on how Agentic AI impacts how businesses communicate, serve customers and get work done. During my many meetings, whenever someone brought up the term “agentic,” I asked how they define agentic AI or AI agents. While every vendor defines agentic AI/AI agents differently (usually based on what they offer), there’s some consensus that it involves reasoning and action, and the ability to perform tasks on behalf of someone (or something) without explicit instructions. There are some differences of opinion in whether AI agents are autonomous, with some vendors noting that there’s a continuum, with autonomy being the end goal that hasn’t been achieved yet.

For example:

NICE defines AI agents as having reasoning and taking action, while maximizing value through workflows, rather than being fully autonomous. AI agents take action and connect with other systems to resolve complex intents with automation.
According to Zoom, agentic AI does the work for you, takes action, and executes on your behalf. Zoom notes that agentic AI includes four skills: reasoning (it can size up situations and map out the best game plan to complete a goal), memory (it learns from the history of interactions), task action, and orchestration.
Salesforce sees agentic as the ability to reason and take action, including the ability to form and execute a plan - whether done autonomously or in assisted mode.

While unified communications and collaboration have been the central theme of Enterprise Connect for many years, Enterprise Connect is quickly becoming a contact center event. Many of the keynotes and announcements focused on customer experience (CX), especially as most of the traditional UCC/UCaaS vendors have made significant strides in their CX efforts. A few examples include Microsoft, Cisco, Google, and Zoom.

Throughout the event (when time permitted) I did short vendor video interviews, which are included throughout this article (yes, I know – if you took the time to watch every video this article would take hours to get through, but the videos are a great source of information).

The following covers some of the key CCaaS/CX announcements and news and my video interviews.

AWS

AWS launched the next generation of Amazon Connect, which provides “AI everywhere,” while continuously analyzing interactions to improve the customer and agent experience. In his keynote presentation, Pasquale DeMaio, VP of Amazon Connect, described some of the new features being introduced, including native integration of AWS AI. This makes it easy to AI-enable every customer touchpoint in the contact center with one click, adding AI capabilities such as GenAI self-service, GenAI Agent assistance, conversational analytics, GenAI post-contact summaries, screen recording, GenAI Performance evaluation, forecasting, and scheduling. This next generation of Amazon Connect includes Amazon Q for Connect, providing automated agent assistance and end-customer self-service, as well as Contact Lens for conversational analytics, screen recording, and performance evaluation. According to DeMaio, AWS is taking what they’ve learned about AI in the past eight years and making it a key part of Connect, with everything in one package.

AWS also announced the general availability of Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect, which integrates all of Connect’s digital channels into Salesforce Service Cloud.

In this video interview, DeMaio and Heidi Elmore, Senior Product Marketing Manager - Amazon Connect, discuss how AWS brought together all the key capabilities in one solution, while making things simple with pay-as-you-go pricing. This helps companies think differently about the way they interact with customers and provide more proactive service. DeMaio also describes the various AI capabilities for customers, agents, and supervisors, while Elmore provides insights about customers using the new Amazon Connect and AI capabilities.

Cognigy

In addition to its strong conversational AI capabilities, Cognigy provides fully pre-trained AI agents, including AI Voice Agents, AI Agents for Chat and Messaging, AI-Powered Agent Assist, and AI Agents for Sales & Marketing, in addition to AI agents for various vertical industries.

Cognigy launched its AI Agent Console, providing workforce management for AI Agents to monitor human and AI agents in real-time to manage the workforce.

In this video, Cognigy’s VP Marketing, Alan Ranger, talks about the AI Agent Console, which sheds light on AI agent performance, along with relevant metrics to help organizations better manage these agents. The same console interacts with human agents using the Cognigy copilot to measure success. Ranger also provides some interesting predictions about how everyone will have an AI agent on a mobile device that will act on our behalf to interact with other AI agents for tasks such as booking a restaurant reservation. The AI agents will use a conversational interface when interacting with other AI agents to complete the tasks.

Cisco

Cisco isn’t new to the contact center world but has made some major strides recently, adding new capabilities to its Webex Customer Experience portfolio, notably Webex AI Agent and AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center. At Enterprise Connect, Cisco introduced new agentic AI capabilities, including the general availability of the Webex AI Agent, as well as new workflows in AI Assistant for Webex Suite, Webex Calling Customer Assist, and AirPlay on Cisco Devices for Microsoft Teams Rooms.

Webex AI Agent will be GA at the end of March, providing “a 24/7, self-service solution that works alongside human agents to answer routine and high-volume customer questions and executes actions to fulfill customer requests.” Cisco notes that businesses can design and deploy AI Agents tailored to their requirements, choosing between autonomous agents for dynamic conversations or scripted agents with pre-configured responses. Webex AI Agent integrates out of the box with Webex Contact Center and provides omnichannel, multilingual AI agents (supporting nine languages), and real-time intent fulfillment.

Cisco added several new features to AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center, including suggested responses and real-time transcription for agents.

The Cisco announcement that intrigued me the most was Webex Calling Customer Assist, aimed at frontline workers. This allows workers in local and regional branches, including retail stores, bank branches, pharmacies, and healthcare clinics, to assist customers and resolve issues. Available through a new Webex Calling offer, capabilities include voice queues with custom messages, advanced auto attendant, click-to-call, AI Assistant for Agents, call sentiment for supervisors, analytics, and more. This offering helps break down the walls of the contact center, enabling frontline workers to assist customers and resolve customer issues, enhancing customer interactions.

At a noisy airport on the way home from Enterprise Connect, I spoke with Vinod Muthukrishnan, Webex Customer Experience VP & COO about some of Cisco’s new announcements.

Dialpad

Dialpad demonstrated its Ai-Powered Customer Intelligence Platform, combining its Ai Contact Center, Ai Sales, Ai Voice, and Ai Meetings with Ai Messaging. The company recently introduced its Ai Agent, an AI-powered virtual assistant that offers 24/7 digital assistance. Using RAG and genAI, Ai Agent searches an organization’s knowledge base to provide answers and information that’s presented to customers conversationally and naturally. Other recent contact center offerings include Launchpad for real-time performance insights, Ai Assistant with integrations into existing knowledge centers and systems, and WFM based on Dialpad’s acquisition of Surfboard.

In this video, Vice President of Product Management Sara Jew-Lim, and Fabrice Della Mea, Vice President of Product Management, Contact Center, discuss these recent announcements, including information on Dialpad’s WFM integration with HR IS systems to improve agent scheduling. Lastly, they discuss Dialpad’s own large language model and how it provides real-time benefits, such as real-time coaching and guidance.

Five9

Five9 announced Spotlight for Five9 AI Insights, powered by Five9 Genius AI to extract actionable insights from conversation transcripts. The Spotlight feature for AI Insights analyzes customer conversations to provide operational data and relevant intelligence that can be tailored and used by sales and marketing teams.

For example:

Sales teams can prompt AI Insights to "Track the most common objections that cause a possible sale to stall,"
Marketing teams can prompt it to "Identify which elements of our messaging customers reference the most in conversations,"
Product teams could prompt it to "Spot what product-related issues are generating the most support tickets."

In this video, Jonathan Rosenberg, Five9 CTO and Head of AI explains how Five9 uses genAI for analytics and insights. He explains how Five9’s AI Insights transcribes each call and uses genAI to figure out the reason for the call, adding additional metrics like customer sentiment and customer satisfaction. Rosenberg provides examples of how various people in organizations can easily prompt the system to get information and mine data for relevant insights. As Rosenberg notes, with Spotlight “You think it, you type it, you graph it.”

GoTo

GoTo launched several products recently, including AI Receptionist, the first offering in GoTo Connect’s new Digital Workforce portfolio aimed at complementing human employees. GoTo Connect AI Receptionist uses genAI to greet callers and create human-like conversations. Supporting more than 10 languages, it handles mundane tasks, resolves routine inquiries by leveraging knowledge bases and FAQs, and intelligently routes callers to the right destination when needed, providing always-on coverage.

GoTo also launched AI Quality Management (QM) for GoTo Connect Contact Center, using genAI to simplify agent coaching and training through automated AI-powered reporting and analysis.

The company has been doubling down on several vertical industries, and introduced GoTo Connect Automotive, which integrates GoTo’s platform with dealer management systems and CRM systems for automotive dealers.

In this video, Joe Walsh, VP Global Marketing & Site Leader provides insights about GoTo Connect AI Receptionist, GoTo Connect Automotive, and AI QM.

Microsoft

Microsoft has been making important headway with its Dynamics 365 Contact Center, a Copilot-first contact center solution that is built to work with a business’ existing CRM or Dynamics 365 Customer Service. The big news at Enterprise Connect was the integration of Teams Phone and Dynamics 365 Contact Center integration, enabling customers to use Teams Phone as their contact center telephony system. By offering a single telephony solution, Microsoft reduces operational complexity, improves billing processes, and provides broad geographic coverage, leveraging the global availability of Teams Phone numbers.

As Ilya Bukshteyn, Corporate VP, Microsoft Teams Calling, Devices, and Premium Experiences, explained during his keynote presentation, this integration lets organization levering their Teams Phone PSTN investment to work with their contact center solution of choice, starting with Dynamics 365 Contact Center. Businesses can take advantage of Teams Phone enterprise features, including the Teams management interface. Teams Phone Extensibility will support certified ISV contact center solutions, including Anywhere365, AudioCodes, ComputerTalk, Enghouse, IP Dynamics, Landis, and Luware.

As someone who’s been advocating the integration of UCaaS and CCaaS for many, many years, I was extremely happy to hear this news. I’ve long touted the benefits of having a single, consolidated phone system to eliminate the need for separate UCaaS & CCaaS solutions. With Teams Phone integration, organizations using Dynamics 365 Contact Center will have access to various capabilities, while reducing cost and complexity, and simplifying deployment and management.

Microsoft also added features in its Teams Queues App, aimed at groups and departments that don’t have or need full contact center capabilities. New features include monitor, whisper, barge, and takeover capabilities for supervisors.

Mitel

Mitel’s big news at Enterprise Connect was the general availability of its omnichannel CX and contact center suite, Mitel CX, which includes genAI-powered virtual agents, agent assistance with real-time prompts, suggested responses, and intelligence-based coaching, and real-time analytics. It also provides customizable workflow automation, including Mitel’s Chatbot Builder and low-code/no-code Workflow Studio. Mitel CX’s UC integration lets businesses analyze omnichannel customer interactions, workforce performance, and operational trends.

In this video, Mitel CMO Eric Hanson and Luiz Domingos, CTO, Group VP Large Enterprise and Vertical Solutions R&D discuss the Mitel CX and how it fits in with Mitel’s hybrid strategy. They also provide information on Mitel’s partnership with Zoom, offering a unique hybrid cloud solution that integrates Zoom Workplace and Zoom AI Companion with Mitel’s communications and telephony platforms.

MITEL 6526

NICE

NICE introduced CXone Mpower Orchestrator, the winner of the Best of Enterprise Connect award and Best Innovation in Customer Experience award. Built natively on CXone Mpower, Orchestrator automates customer service workflows with agentic AI across the entire customer service organization, including both the front and back offices. It unifies all touchpoints, including virtual agents, live agents, and back-office workflows, on a single AI platform while integrating AI-driven insights, third-party applications, and enterprise-wide workflows into a unified, automated, and optimized framework.

In this video, Andy Traba, VP of Product Marketing, discusses how CXone Mpower Orchestrator integrates data, AI models, and knowledge to optimize and automate workflows across teams and applications. He also discusses how NICE defines agentic AI, which involves workflows across the entire business, as well as openness and flexibility to interact with third-party applications. Lastly, Traba discusses how NICE’s vision for automating customer service goes beyond the contact center to ensure the right resources are in place across the entire workflow.

I also spoke with NICE’s Jennifer Wilson, Director of Product Marketing, about NICE’s copilots that assist agents, supervisors, business leaders, and system administrators. Wilson notes that AI augmentation is not just for agents, but also other personas and employees within the customer experience space. For supervisors, copilots can identify coaching opportunities and create and deliver personalized agent coaching models. For business leaders, copilots can provide more insights into KPIs, uncover how different touchpoints are intertwined, identify bottlenecks in processes, etc., and provide full visibility to the customer experience workflow ecosystem.

Salesforce

As shown below, Salesforce announced a slew of Agentforce innovations to assist customers, customer service representatives, and contact center supervisors. The company announced Agentforce 2dx, providing agentic reasoning for workflows with the ability to take action on its own. Agentforce 2dx offers new low-code and pro-code tools for admins and developers to configure, test, and deploy Agentforce faster. The new version lets organizations integrate autonomous agents into their existing data systems, business logic, and user interfaces, helping agents be more proactive.

I met with Ryan Nichols, Chief Customer Officer for Salesforce Service Cloud, who explained Salesforce’s views on agentic AI. Nichols sees a progression in AI agents and discusses how customers can get started:

First, start with an AI agent that can answer a question based on information that’s grounded in a company’s data (e.g. What’s your refund policy?)
Next, personalize the answers based on data that’s specific to the customer (e.g. Where’s my order?)
Take action on behalf of the customer using the same workflows for contact center agents. (e.g. Cancel my order)

Upcoming Agentforce innovations include the next generation of customer support assistants that help agents respond to complex and tricky questions and guide the rep on generating a plan to subsequently resolve this in self-service.

In this video, Nichols describes Salesforce’s platform approach, the company’s view of AI agents, and Salesforce’s new integration with Amazon Connect. He gives a glimpse into Salesforce’s next generation of customer support assistance.

Talkdesk

Talkdesk’s key announcements at Enterprise Connect included:

Talkdesk Knowledge Creator, which uses generative AI to create and maintain knowledge for customer service. It automates knowledge gap discovery and transforms conversations, transcripts, and agent responses into AI-generated knowledge.
Talkdesk AI Agents for voice, powered by agentic AI, that analyze, decide, and act in real-time, providing a more natural customer self-service experience. It can match the customer’s language and even switch languages mid-stream in an interaction.
Talkdesk After Hours, which extends a business’ contact center availability, creating a 24-hour operation. Supporting 59 languages, it uses AI to address customer inquiries with natural, conversational responses. It can then capture key customer details and schedule a callback when necessary.

In this video, Crystal Miceli, Talkdesk’s VP of Product and Industry Marketing, and Kevin McNulty Senior Director of Product Marketing discuss these new offerings, as well as Talkdesk’s AI agents for various vertical industries.

Verint

Verint has long touted its various bots that perform a range of functions and continues to evolve its bot story and deliver outcomes at scale. During a meeting at Enterprise Connect, Verint discussed micro-workflows, where bots and AI are injected into workflows to drive outcomes. Rather than focusing on the bots themselves, the focus is on solving one specific problem and then moving on to solve another specific problem. This makes it easier for customers to see the business outcomes and understand the value that Verint and the bots provide.

One thing that stands out is Verint’s hybrid approach, which enables the bots to be plugged in to on-prem systems if needed. This lets on-prem businesses still get value and benefit from AI without having to move to the cloud.

In this video, Dave Singer describes how Verint bots automate micro-workflows, which are steps in larger workflows, such as call handling. As Singer notes, “generative creates things, agentic does things.” He explains how Verint daVinci AI looks at what’s needed and then chooses and optimizes the right model to power the bots for the specific workflow and situation.

Zoom

Zoom added new agentic skills to its AI Companion, which is embedded across the entire Zoom platform. On the CX side of things (which Zoom refers to as part of its Business Services), announcements included:

Zoom Virtual Agent
New capabilities for Zoom Contact Center, including AI Intent Routing, AI Expert Assist for Video, Team Chat as a Channel, Unified Reporting, Zoom CX for Microsoft Teams, Zoom CX for Chrome OS
Quality Management and Workforce Engagement Management

In this video, Michelle Couture, Global Lead, CX Product Marketing, discusses the addition of AI Companion with Agentic skills to Zoom Contact Center, including Zoom Virtual Agent with AI capabilities through voice and chat channels. In the second video, Couture discusses Zoom’s contact center momentum, and new video capabilities for Zoom’s AI Expert Assist.

I also spoke with Ted Yoshikawa, Head of Product, Zoom CX, about how Zoom defines agentic AI and how Zoom is adding agentic AI throughout its portfolio. He also discusses how customers are using Zoom’s AI today.

Conclusion

It’s impressive to see how quickly the industry moved towards adding agentic AI capabilities to their portfolios and roadmaps. Of course, some (most?) of the demos we saw were just that – demos – and it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s slideware at this point. But there’s no denying that vendors are working feverishly to develop AI agents and fully integrate them into their CCaaS/CX offerings in various ways.

CX/CCaaS vendors will need to clearly articulate their agentic AI stories (and define how they view agentic AI) while being forthcoming about what’s currently available and what’s in development or on the roadmap. Seeing demos is great, but the proof is in actual customers and use cases and delivering these capabilities at scale.

I expect to see more real-world deployments and implementations in the coming months, providing insights into how customers are using AI agents and the value they provide. As always, I’ll be looking for best practices to help customers get started and successfully deploy these solutions, as well as insights about user adoption. And I expect to see some high-profile failures along the way as customers rush out to deploy AI agents that aren’t quite ready for prime time.

Looking back at Enterprise Connect, it's truly the end of an era as the conference moves from the Gaylord Palms - with its alligators, turtles, and beautiful foliage - to Caesars Forum in Las Vegas in 2026.

As always, special thanks to Eric Krapf and the Informa team for all their hard work in bringing together the unified communications & collaboration and CX communities year after year.

I guess all we can say is, see you later, alligator.

BCStrategies

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