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(Video length: 23:17) In this episode of The AI Chefs, David and Kevin serve up two hearty recipes to help you take your AI usage to the next level, whether for learning or leveraging custom data! Kevin’s Tip – “AI Potluck”: Bring the right ingredients to the table! Kevin demonstrates how to use tools like Gemini NotebookLM to feed AI a custom set of data, shaping its output to meet your specific needs. Just like at a potluck, what you bring determines the meal, and with AI, your results improve when you provide the right inputs. David’s Tip – “Learning Lasagna”: AI as your personal instructor? Yes, please! David shares how he’s using ChatGPT to tailor guitar and music theory lessons to his current skill level. Unlike one-size-fits-all tutorials on YouTube, this approach builds a layered learning experience that’s perfectly suited to his abilities and goals. Whether you’re customizing data for better insights or creating a tailored learning experience, these AI recipes will inspire you to cook up something amazing!

(Video length: 21:36) In this episode of The AI Chefs, we’re serving up two fresh AI-powered recipes to level up your workflow and problem-solving skills! Red Flag Velvet Cake – David’s tip helps you spot potential issues in your writing before they become problems. Just ask AI if there are any “red flags” in your document, this lets you catch weak spots, refine your work, and gain confidence that it’s solid. Data Donut Hole – Kevin’s tip is perfect for those “I can’t quite remember” moments. If you have random bits of information but are missing the core detail, feed those stray facts to AI, and let it fill in the gaps, whether it’s identifying a movie, a song, or important business data. Watch now to see these AI tricks in action!

(Video length: 29:54) In this special episode of The AI Chefs, we’re putting aside the recipes to focus on one big topic: DeepSeek. This AI model has been making waves, and we spent 30 minutes breaking down what it is, why it matters, and how it compares to other AI tools. What makes DeepSeek unique? How does it stack up against ChatGPT, Gemini, and others? What are the key takeaways for AI users and creators? If you’re curious about the latest in AI advancements, this episode is packed with insights you won’t want to miss.

(Video length: 31:43) Welcome back to The AI Chefs! In this episode, we’re serving up a feast of AI insights, from must-have kitchen gadgets to the best way to get AI-powered content ideas. Kevin’s Course: He starts with some fun and useful kitchen tools before diving into a breakdown of different AI tools, their pricing models, and how they stack up. If you’ve ever wondered which AI platform is worth your investment, this is the segment for you. David’s Dish: Instead of asking AI for a single answer, why not get a variety of options, just like a Rodizio-style restaurant brings a selection of meats to your table? David explains how this approach improves AI results, using YouTube’s new Inspiration tab as an example. Instead of just asking for a video idea, let AI present multiple choices and refine them with you! If you enjoyed this episode, hit like, subscribe, and let us know, how do you use AI in your creative process? ️

Zendesk's Relate user conference last week marked an important milestone for the company. Two years into its second act as a private company, it has sharpened its focus on two key markets: customer experience (CX) and employee service. Let’s dive into the announcements and key takeaways from the event. Zendesk has historically served employee support more by default than by design—customers adopting its intuitive help desk software for internal use. Now, with the formal introduction of the Zendesk Employee Service Suite, the company is making a deliberate push. With 17,000 companies already using Zendesk for employee-facing operations, this move feels not just logical but overdue. The newly introduced suite brings purpose-built capabilities, most notably a Service Catalog that extends beyond help desks to deliver a seamless employee experience from onboarding to ongoing support. The highlight of the event was the launch of the Zendesk Resolution Platform, with AI Agents at its core. Zendesk has made it clear—it wants to be your AI provider, and its newly released agentic platform is definitely worth your consideration. The company shared that it already has 10,000 customers using its AI products. Customer support automation is one of AI's most promising use cases. Support operations are highly digitized, with vast datasets concentrated in help centers and ticketing systems—capturing both interaction transcripts and resolutions. With over 13 million resolutions processed daily, Zendesk has transformed its data goldmine into a powerful knowledge graph. Zendesk's agentic platform nicely exposes the chain of thought of its agents, giving you both visibility and control over processes and actions. It leverages Zendesk QA to oversee not only human agents but also automations—an ingredient the company highlights as part of its secret sauce. Its architecture is built for a swarm of highly specialized agents—Zendesk's approach to achieving accuracy at scale. Zendesk has centered its AI vision on driving resolutions, setting an ambitious target to automate 80% of support inquiries within the next few years. While the "driving outcomes" messaging pervades vendor marketing, Zendesk backs this positioning by aligning both its value and pricing with the key result you can expect—resolution. This is already reflected in its pricing at $1.50 per automated resolution. And as we shift toward a world where resolution is predominantly automated, the company plans to evolve its seat-based pricing model into an outcome-based structure, offering the flexibility to convert pricing between human and automated support. I commend Zendesk for tackling the challenges of knowledge management—an essential yet notoriously difficult domain. Its new Knowledge Builder introduces GenAI-powered tools to enrich, refine, and repurpose content, taking the tedious out of the job. Eventually, Zendesk’s Resolution Platform brings together its recent acquisitions, bolstering its contact center capabilities. While the Local Measure acquisition is still awaiting regulatory approval, the path forward is clear. Zendesk also aims to be your contact center provider for two key reasons. First, as automation takes hold, it sees voice becoming a more strategic escalation channel for complex issues, with research already showing that voice is used in 52% of resolution journeys. Second, as markets converge, Zendesk seeks to prevent CCaaS vendors from encroaching on its territory. It plans to leverage Local Measure technology and expertise to package Amazon Connect for the mid-market, a segment where its offering particularly excels. Combined with its WFM and QA modules, as well as PolyAI’s Voice Agents, Zendesk will be well-positioned to provide a comprehensive contact center solution. Relate 2025 represents a significant turning point for Zendesk with the launch of its agentic platform, a key step in realizing its aspiration to become your AI provider. The event also highlights the company's strategic focus on two key market opportunities: employee services and customer service with an expanded scope to include contact centers. By aligning its value proposition and pricing model around resolutions, Zendesk cleverly differentiates itself amid the growing number of vendors positioning themselves as broad CX providers.

(Podcast length: 33:03) BCStrategies Experts David Maldow and Kevin Kieller discuss WebexOne 2024 while Experts Blair Pleasant and Jon Arnold discuss their adventures in Zambia at the NICE Analysts Summit 2024.

(Podcast length: 34:38) Lawyers and BCStrategies Experts Martha Buyers and David Maldow discuss some of the legal implications and issues related to artificial intelligence (AI).

(Podcast length: 38:58) A collection of the BCStrategies Experts including Blair Pleasant, Martha Buyer, Charles Vondra, Kevin Kieller, Steve Leaden, Dave Michels and Nicolas de Kouchkovsky talk with co-founder Joe Eisner, CEO, and co-founder Jay Yeras, CTO, about how blissAI helps organizations turn their existing call recordings into "gold" that can help power AI initiatives.

(Podcast length: 23:45) Experts Blair Pleasant, Nicolas De Kouchkovsky, Evan Kirstel, David Maldow, Dave Michels, and Kevin Kieller discuss what we expect to see more of and less of in 2025 related to UCaaS, CCaaS, AI, and other communication and collaboration technologies. As always an informed and opinionated discussion!

(Podcast length: 21:16) Experts Joseph Williams, Kevin Kieller, Chuck Vondra, Blair Pleasant, Marta Buyers, Dave Michels, and Jon Arnold recap the year that was 2024. What were the highs and lows related to UCaaS, CCaaS, AI, and related technologies. As always, there is no lack of opinions and a wide-variety of perspectives combined with deep industry insights.

(Podcast length: 34:52) Can AI agents demonstrate empathy equal to or better than human agents? Are human agents really demonstrating empathy or simply trying to keep you as a customer? The BCStrategies Experts discuss this interesting topic and offer different points of views and opinions.

More features brings more complexity and a need to change how we manage. As 2024 draws to a close, it is worth reflecting on the fact that Microsoft Teams has now been available for seven and a half years, having been launched worldwide on March 14, 2017. (This is either a short or long period of time depending on your perspective.) Overall, each year with Microsoft Teams has seen more users, more features, more licenses, and more complexity. Teams is Successful Teams has certainly been successful, and provides many organizations with strong communication, collaboration, and workflow capabilities, as witnessed by… 320 million monthly active Teams users 20 million monthly active PSTN users 3 million Teams Premium users >1 million Teams Rooms The Teams “universe” currently looks like this (as of October 2024): 320 million monthly active Teams users is indeed a big and impressive number. However, despite a huge “push” from Microsoft, Teams Phone, as a replacement voice system (PBX), appears to be an underutilized capability, with only 6% of active Teams users taking advantage of this robust capability. An additional 24 million users have unused licensing for Teams Phone via their E5 license. An estimated 60 million users in total are licensed for Teams Phone, 44 million as part of their E5 bundle and an estimated 16 million additional Teams Phone license purchases, most often as an add-on to an E3 license. Certainly, an opportunity in 2025 for organizations and Microsoft partners. To get to the current state, Teams growth has been explosive, but is leveling off, granted at an impressively high level. Teams is Powerful and Keeps Adding Features Over the past years Teams has grown more powerful, with hundreds of features added each year. 2024 was no exception to this trend. Recently, Microsoft introduced a  new chat and channels experience  that was described by many as one of the biggest changes to Teams ever. The new chat and channel experience works well, even with lots of channels it displays quickly and allows you to easily monitor unread messages. The numerous configuration options might be overwhelming to some users and different modes of displaying the same information can make helping a user more difficult; giving instructions on what to click on depend on their configuration choices. At Microsoft Ignite (week of November 18, 2024) additional Teams features were  announced : Multilingual meeting transcripts Translation for intelligent meeting recaps Microsoft Places  which helps better manage hybrid work scenarios Storyline integration into Teams (previously part of  Viva Engage ) Of course, lots of new  Copilot  features which extend Teams were also announced, including: The ability for Copilot to analyze content presented in Teams and reason over shared content Copilot will now give quick summaries for files shared in a Teams chat Copilot Pages  which provides persistent results for prompt results from BizChat (aka Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat). Pages can be shared and co-authored. A Copilot Interpreter agent that provides real-time language translation during a meeting. Participants can choose to have the Interpreter simulate their own voice. A Copilot meeting Facilitator agent that will take real-time summary notes that can be co-authored with meeting participants An Employee Self-Service agent that can provide answers and take actions related to common HR and IT scenarios from within Teams BizChat While the addition of new features to Teams is welcomed by power users, there is starting to be increasing “rumblings” from standard users related to the seemingly incessant UI changes Microsoft is making. Administration and Support of Teams With most new Teams features, options, or capabilities there is a need for a system admin to understand and configure who gets what option. Many options have security, compliance, data residency, and/or licensing implications. New features also require that the Teams Admin Center (TAC) continues to evolve or additions to the PowerShell scripting language are needed. Keeping up with both options, as hundreds of new features are added, can be challenging for IT Pros. With more complex configurations, and potentially many different sets of options for different user groups, diagnosing problems becomes more complex. Licensing is Complex and Getting More Expensive In the beginning Teams was included as part of Office 365 (and M365 licenses), now there are  business  and  enterprise  plans where Teams has been “unbundled” from Microsoft 365. In addition, there are multiple add-ons to Teams, including  Teams Premium  ($7/user/month),  Teams Phone  (included with E5, otherwise $8+/user/month), Copilot ($30/user/month), and  Teams Rooms Pro  ($40/room/month). A full enterprise plan comparison chart is available  here . Microsoft also recently  announced  that Teams Phone licenses will increase in cost in 2025, going from $8+/user/month to $10+/user/month. Monthly billing annual plans will all now have a 5% price increase (as compared to upfront paid annual plans). Teams Management Options Throughout 2024, I have had numerous discussions with many individuals at  VOSS  focused on their approach to simplifying some of the above noted challenges with Teams. Here are some of my key takeaways from these discussions. VOSS Automate  is designed to simplify the administration of Teams, and also can provide a “single pane of glass” if you need to manage both Teams and other systems (e.g. Cisco). I’ve seen examples where VOSS: Insulates admins from needing to deal with finicky scripting Can be used to automate multiple systems and multi-step processes Allows you to delegate capabilities based on office location, or any other logical grouping Can present a simplified user interface, with limited options, to first-tier support workers Can help standardize sets of configuration options applied to users Provides a complete audit trail (and supports rollback in case a change has an unintended effect) VOSS Insights  extends the built-in Teams reporting to provide a unified view across multiple systems. I wrote recently that  Teams reporting is improving but there are still gaps . Cost and license optimization is an area where organizations often use VOSS Insights. Taming Teams At the end of 2024, organizations looking to fully leverage Teams in 2025 need to: Provide adequate initial and on-going training for end-users (This includes establishing a process for keeping up to date on new features and how these might be integrated to improve your business processes) Analyze and optimize Teams and add-on licenses (Copilot, Teams Premium, Teams Room Pro) Ensure IT has the time and inclination to keep up with management and configuration changes within Teams Admin Center and O365 Admin Center (This may involve considering third-party tools to simplify management and reporting) Leverage built-in tools and reports (and potentially third-party tools) to monitor, manage, and operate your Teams environment efficiently and effectively If you work for a large enterprise organization, do you have the same impression as me? In 2024 did you see Teams get more powerful, more complex, neither or both? I would love to hear your thoughts.