UC and CX Trends for 2025

As we welcome 2025, it’s time for the annual tradition of making predictions for the coming year.

• AI Adoption and Training: I hope and expect to see vendors pay more attention to adoption, usage, training, and change management for AI in both the enterprise and contact centers. While some AI capabilities are intuitive, some require training (for more information, see my NoJitter article on this topic). You probably don’t need much training for summarizing a meeting, but more complex tasks, such as  using Microsoft Copilot to analyze data or create charts in Excel, training is needed to help users get the most out of it. Contact center agents need to know not just how to use the AI tools, but why they should be using AI and understanding the “what’s in it for me” (WIIFM) so they’ll be more likely to embrace the AI tools. Vendors such as Microsoft and Cisco are doing a good job of providing adoption and training tools for their AI, and I’m hoping that most other vendors will follow suit. (I’ll be doing a session at EC on this topic.)

• Focus on tangible benefits of AI: While most of the focus on AI in 2024 has been on experimentation with the technology and use cases, the focus in 2025 will be on the quantitative benefits and ROI of AI deployments. Businesses were quick to try out different AI tools without considering the true costs and ROI, but that is changing. Vendors need to not just talk about their AI technology but the tangible business value it provides to customers. Customers need to ask how these tools will help them increase sales, reduce costs, improve productivity, etc. and how that turns into quantitative benefits and results.

• Expect to see vendors also experiment with various pricing models to try to figure out the best way to monetize AI.

• The finance folks and C-suite will get more involved in AI decisions and deployments, requiring an understanding of the true cost and true value of AI deployments. Along those lines, expect to see lots of ROI studies and tools that help demonstrate the value and ROI of AI to identify the true value provided. I expect to see companies like WiserOwl that provide CX decision intelligence identify how cost-effective AI agents really are and the true value provided.

• The Year of Agentic AI: 2024 was the year of AI, but 2025 will be the year of Agentic AI and AI Agents. “Have your agent call my agent” will take on a whole new meaning with agentic AI. These AI agents can perform tasks autonomously on behalf of humans without specific instructions. We’ll eventually all have our own agents that will do things proactively, and we may not even know these tasks have been done.

• But – there will be a tsunami of AI agents, creating “agent sprawl.” Hopefully we’ll see orchestration tools that will manage all the various agents to help them work together without creating too much chaos.

• The Increasing Role of Data and Knowledge: As businesses recognize the importance of data and knowledge for AI deployments, they’ll spend a lot of time and effort getting their data in order. One of the biggest challenges I hear from customers is that their data is in many different places and not optimized for AI use. As I noted in last year’s predictions article, the role of knowledge and knowledge management platforms will greatly increase, as knowledge is an essential part of an AI solution. Contact center AI applications such as customer self-service, agent assistance, chatbots, and virtual agents, depend on having and extracting the right knowledge. Knowledge systems form the basis for both agent assist and customer self service applications, and will continue to gain importance.

• Proactive outreach and engagement will start to see increased usage. Using AI-based analytics to identify and anticipate customer needs, businesses can send proactive notifications, and in some cases solve an issue before the customer knows there’s a problem. Several CCaaS/CX vendors, including NICE and Five9, made strategic acquisitions in 2024, setting the stage for businesses to deploy proactive capabilities.

• Lots of lawsuits! As I predicted last year, there were several high-profile lawsuits related to AI and data privacy in 2024, and I expect to see many more in 2025. There were lawsuits against AI providers related to data privacy, customer consent, the use of end-user data for training the AI models, proper use of user and customer data, and unexpected or harmful outcomes based on AI recommendations. Several lawsuits were related to companies listening to, recording, collecting, and analyzing customer communications without explicit consent. This is leading to the next prediction…

• Changes to Terms of Use: Businesses are recognizing the role of customer consent when it comes to listening to, recording, and analyzing customer communications for AI purposes, such as training vendors’ AI models. Some businesses are changing their consent policies and terms of use. For example, this notification appeared on a recent chat interaction:

As more businesses recognize the legal implications of how they use and collect customer information for AI purposes, they will be more forthcoming in their customer communications and terms of use notifications.

• AI Impact on the Workforce: Despite all the vendors constantly claiming that AI will augment and not replace human workers, we’ll start seeing some jobs disappearing. Most businesses note that attrition is taking place naturally and rather than laying off workers, companies instead are simply not replacing some workers when they leave. However, in order to gain the financial benefits of AI, companies will ultimately end up laying off workers in areas where AI can do their functions more cost effectively. We’ll see this initially in the contact center, as agents, supervisors, business analysts, and others will slowly be replaced by AI, and other job functions throughout organizations will follow. As Bill Gates noted, out of countless professions, only three will truly withstand the AI revolution.

And for a couple non-AI predictions:

• The continued integration of unified communications and collaboration platforms with contact center/CCaaS. This has been taking place for several years, leading to:

• CX for Everyone (or CX Everywhere): As I’ve predicted year after year, businesses will recognize that CX is the responsibility of everyone – not just contact center agents. We’ll see more examples of customer service and support responsibilities expanding beyond the formal contact center to what I call “Experience Workers.” With integrated UC/contact center platforms and offerings, non-contact center workers will get the interaction tools they need to help provide a better customer experience. This ties in with the ability for contact center agents to collaborate with subject matter experts (SMEs) to create what I call the Collaborative Contact Center.

AI is transforming everything we do in our business and personal lives. 2025 will be a pivotal year as we move from experimentation to real solutions and applications with real business value. There will be some hits and misses, along with some success stories. Let’s hope there are more success stories!