Enterprise Connect 2026: A Different Kind of Vibe

Enterprise Connect 2026 has come and gone—and as always, it was a whirlwind. I spent nearly all of my time in vendor

meetings and recording video interviews, attending only a handful of sessions in addition to the one I moderated.

Unsurprisingly, the event centered on AI—particularly agentic AI—including virtual agents, workflow and agent studios, analytics, testing, and more. Below are the key themes that emerged across conversations.

Key Themes

• The word of the week: “vibe.”

  This showed up in two ways. First, “vibe coding,” with vendors noting that some applications are now being built in days—or even hours—reshaping development cycles. Second, the overall vibe of the event felt different. The move to Las Vegas, along with the absence of companies like Microsoft and Cisco on stage and in the exhibit hall, changed the dynamic. And, of course, many people missed gathering at Wreckers Bar.

• Voice is back.

  Voice is re-emerging as a critical interface—natural, intuitive, and rich in data. It’s increasingly treated as a core data channel, capturing customer intent, behavior, and preferences. That data is essential for training AI and powering agentic systems.

• Trust and governance are table stakes—but not enough.

  Vendors are focused on enterprise trust in their platforms, but end-user trust in AI interactions is just as important and often overlooked.

• The shift to agentic AI is moving faster than organizations can absorb.

  The rapid transition from generative to agentic AI has caught many companies off guard. Planning even 12–18 months ahead is difficult, and adoption is lagging behind innovation.

• Differentiation is getting harder.

  Vendors are struggling to stand out in an increasingly crowded and converging market.

• Salesforce is disruptive, creating discussions about where the CX stack will live.

  Its contact center announcement is already influencing vendor strategies and positioning. While some question maturity and pricing, others see it as a logical step toward deeper convergence of CRM and CX platforms, combining the CRM system of record with the CCaaS system of engagement.

• ROI remains unclear for many organizations.

  Beyond productivity gains, businesses are still working to quantify the value of AI investments.

• “SaaSpocolypse” discussions are gaining traction.

  With tools like Claude and similar platforms, AI agents can perform tasks traditionally handled by SaaS applications. This is prompting enterprises to reassess their software stacks.

• Pricing for agentic AI is unresolved.

  The industry is moving away from per-seat pricing, but there’s no consensus on alternatives. Options being explored include consumption-based pricing, outcome-based pricing, and even revenue-sharing models. Token-based pricing is widely viewed as unsustainable.

• Verticalization as a differentiation strategy.

  Vendors are increasingly focusing on industry-specific solutions, particularly in healthcare, as a way to stand out. Several vendors announced specific vertical applications, including GoTo Connect CX for Healthcare, Amazon Connect Health, and RingCentral AIR Pro for Healthcare. Expect to see continued focus on vertical applications as a way to differentiate.

• Businesses are looking for ROI and outcomes from AI beyond productivity enhancements.

• In addition to AI agents and automation, buzzwords included orchestration, autonomous, single-stack platforms, Agent Studios, trust/governance, sovereignty, guardrails, workflows, and vibe coding.

Vendor Announcements and Interviews

As noted, most of my time was spent in vendor briefings. Where possible, I recorded short video interviews to capture what these announcements actually mean in practice.

AWS

Pasquale DeMaio, VP of Amazon Connect, emphasized that “deflection is dead,” arguing that companies should focus on engagement rather than containment. AWS is positioning its tools to help businesses build longer-term customer relationships using agentic AI.

He highlighted capabilities such as customizable agent dashboards, no-code workflow tools for business users, and built-in security and governance. He also discussed Amazon Connect Health, AWS’s new healthcare-focused offering.

Crescendo

Crescendo won “Overall Best of Enterprise Connect 2026” for its Multimodal AI platform, which unifies voice, text, and visual interactions into a single conversation.

Tod Famous, Chief Product Officer, described Crescendo’s approach as AI-first, combining automation with human labor while continuously optimizing both. Key capabilities include multimodal interactions (including image sharing), an AI-driven Insights Dashboard, and MCP-based agentic experiences.

Dialpad

Dialpad’s latest offerings are aimed at helping businesses quickly and effectively deploy agentic workflows where they can provide the greatest ROI and business outcomes. Dialpad is focusing on the full lifecycle of agentic AI—from discovery through deployment and governance.

Its approach includes:

• Skill Mining to identify automation opportunities

• Agent Studio to build agents

• Proving Ground to test them

• Guardian to enforce compliance and safety

Calvin Hohener, lead product manager, and Fabrice Della Mea, Vice President of Product Management, Contact Center emphasized how Dialpad’s agent AI solution with analytics across a single platform creates a continuous feedback loop between human and AI agents.  

Five9

Five9’s Matt McGinnis, VP Product Marketing, provided an update on Five9’s AI progression, highlighting its continued AI evolution with:

• Genius Routing to match customers with the right agent (human or AI)

• AI Insights with Spotlight for visibility into key trends

• Agentic Quality Management for full interaction coverage across human and AI agents

The company also expanded its Fusion ecosystem to go beyond integrations and support broader CX partnerships.

GoTo

David Evans, VP Product Management, described how GoTo is expanding its vertical strategy into healthcare, building on its success in automotive. GoTo is focusing on SMB customers and large customers with multiple locations, particularly retail and clinic-based healthcare organizations, with its single unified communication and CX platform. Tools like AI Receptionist support 24/7 service and scheduling while maintaining compliance.

Infobip

Infobip introduced AgentOS, a modular agentic platform spanning sales, marketing, and service.

According to Krešo Žmak, Chief Information Officer, the company’s key differentiation is rapid deployment—enabling customers to define use cases and launch proofs of concept quickly—as well as strong native channel integration and MCP-based development for agentic workflows.

Journey

Journey is the Zero Knowledge transaction layer for contact centers and agentic AI—enabling payment completions, user authentication, and regulated data collection. Journey’s President, COO, and Founder, Alex Shockley, discussed the availability of Journey.ai Payments, Journey Authentication, Journey Forms, and Journey Signatures within Zoom Virtual Agent (ZVA) to extend end-to-end automation to workflows involving sensitive, regulated, or complex data. These integrations extend automation into regulated workflows. Separately ,during a hands-on demo of ZVA 3.0, I experienced first-hand how Zoom’s virtual agent seamlessly and quickly passed my food ordering interaction to Journey for payment authentication.

LeapXpert

LeapXpert enables compliant business communication across messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Signal. The platform provides governance, security, and threat protection, while also capturing conversation data to generate insights and trigger workflows. Dima Gutzeit, Founder and CEO of LeapXpert, discussed how the company helps enterprises use messaging channels such as WhatsApp, Signal, etc., isecurely, providing governance, while protecting the company from threats such as viruses and malware.

Mitel

Mitel introduced two major offerings:

• Mitel WX (Workforce Experience): A unified, AI-enabled platform connecting frontline, mobile, and knowledge workers within their workflows

• Mitel Edge: Extends hybrid communications to on-prem environments for resiliency, security, and local control. Designed for environments that need high reliability, security, and data control, features include:

·       Local call control

·       System survivability if connectivity fails

·       Edge-based routing

·       Secure remote access

·       Data sovereignty support

Mitel CMO Eric Hanson noted that Mitel WX is a new user experience for all types of workers – frontline, knowledge workers, and contact center agents - offering a widget-based design that surfaces the right tools for users in a single pane of glass. He explains that Mitel Edge builds on Mitel’s hybrid strategy, which can be deployed on-prem or private cloud.

These announcements reinforce Mitel’s hybrid strategy and focus on vertical use cases.

NiCE

NiCE won Best Innovation for Customer Experience for Automated Insights, which converts interaction data into structured intelligence and automatically generates AI agents. Carmit DiAndrea, head of AI Data Management, explained how the platform identifies automation opportunities, quantifies ROI, and continuously learns from high-performing interactions. Automated Insights analyzes cost to serve, customer experience, revenue, and compliance to identify top automation opportunities and generate workflows that drive business value. Built into NiCE AI Agents (Cognigy), Automated Insights continuously learns from top human interactions and ideal resolutions to automatically create high-performing AI agents.

Jennifer Wilson provided an update on NiCE Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) and Workforce Optimization (WFO). Using both human and AI agents in the workforce requires changes in the way organizations approach forecasting, scheduling, quality management, etc. Wilson noted that NiCE can monitor AI and human agents individually or together as a workforce and determine where interactions are best served by AI agents and where human agents should assist. She also discussed using copilots for workforce management to proactively assist supervisors and uncover trends and correlations.

Salesforce

Salesforce’s Agentforce Contact Center was one of the most discussed announcements at Enterprise Connect. It brings voice, AI, and CRM into a single native platform. This move positions Salesforce more directly against traditional CCaaS vendors, many of whom have historically partnered with Salesforce.

According to Ashish Seth, VP Products, Agentforce Contact Center, “For Salesforce to be successful in CX, we need to own voice and be in the contact center space. If you own the channels, you own agentic experiences. Convergence has been happening for a long time, CCaaS and CRM had to come together.” During a meeting, Seth explained that Salesforce owns the voice channel – from the edge to desktop, noting, “We created the telecom and voice infrastructure, which is 100% native and operated by Salesforce.” Agentforce Contact Center is generally available as an add-on to all Agentforce Service customers in the US and Canada. 

Talkdesk

Talkdesk introduced the CXA Operations Center along with enhanced analytics tools to manage AI agents alongside human workers.

The focus is on operationalizing AI—covering discovery, deployment, monitoring, and optimization—while ensuring governance and performance in production environments.

As Pedro Andrade, VP of AI for Talkdesk told a group of analysts, “AI agents should be part of your workforce. The challenge is coordinating AI with your human workforce. If AI is part of the team, it must be governed as part of the workforce. If AI is part of the team, it must be governed as part of the workforce.”

The CXA Operations Center provides a centralized interface for managing the operational lifecycle of AI agents in live production, ensuring that AI performance remains consistent and safe as customer scenarios evolve. Key features include AI Agent Observability to provide real-time operational intelligence into how AI agents behave in production, and AI Agent Evaluation to ensure AI agents perform reliably, safely, and consistently.

The enhanced Talkdesk Interaction and Quality Analytics provide CX Insights by connecting conversational intelligence directly to business outcomes, and Automation Mining to identify high-impact automation opportunities within customer interactions.

UJET

UJET introduced AXO (Agentic Experience Orientation), a persistent AI layer that maintains context across the entire customer journey.

The platform uses a “self-improving loop” to identify successful interactions and apply those patterns to future engagements. It also incorporates Computer Using Agents (CUAs) to execute workflows autonomously. According to CEO Vasili Triant, a self-Improving loop is where the conversational engine and the customer data are one and the same. He explains that when an interaction ends successfully, AXO identifies the ‘successful DNA’ of that call. The next time an agent faces a similar problem, the system proactively orchestrates the specific guidance based on the successful call.

Matt Clare, UJET’s Vice President Product Marketing, explained that AXO unifies disparate data sources within the contact center and uses AI to consolidate this data and recommend what workflows to automate. It uses these contextual data sources to provide real-time assistance to contextually display information to agents in real time.

Verint

Verint provided its first major update following the Calabrio acquisition.

Key points:

·      There is no big ‘platform consolidation’ project

·      Verint is not going through a big ‘migrate the base’ project

·      Calabrio customers can now deploy Verint Bots to their existing environment

·      No products are targeted for end of life. For now, Verint will continue developing on both product lines.

·      There will be one product team for Verint and Calabrio.

·      Verint is maintaining the Calabrio name as a product brand.

The strategy focuses on interoperability and expanding capabilities without disrupting customers.

Calabrio customers now have access to Verint’s AI bots through the Verint CX Automation Platform, including Genie, TimeFlex, Intelligent Virtual Assistant, and Copilot. Verint customers now have access to Calabrio workforce engagement tools, such as workforce management, performance analytics, and quality monitoring, expanding Verint’s capabilities in agent management and scheduling. 

Dave Singer, Global Vice President, Go-To-Market Strategy explained that the company is building all of its AI and bots to work on either of the product lines.

Zoom

Zoom announced more than 45 AI enhancements, positioning its platform as a system of action rather than just a meetings tool.

Key updates include:

• AI Companion as an agentic platform

• Zoom Virtual Agent 3.0

• AI Expert Assist 3.0

• Customer Workflow Orchestration using natural language

The Zoom enterprise agentic AI 3.0 platform features a range of new features, including:

• Custom and prebuilt AI agents with no-code orchestration

• New third-party integrations for AI Companion, including 10 secure enterprise search connectors

• New AI-first canvases (Zoom AI Docs, AI Sheets, and AI Slides)

• Zoom Phone Mobile

• SMS for Zoom Virtual Agent AI Receptionist

• AI Expert Assist 3.0 for Zoom Contact Center

• Natural-language customer workflow orchestration

• Meeting security enhancements

Zoom Phone features new Agentic workflows, SMS for Zoom Virtual Agent AI Receptionist (formerly AI Concierge), Zoom Phone Mobile, and more.

For Zoom CX, new capabilities include:

• Zoom Virtual Agent 3.0

• Agentic AI Expert Assist 3.0 with a real-time, agentic AI layer empowering agents and supervisors with contextual guidance, intelligent orchestration, and automated task execution

• Zoom CX Insights, enabling businesses and CX leaders to ask questions about customer experience, workforce, and automation performance in natural language

• Customer Workflow Orchestration to design and automate customer journeys across systems, channels, and teams using natural-language workflow creation triggered by contact center events or signals from enterprise systems

• Advanced Quality Management for Zoom Virtual Agent

The emphasis is on reducing friction and enabling workflows that translate interactions directly into outcomes.

During a demo at Zoom’s booth I saw Zoom Virtual Agent (ZVA) 3.0, AI Expert Assist 3.0, and Customer Workflow Orchestration in action. ZVA makes it easy for customers to engage with businesses using natural language, while AI Expert Assist 3.0 helps contact center agents provide faster and better service to customers, even performing tasks on the human agent’s behalf. One of the most impressive product announcements made at Enterprise Connect was Zoom’s Customer Workflow Orchestration, which lets administrators simply use natural language to create workflows.

Ram Rajagopalan, Ted Yoshikawa, and Kentis Gopalla discussed Zoom Virtual Agent 3.0, Agentic Expert Assist, which offers a live AI interpreter for real-time speech translation, and CX Insights, providing recommended actions and more.

Final Thoughts on Enterprise Connect 2026

As noted, the vibe this year was different, with people speculating if this is the final year of our beloved Enterprise Connect. While Informa has plans to host the event at the MGM Grand in 2027, many vendors complained about the lack of customers attending the event, questioning whether the show has lost its mojo.

With its roots in enterprise business voice communications (the event was previously called VoiceCon), earlier sessions and conversations were around IP-PBXs, SIP trunking, SBCs, and softswitches. Today, Enterprise Connect is viewed as a CX show, with “traditional” UCaaS vendors touting their CX capabilities. Every keynote included a CX component, with CX vendors representing a large portion of the vendor sponsors and exhibitors.

Things are moving at an extremely fast pace. In 2025, people were just learning about AI and trying to figure out what agentic AI was all about; in 2026, agentic AI and autonomous AI agents were part of every discussion and demo. 2025 was about introducing the concept of AI agents; 2026 was about using low code/no code tools to build and integrate AI agents into workflows.

My prediction for 2027 – a key theme will be personal AI agents that perform tasks on behalf of individuals and interact with business AI agents. If you’d like to discuss this, have your AI agent call my AI agent.