Talkdesk Analyst Summit 2025 – All About CXA

At its Analyst Summit in Savannah, GA, Talkdesk highlighted its new platform—and the market category it hopes to define: Customer Experience Automation (CXA). As organizations look to automate the entire customer journey, not just customer service interactions, Talkdesk sees CXA as the platform to orchestrate and optimize CX end-to-end, both before and after live interactions.

Talkdesk positions CXA both as a new market category and as its multi-agent automation platform, designed to automate and scale service, sales, and support processes across the full customer lifecycle.

CXA: The Evolution of AI

Noting that we’re in the era of orchestrated automated CX, CEO & Founder Tiago Paiva explained that Talkdesk is positioning CXA as the next evolution of enterprise AI, enabling multi-agent orchestration. He explained that while CCaaS remains valuable, CXA is increasingly what resonates with customers.

CXA brings together intelligent, autonomous AI agents—each with a defined role and shared context—to solve complex CX challenges across front- and back-office operations. Although the platform is entirely new, it supports the AI applications already offered on Talkdesk’s CCaaS platform. Importantly, customers don’t buy the CXA platform directly; instead, they purchase applications such as Autopilot or Navigator that run on top of it.

Talkdesk describes CXA as an automation platform built to learn, adapt, and improve through a continuous loop of discovery, build, orchestration, and measurement. The system draws on Talkdesk Data Cloud, Knowledge Creator, AI agents, and multi-agent orchestration to automate workflows through specialized agents coordinated by an orchestrator.

CXA’s multi-agent orchestration is central to its value, using real-time data to power applications such as Navigator, Copilot, and QM Assist. It brings intelligent workflows to vertical industries, including healthcare, finance, retail, travel, and the public sector.

As CTO Munil Shah explained, “We look at CXA as an automation platform—not just infusing the contact center with AI, but providing AI automation, integrations, triggers, workflows, and orchestration in one platform that’s purpose-built for CX and industry verticals.”

CXA supports complex use cases that go beyond traditional CCaaS, such as automated scheduling, shopping cart recovery, hospital post-discharge workflows, outage management, and more.

A major differentiator is CXA’s ability to run on top of Talkdesk CCaaS or as a standalone platform, working with third-party CCaaS, and even on-prem environments from Avaya, Cisco, and Genesys.

A Deep Dive Into CXA

To better understand CXA, I spoke with Pedro Andrade, VP of AI, who walked through how agentic AI powers the platform. He noted that these AI agents can reason, think, and act autonomously, and described the virtuous lifecycle at the heart of CXA:

• Discovery: Mining and understanding customer data; identifying what should be automated.

• Build: Using low-code/no-code tools to create workflows and test automations and agents.

• Orchestration: Deploying agents throughout the customer journey with multi-agent coordination.

• Measure: Evaluating automation performance and the impact of AI agents.

This cycle repeats for every use case. Pedro also detailed how CXA applications attach AI agents to workflows so they can take action when needed.

Industry Specialization

Industry specialization remains one of Talkdesk’s strongest differentiators. The company focuses deeply on vertical and sub-vertical needs—such as healthcare payers and providers, credit unions, and casualty insurance—and delivers tight integrations with leading industry applications.

I spoke with Rohit Madhavarapu, VP of Product Management for Industries, about Talkdesk’s approach, which centers on:

• Purpose-built vertical products

• Verticalized teams with real expertise

• Business process transformation aligned to industry needs

Rohit emphasized that Talkdesk’s goal is to remove friction and create better experiences. Talkdesk also hires industry specialists (for example, Rohit came from Epic) to provide specific vertical expertise. He also explained how CXA enhances their industry strategy and helps customers apply automation effectively across their businesses.

Go-To-Market Evolution

As Talkdesk expands from CCaaS into CXA, the shift requires a different sales and GTM strategy. In my conversation with Jen McDonald, SVP of Americas, she explained how Talkdesk reshaped its sales team to ensure deep vertical and use case knowledge—especially as the company targets larger enterprises.

Rather than selling features, the team now collaborates with customers to ideate on impactful workflows. She also highlighted the role of channel partners in identifying use cases and deploying multi-agent workflows in a matter of weeks.

Key Messages From Talkdesk

To discuss the key messages from the event, I spoke with CMO Neville Letzerich, who highlighted three key themes:

• CXA as both a new category and a core product

• Talkdesk’s industry specialization

• Enterprise scalability and reliability

Neville emphasized that while Talkdesk is moving upmarket, CCaaS continues to play a foundational role by supporting human agents, while CXA powers the AI workforce. He also stressed that customers should begin with a few vertical use cases, realize value quickly, and expand from there.

Closing Thoughts

Talkdesk clearly recognizes that CCaaS is becoming commoditized as Agentic AI takes over many functions traditionally handled by human agents. Rather than wait to be disrupted, the company is intentionally repositioning itself as a CX automation vendor.

As Munil noted, “We saw AI as being transformative and wanted a separate product category that takes us beyond CCaaS.” Still, Talkdesk continues to invest in CCaaS—enhancing WFM, the agent desktop, routing, integrations, and more. The company made it clear that CCaaS is for human agents; CXA is for AI agents.

Talkdesk’s deep industry focus strengthens its differentiation, influencing how it sells, who it targets, and how it delivers ROI. But the shift from CCaaS to CXA won’t be without challenges: repositioning takes time, some channel partners may resist change, and selling automation outcomes requires new motions and new buyers.

Whether CXA becomes a widely recognized market category remains to be seen. Other companies—like Verint, Sierra, and NiCE—may join Talkdesk in defining the category, potentially leaving traditional CCaaS vendors behind if they don’t evolve.

What stood out most at the summit was Talkdesk’s honesty about learning as they go. The CX AI landscape is still the Wild West—uncertain, fast-moving, and competitive. But based on what I saw and heard, Talkdesk is positioning itself to break free from its CCaaS roots and emerge as a major force in the new era of Customer Experience Automation.