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As we wrap up the year, I thought it would be fun to hand out my own set of industry awards. Take these with a grain of salt—many are just for entertainment. Most reflect my experiences and insights from various analyst events and countless vendor interactions throughout the year. If you want to nominate a vendor for a category, drop it in the comments or send me a message.   Best Marketing Ingenuity – 8x8 CMO Bruno Bertini delivered a bold rebrand that literally breaks out of the box. The latest marketing campaign - “The Power of You”—complete with cinematic visuals and generative AI production—puts customers at center stage and highlights their achievements in a fresh, engaging way. Best Persistence – Avaya Despite skepticism from naysayers, Avaya continues to innovate. Its Infinity Platform provides a practical evolution path for existing customers, and the company added agentic AI and Model Context Protocol (MCP) support—proof that Avaya isn’t fading away anytime soon. Best Catch Up (or Most Improved Player) – Cisco Cisco is back in the CCaaS spotlight. After trailing the pack for a while, Cisco now offers a much more complete portfolio—agentic AI, new AI-powered quality management, industry-specific integrations, and a compelling “connected intelligence” vision where humans and AI collaborate seamlessly. And the results have been impressive – cloud contact center product orders increased 79% year over year in Q1 FY 2026. Best “We’re Back!” Reinvigorated Marketing (and AR) – Tie: Dialpad and UJET Dialpad  has reemerged after a relatively quiet period, refreshing its marketing and analyst relations and launching new agentic AI capabilities aimed at shaking up the market. Expect to see and hear a lot more from Dialpad in the coming months as the company sets its sights on leading customers to agentic AI. UJET  let Google take the sales and marketing reins early in their partnership, but is now back on the scene with renewed channel engagement and an energized sales organization. Best Hope for Humans and AI Working Together – Five9 Five9 flipped the script: instead of AI augmenting humans, it’s humans augmenting AI. By keeping people in the loop, Five9 envisions human and AI agents working hand in hand—not replacement, but enhancement. Best Dressed CEO – Five9 CEO Mike Burkland stole the show at the CX Summit in full Nashville cowboy style. 'Nuff said. Best Views of NYC at an Analyst Event – Global Relay Global Relay’s New York HQ wowed analysts with incredible views, as well as in-depth and interesting sessions on digital communications governance, archiving, compliance, and communications surveillance for collaborative messaging applications and front-office workers. Best Display of AI at the Sphere – Google Google opened Cloud Next 2025 with an AI-powered sneak peek of an enhanced “Wizard of Oz” at the Las Vegas Sphere. Using DeepMind’s capabilities and its latest LLMs, Google used AI-driven "outpainting" to extend scenes, enrich environments, and reimagine the film for the Sphere’s curved, immersive display. Best Ability to Say “I Told You So” – Mitel While the industry raced toward multitenant public cloud, Mitel held its ground, insisting that public cloud isn’t the answer for everyone. Many organizations continue to prefer hybrid, private cloud, or on-prem solutions—vindicating Mitel’s commitment to customer choice. Best “Come Together” Moment – NiCE NiCE’s acquisition of Cognigy was a masterstroke. Pair the leading CCaaS vendor with the leading conversational AI provider, and you get an impressive, forward-looking Customer Engagement Platform. The deal positions NiCE to innovate faster and gain momentum in the CX AI market. Best Job Filling Really Big Shoes – Scott Russell, CEO, NiCE Scott has a strong vision for the company, along with contagious energy. His focus on partnerships and openness should help NiCE expand to other areas beyond the contact center and continue strong growth and leadership.   Best at Minding the Gap – RingCentral RingCentral filled a valuable market gap with its Customer Engagement (CE) Bundle—combining calling, collaboration, and light contact center features. It’s ideal for the underserved market of companies that can’t afford to miss customer interactions but don’t need the complexity of a full contact center solution. Best “We’re Listening – and Then Some” – Sprinklr Sprinklr evolved from social listening origins into a full Unified Customer Experience Management (Unified-CXM) provider. Its AI-native platform spans Service, Social, Marketing, and Insights—and uniquely leverages social listening to enhance CX intelligence. Best Way to Stand Out in a Crowd – Talkdesk Talkdesk keeps doubling down on its vertical expertise, taking specialization a level deeper with sub-verticals (think healthcare providers vs. payers). This isn’t lip service—they’re restructuring go-to-market and sales around these industries and going genuinely deep. Best “We’re Still a UCaaS and CCaaS Player” – Vonage After being acquired by Ericsson, Vonage was primarily focused on its Network APIs and CPaaS business, making some people wonder about the future of its UCaaS and CCaaS offerings. Vonage put those doubts to rest, introducing new Voice AI Agents, expanding partnerships with Salesforce and ServiceNow, enhancing its VCC Intelligent Workspace with AI, and more, to engage customers and employees across all channels from anywhere with context.   Cutest Bots – Verint Verint’s ever-expanding bot family continues to grow—forecasting bots, wrap-up bots, knowledge bots, and many more. These automation tools streamline workflows and consistently deliver measurable results: lower labor costs, improved CX and EX, and higher revenues. Best Kept Secret (For Now) – Wildix Wildix is a well-established European vendor quietly gaining traction in North America. At its first analyst event, the company unveiled a strategic vision rooted in European values and a purpose-built, partner-led approach for SMB and mid-market customers. The secret is definitely getting out… Best Longest List of Applications – Zoho Zoho wins this by a landslide: 88 products (and counting), with more than 50 tightly integrated applications and the Zoho One bundle offering 45+ apps. They may have added another one while you were reading this. Best Pivot – Zoom Zoom pulled off a highly successful transformation from a video/meetings company to an AI-first platform for employee and customer experience. Zoom CX is growing at high double digits year over year, as customer counts are up 60%; while the number of Workvivo customers rose 70% in Q3. “And the Emmy Goes To” - Zoom Zoom earned an Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Award for “Zoom for Broadcast,” used widely by broadcasters to streamline high-quality video and audio integrations. If you’d like to add new categories, suggest nominations, or disagree with any of these—let me know!

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 CXA as a product. They consume AI capabilities on a usage basis—paying only for what they use across Autopilot, Navigator, Agentic Workflows, and other AI-powered experiences built on the platform. CXA is the underlying engine; customers simply tap into it as they deploy and scale AI across their customer journeys. Talkdesk describes CXA as an automation platform built to learn, adapt, and improve through a continuous loop of discovery, build, orchestration, and measurement. At the core is the Talkdesk Data Cloud, which unifies and structures all customer interaction data and enterprise knowledge. This foundation enables accurate retrieval, reasoning, and decision-making for every AI agent. CXA combines this data layer with multi-agent orchestration—specialized autonomous agents working together with shared context—to automate complex workflows across front- and back-office operations. The orchestrator coordinates these agents, dynamically routing tasks, resolving dependencies, and ensuring accuracy through continuous access to real-time data and knowledge. This combination of high-quality, unified data and multi-agent intelligence is the primary source of CXA’s differentiation. It underpins applications such as Navigator, Copilot, Autopilot, and QM Assist, and brings intelligent, end-to-end workflows to industries including healthcare, financial services, 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.

Wildix held its first analyst summit in beautiful Venice—a fitting location, since the company was founded in Trentino, Italy, by brothers Steve and Dimitri Osler. While most unified communications vendors originated in the U.S. and later expanded to Europe, Wildix’s roots are firmly European, and now the company has set its sights on expanding across the U.S. market. The event’s theme—“Masks Come Off”—was appropriate. Wildix used the occasion to “unmask” itself, introducing the company to a broader audience, including analysts who may not have been familiar with it. Although many outside Europe may not know the Wildix name, the company has been in business for 20 years. Wildix focuses on unified communications for SMBs and midmarket organizations (50–5,000 employees) and sells exclusively through channel partners. As CMO Emiliano Tomasoni emphasized, Wildix isn’t trying to be everything to everyone. Instead, it has a clear focus on SMBs and specific verticals—such as retail and healthcare—where it can deliver measurable ROI. With 360 employees worldwide, Wildix isn’t aiming to be the biggest player or a niche boutique vendor—it’s focused on delivering value through communications that make a tangible difference. “ROI is the key when we speak to customers,” Tomasoni said. “ROI isn’t magic—it’s the common language among all departments: sales, IT, operations, marketing.” According to CEO Steve Osler, Wildix’s vision is to connect every aspect of communication into one seamless, intelligent experience—built for results, powered by trust, and designed for people. The company’s goal is to define the next chapter of communication with secure, reliable, and adaptive solutions that simply work. The company prides itself on being the only European UCaaS vendor combining AI-driven innovation with a 100% channel model, with ROI-first DNA. Wildix offers a unified solution providing global connectivity, telephony, UC, and “CC Lite” capabilities across voice, video, chat, SMS, fax, and Kite webchat—all optimized for remote and hybrid work. Embedded AI powers transcriptions, summaries, and virtual agents. Wildix supports private cloud, single-tenant, hybrid, and on-premises UC deployments—unlike most UCaaS and CCaaS vendors that offer only public multi-tenant cloud options. This flexibility gives customers greater control, security, and data privacy. The single-tenant architecture is also a big differentiator and provides significant benefits for companies looking for data sovereignty and security. Three Core Applications Wildix’s portfolio centers on three key applications: Collaboration 7 – The entry-level UCaaS application providing core capabilities such as calling, chat, and meetings for small teams. x-bees – Designed for sales and service teams, it includes CRM automation, AI assistance, integrated queues, dashboards, IVR, and omnichannel engagement across voice and digital channels (SMS, WhatsApp, live chat). Together, these deliver “contact center lite” functionality with AI woven throughout. x-hoppers – Targeted at retail and frontline environments, x-hoppers delivers AI-enabled headsets and push-to-talk capabilities for real-time team communications and guidance. These applications sit atop the Wildix Management System (WMS7), with an agentic AI layer integrated across all apps, as well as 500+ AI-enabled integrations. Wildix also manufactures its own plug-and-play hardware, including phones, DECT and Wi-Fi handsets, gateways, and push-to-talk headsets.   To learn more about Wildix’s applications, I spoke with Stewart Donner, Global Head of Engineering, who also discussed the key messages of the event.  Wilma - The Face of Wildix AI AI is embedded natively in the platform, with the “Wilma” agentic AI layer and AI assistant, available on all products. I spoke with co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer Dimitri Osler about Wildix’s AI strategy and approach. He explained that Wilma can draft emails, guide retail associates in real time, summarize meetings, transcribe meetings in real-time, etc. Wildix supports multiple LLMs, allowing customers to choose the model best suited to their needs. Dimitri also underscored the importance of localization and described how Wildix leverages AWS to provide consistent coverage worldwide.   Partner Model Wildix supports a 100% channel-driven model, selling exclusively through certified partners. These partners are a key differentiator, as they are trusted locally, able to deliver faster, and often outperform vendors that rely on direct sales. With over 1,000 partners globally, Wildix primarily works with MSPs, along with system integrators, VARs, telecom providers, and agencies. Partners maintain full control of the sales cycle—from billing to implementation—while Wildix provides support where technical expertise is needed. This close collaboration has resulted in an impressive 96% partner retention rate. To provide more insights about Wildix’s channel approach, I spoke with Jason Uslan, Chief Commercial Officer.   A standout example of Wildix’s partnership strategy is its work with RoboReception, a UK-based healthcare software provider offering an AI-powered call handling platform for dental practices. Aimed at reducing the number of missed patient calls and automating routine patient interactions, such as appointment bookings, cancellations, and FAQs, RoboReception improves dental practice efficiency and patient care. Dr. Grant McAree, Director of RoboReception, explained that early on in his dental practice, he realized that reception issues due to fragmented technology, staff shortages, and overburdened teams, created a healthcare bottleneck, noting that: One-third of new patient calls go unanswered 75% of voicemails are never returned 80% of patients who can’t reach someone don’t leave messages This leads to significant lost revenue opportunities. RoboReception solves this problem by using AI to answer calls and book appointments automatically—providing 24/7 service. It’s a true partnership: RoboReception designs the agentic workflows; Wildix channel partner Focus Group handles deployment and integration; and Wildix delivers secure, AI-powered communications with real-time data synchronization to ensure compliance. The results speak for themselves. Dr. McAree shared that the next step is to expand the platform beyond dental practices to general practitioners, legal services, and hospitality. I spoke with Dr. McAree about how RoboReception helps dental practices, and future plans for expansion.   Closing Thoughts Wildix’s first analyst event was a welcome opportunity to learn more about a company many of us weren’t as familiar with, and understand how it differentiates in the crowded unified communications market. Key differentiators include: SMB focus Architectural flexibility (cloud, hybrid, or on-prem) and a single-tenant cloud architecture for enhanced security, privacy, and data sovereignty Deep European DNA, addressing privacy, sovereignty, and language needs 100% channel sales model - no channel conflict Specialized horizontal applications for sales and front-line/retail workers, including software and hardware Hardware and software solutions, including AI, APIs, plug-and-play phones, DECT, WiFI handsets, gateways, and Push-to-Talk headsets Built-in “contact center lite” capabilities A people-first culture with a distributed workforce and work-life balance After speaking with several channel partners, it’s clear that Wildix is deeply committed to enabling their success—empowering partners to integrate with third-party applications and rapidly develop and deploy AI-enabled solutions and workflows to best support their customers. The company will have to overcome some hurdles in a crowded unified communications space that is dominated by big names such as Microsoft, Cisco, Zoom, and others. As Wildix accelerates its North American expansion, expect to see the company to gain visibility and traction. With its channel-centric strategy and SMB-first approach, Wildix may not remain a European secret for long.

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Latest Events BC Strategies Expert analysis, insights, and opinions Recent Events Inside Enterprise Connect 2025: Conversations, Insights, and Industry Trends A Farewell to the Gaylord Palms In this article, BCStrategy Expert Blair Pleasant covers key announcements and news, and offering valuable insights through informative vendor interviews she conducted at Enterprise Connect 2025. Read More A Congregation of Thoughts Read BCStrategy Expert Kevin Kieller's high-level impressions and takeways from Enterprise Connect 2025. Read More Key Takeaways - Part 1 Join BCStrategies Experts Kevin Kieller, David Danto, Thomas Brannen, Jon Arnold, Melissa Swartz, Robert Harris, and Steve Leaden as they share their key takeaways from Enterprise Connect 2025, highlighting the most surprising revelations, compelling insights, and overarching themes shaping the event. View Here Key Takeaways - Part 2 In this podcast, BCStrategies Experts Blair Pleasant , David Maldow , and Martha Buyer discuss their key takeaways and insights from Enterprise Connect 2025, offering thoughtful observations on the event's most impactful moments. View Here