Search Results

Blair Pleasant and Jon Arnold discuss NiCE's $955M acquisition of conversational AI company Cognigy. Kevin Kieller moderates the discussion.

By Blair Pleasant and Jon Arnold By now you’ve no doubt heard that NiCE is acquiring conversational AI leader Cognigy for a whopping $955M. There’s a lot to unpack here, and many reasons why this marriage makes perfect sense – so much sense, in fact, that my first reaction was “What took so long?” It’s no secret that AI, including conversational AI and agentic AI, is the future of CX, and all CX/CCaaS vendors are moving quickly to put a stake in the ground. Whether through homegrown solutions or integrations and partnerships, CX vendors are quickly moving to become AI-first providers. Consumers are looking for intuitive, responsive, and intelligent solutions that let them move seamlessly from self-service to agent assisted interactions. As the leader in conversational AI and agentic AI, Cognigy services 1,000 brands around the world, including well-known enterprises such as Lufthansa, Mercedes-Benz, and Nestlé. While customers haven’t been banging down the doors demanding AI-assisted, self-service, NiCE knows that this is the direction the industry is headed, and can now enhance its CXone Mpower platform with even more AI capabilities. This acquisition helps NiCE get to market faster with market-leading solutions, making it easier for customers to quickly adopt AI-first solutions. While best-of-breed solutions have their merits, the trend is to move away from point products and siloed solutions (what NiCE calls “frankenstacks”) to single platforms and technology stacks, reducing friction and providing simplicity. As a single platform, CXone Mpower provides an end-to-end solution with shared data, customer history, context, and insights that lets human agents and AI agents work together seamlessly. As NiCE CEO Scott Russell noted during the financial analyst call about the acquisition, generative AI needs to be purpose built specifically for CX. Combining Cognigy’s agentic AI with NiCE CXone Mpower platform - with its rich data and CX AI models - can bridge the self-service resolution gap. The combined solution will be able to orchestrate and automate the entire workflow, from front to back office, and from intent to fulfillment, extending CXone Mpower beyond the contact center. This acquisition comes as no surprise, as Russell made no secret of the fact that he wants NiCE to expand beyond providing customer service solutions to other CX areas. It is also no secret that NiCE has a great deal of cash, and AI acquisitions were at the top of the list. NiCE is the market leader, so it makes sense to acquire another market leader. Cognigy provides an AI agent orchestration platform that helps customers build, operate, and orchestrate CX AI agents at scale across every channel, delivering hyper-personalized service that feels human-like. The company was an early entrant with both conversational AI and AI agents. Before agentic AI and AI agents become all the rage, Cognigy CMO Alan Ranger introduced me to Cognigy’s Agentic AI capabilities at the Enterprise Connect AI (ECAI) show in October 2024. While AI agents and agentic AI are currently all the rage, Cognigy was early to the game and one of a handful of companies at ECAI talking about AI agents. Here are some key points about the acquisition: Cognigy is a German company that has been mainly successful in Europe, while trying to make more inroads into the North American market. This acquisition opens the door for NiCE to get a larger presence in the European market, while Cognigy can expand in North America. NiCE and Cognigy already work together and have integrated solutions, so they can hit the ground running without having to re-engineer anything. NiCE will be able to offer the Cognigy platform standalone right away and will eventually provide a fully integrated solution. According to Barry Cooper, president of NiCE’s CX Division, Cognigy already integrates with NiCE’s Agent Assist Hub and Virtual Agent Hub as part of the CXone Mpower platform. Cooper notes that full integration will be quick but won’t start until after receiving regulatory approval of the acquisition. The goal is to scale AI adoption by providing a single platform and single pane of glass with Cognigy embedded in CXone Mpower to provide a single customer experience. Cognigy’s AI agents will be orchestrated natively on the NiCE CXone Mpower platform, reasoning and responding in real time to make consumer experiences faster, more human, and personal. Cognigy becomes part of fully connected platform gaining access to richer data, shared knowledge and models. NiCE is gaining tremendous AI talent and expertise, adding Cognigy’s executive team, engineers, and others. Cognigy CEO Philipp Helteweg will become GM NiCE Cognigy. As part of the acquisition, an employee retention program is in place to retain Cognigy’s AI talent. Cognigy has strong talent and AI experts who’ve been innovating in this space who will join the NiCE team to help expand its AI expertise. The acquisition will have a big impact on Cognigy’s CCaaS/contact center partners, notably Genesys, Avaya, and 8x8. While Cognigy plans to continue supporting these partners and offer its platform both as a combined offering with CXone Mpower and as a standalone offering, we expect these companies – particularly Genesys – to look for a new partner and potential acquisitions. This should be welcome news to some of Cognigy’s conversational AI/AI agent competitors, as we’re likely to see more acquisitions in the next few months. This also opens the door for NiCE to have discussions with Cognigy customers currently on different contact center/CCaaS platforms who may be considering moving to NiCE. There aren’t very many downsides to this acquisition for NiCE or Cognigy. While some industry watchers claim that having its own technology stack rather than partnering with best-of-breed vendors is more limiting, as it reduces the likelihood of partnering with a vendor that may be more innovative, the benefits of owning your own technology outweighs those concerns. The CXone Mpower platform is open and can integrate with other vendors if a customer prefers that option. Conducting the Orchestra Our BCStrategies view would sum this up in a single word - orchestration. That has been a central theme at NiCE, initially envisioned by outgoing CEO Barak Eilam with CXone Mpower. Current CEO Scott Russell has enhanced that vision with orchestration capabilities that go beyond the contact center. CX orchestration is now the focus of most CCaaS providers, but as we saw at Interactions, NiCE is taking the orchestration concept to another level via big-time partnerships with ServiceNow and Snowflake. In parlance that Cognigy’s German roots will appreciate, NiCE has upleveled the game from a string quartet to an orchestra in terms of orchestrating workflows and outcomes across the entire enterprise, instead of just the contact center. The Cognigy acquisition is akin to adding another layer of instruments to make this a more complete symphony orchestra. No acquisition is ever neat-and-tidy, and Cognigy’s partner relationships will need to evolve, so for now, the conductor’s role will likely be shared by the CEOs - Scott Russell and Philipp Helteweg. Taking the orchestration motif one step further, as a company, NiCE is certainly orchestrating how the CX landscape needs to evolve in the age of AI. Adding Cognigy shows vision for how to separate from the pack, and this sets the bar ever-higher for competitors. NiCE now has the most complete CX platform out there, and it will no longer be enough for competitors to rely on partnerships to keep pace. Of course, all of this is moot if AI turns out to be hype, but given NiCE’s financial strength, they could weather this scenario better than just about anyone. Besides, we’ve been to events for both companies, and the proof points are there - each company has learned how to make AI real, and we no longer need to worry about what took so long.

(Podcast length 20:52) BCStrategies Expert Blair Pleasant hosts Experts Joseph Williams, Jon Arnold, Kevin Kieller, David Maldow and Nicolas de Kouchkovsky as they discuss key themes and announcements from the start of 2025: Blair - Non-traditional contact center agents with Webex, 8x8, TalkDesk, GoTo, RingCentral Joseph - Nest ending support for first-gen thermometers; theme platforms are not forever. Architect for agility and flexibility Jon - RCS and messaging, especially for outbound Kevin - Q1 as the start for "realistic AI" - people are starting to understand opportunities and risks better David - Microsoft, Cisco, Zoom, Google, and the term "Agentic AI" + Data from Star Trek Nicolas - Trends around "agent platform": Zendesk, ServiceNow. How to test, iterate, improve, and control.

BCStrategies.com Experts Kevin Kieller, Blair Pleasant, and Jon Arnold provide a quick recap of Zoom Perspectives 2025, highlighting their key takeaways, including: ➡️Creating a product that customers love is not just a cute saying; it is an imperative embedded in everything Zoom does ➡️ Zoom contact center, Zoom phone, Zoom Workplace, and Workvivo are all seeing strong growth ➡️Xuedong D. Huang and his team have exciting plans related to #AI that drives measurable business outcomes. Their key focus is enabling "conversations to completion" ➡️Nick Tidd has a detailed strategy to expand Zoom's channel contribution from 40% to 80% ➡️Kimberly Storin, as the new CMO, is gearing up to tell the Zoom story more broadly and more powerfully (with swagger) ➡️ Brendan Ittelson is fully committed to helping developers leverage and integrate the power of Zoom into their solutions ➡️The Workvivo by Zoom team brings passion, a great product, and new customers to Zoom. A strong complement to Zoom's frontline offering ➡️ Speaking of frontline, Zoom Workplace for Frontline is well-priced and well-aligned with the opportunity that more than 2 billion frontline workers represent ➡️ Zoom's vertical add-ons for healthcare and education are interesting and expanding (e.g., clinician and lecture transcript notes) ➡️ Zoom Workplace's powerful features, delivered without complexity, are ideally suited to the SMB market (especially for orgs with less than 50 people who typically have no IT staff) ➡️ If you are a Microsoft shop that also uses hashtag#Zoom (as many do), the Zoom Workplace integration with Outlook/ Exchange/ SharePoint is worth checking out

Zoom held its annual analyst event in its hometown of San Jose, CA, providing insights into how the company is transforming from a collaboration company to a provider of an AI-first work platform. According to CEO Eric Yuan, Zoom’s goal is to provide an AI-first work platform that integrates applications into a single, natural language-driven interface, enhancing productivity and work effectiveness. The next step is digital assistants, and eventually true digital twins (don’t expect to see digital twins for another few years).   Analysts were introduced to the new CMO, Kim Storin, who noted that working at Zoom as CMO is a marketer's dream, as it's a brand that people know and love. Storin discussed how Zoom will position itself in the enterprise, SMB, and mid-market space, and that while Zoom serves the biggest enterprises in the world all the way down to very small businesses, “the middle will be our sweet spot,” adding that the middle section with 250-1000 employees “is where we have a right to put a stake in the ground.”   Riding the Wave – And a New GTM Approach   Graeme Geddes , Chief Sales Officer, discussed Zoom’s progress in the past year by providing a surfing analogy. He noted that surfers need to read the swell, and that companies can ride the wave – or be crushed by it. By reading the swell, Zoom identified three key areas of opportunity for Zoom:   ·      UCaaS + CCaaS convergence and unifying the way to serve internal and external stakeholders with a single platform ·      Expanding beyond knowledge-based workers by transforming the way frontline workers connect and communicate ·      The power of AI as a true companion   Geddes identified ways that Zoom is leaning into the wave, as shown in this slide.       Channel acceleration received a great deal of attention. One of the highlights of the event was hearing from new Head of Global Channel GTM, Nick Tidd . T idd has been actively reshaping Zoom’s go-to-market strategy, driving meaningful transformation. As part of this evolution, Zoom is becoming increasingly channel-focused, aiming to significantly grow the contribution of channel-driven business. This shift is supported by a major expansion of Zoom’s partner ecosystem and increased enablement across the board. Tidd has radically transformed Zoom’s channel approach, with more to come.   Product Vision   Chief Product Officer, Smita Hashim, discussed Zoom’s product vision, which covers: ·      Agentic experiences ·      Meeting effectiveness ·      Line of business and industry value   Hashim stated that Zoom’s goal is “Conversations to Completion,” turning conversations into actions, and then driving interactions to completion to help employees and customers, build stronger relationships.   Of course, agentic AI and Zoom AI Companion took center stage in the discussions. Zoom defines agentic AI as including reasoning, memory, orchestration, and task action.   Zoom’s agentic framework includes agents, skills, and models. Zoom offers several different types of agents, including Zoom Workplace Agents, Specialized Agents (such as the Zoom Revenue Accelerator), Custom Agents that customers can build on their own using Zoom’s AI Studio, and Third-Party Agents (such as the ServiceNow agent).   Some of AI Companion’s agentic skills include scheduling, task management, and deep research for data-driven decision making. Zoom utilizes various large language models, as well as its own small language models and third-party models, while enabling organizations to bring their own model.   In April Zoom launched Custom AI Companion, a paid add-on to customize the Zoom experience with advanced AI features, including meeting summary templates, third-party integrations, custom avatars, and more. Custom AI Companion helps customers tailor their AI solution to their organization’s goals and data. In addition to supporting enterprise customers, Zoom recently launched Custom AI Companion for SMB customers, focusing on core capabilities SMBs care about, including customized meeting summaries and additional third-party apps.   In this video interview, I spoke with Hashim about how customers are using Zoom’s UCaaS + CCaaS to get more power from the platform, what Zoom means by “Conversation to Completion”, and Zoom’s approach to agentic AI.       Zoom CX Making Tremendous Strides   Zoom has made tremendous progress with Zoom CX (ZCX, the renamed Zoom Contact Center), focusing on delivering positive experiences for employees and customers while driving strong business outcomes.   Chris Morrissey, GM & Global Head of Sales & GTM, discussed how Zoom is a connection-first platform, focused on creating experiences that make employees and customers feel connected and valued by the brands they choose. Zoom has seen a great deal of AI success for CX, including the AI Companion that comes with ZCX, as well as with AI Expert Assist, a paid option offering knowledgebase retrieval, information retrieval, auto disposition, agent guidance, smart notes, and more. Morrissey stated that Zoom is demonstrating innovation in AI transformation, noting, “We're not an AI-first company, we are a CX-first business, but we do use AI, and we have to demonstrate leadership there.”   During a session with Zoom channel partners, it became clear that partners are very bullish on ZCX. As one channel partner noted, “When Zoom rolled out Zoom Contact Center, we started positioning it as 80% of the capability at half the price, as it didn’t have all the robust features. But the pace of innovation has blown my mind. Zoom has reached par with all the CCaaS players, and it still offers disruptive pricing. Zoom can dominate this space and comes up in competitive conversations more than any other vendor.”   In this video interview, Morrissey discusses Zoom’s CX momentum, its key differentiation, and how Zoom is innovating in AI for CX.     To introduce many of its new capabilities, the CX team discussed the Five Pillars of Connected CX, and Zoom’s offerings and initiatives for these pillars.       For example, for Connected Journeys, Zoom introduced Advanced AI Routing, enabling callers to speak using natural language and get routed to the best-suited agent based on detected intent. Another capability for Connected Journeys is co-browsing with PII Masking to let agents securely co-browse with customers during chat and voice engagements.   For the second pillar, “AI built to resolve, not just respond,” Zoom announced Zoom Virtual Agent (ZVA) 2.0 - agentic AI voice and chat agents that reason, orchestrate, and execute actions with minimal human oversight. ZVA includes pre-built skills, such as schedule, search, summarize, respond, compose, etc. A demonstration of ZVA showed how easy it is to set up the virtual agent, define guardrails, set the virtual agent’s tone and appearance, configure the actions, retrieve data from a knowledge base or CRM, and more. With agentic capabilities, the virtual agent performs tasks using the prebuilt skills without specifically being instructed, based on its reasoning capabilities.   There were many new additions and enhancement for the Unified Customer Intelligence pillar. Zoom built a revamped CX Analytics platform to build journeys that are truly omnichannel, enabling customers to build dashboards and reports, and share them across the organization. The new analytics and reporting platform includes a new UI and GUI that is more intuitive and easier to use and lets customers build their own custom metrics.   The new Zoom CX Insights provides business insights from data from across the ZCX suite for use both inside and outside of the contact center. For example, it leverages AI to provide information on customer churn trends, product improvement opportunities, process bottlenecks, optimization priorities, and more.     There are two more pillars, and many more product announcements and enhancements, which can’t all be covered here.   To summarize and provide a good overview, Kentis Gopalla, head of CX Product and Ecosystem, discusses the five pillars of Connected CX and several of Zoom’s new CX announcements, including Zoom Virtual Voice Agent, Advanced QM, the new analytics platform, agentic AI, CX Insights, and more.       Zoom Workplace   Not to be overshadowed by Zoom CX, Zoom Workplace also had its share of enhancements and announcements. AI Companion has become supercharged with agentic capabilities for reasoning, memory, orchestration, and performing tasks.   With AI Companion, Zoom Workplace added agentic capabilities that help schedule meetings, auto-generate meeting agendas, takes live notes, capture action items and other tasks from recent communications. Other AI-enhanced capabilities include Zoom Power Dialer with built-in AI technology, and the ability for AI Companion to assist with Zoom Phone calls.   In this video interview, Theresa Larkin, Head of Zoom Workplace & AI Product Marketing, provides an update on what’s new in Zoom Workplace and AI Companion with agentic AI capabilities, as well as what’s next. She also discusses Zoom Phone and how it will leverage Zoom Virtual Agent for self-service.     Key Take-Aways   There was a great deal of information provided in 1 ½ days and it’s hard to summarize everything. Here are some of my key take-aways:   ·      Zoom remains extremely customer focused – Yuan truly cares about enabling customer happiness, which drives product innovation and development. Yuan set out to create a product that customers love and that’s easy to use, and this vision still fuels Zoom’s product development and innovation. ·      Business outcomes are key, Zoom customers achieving notable results. For example, during the CX breakout, Amy Roberge, Head of Global Contact Center Solution Engineering, highlighted the business outcomes that various customers have attained, such as reducing call handle time from 15 minutes to 2 minutes, reducing after-call work to 30 seconds, saving $30k per year with native video, achieving 75% containment rate with ZVA, etc. ·      While still serving large enterprises, Zoom is now focusing on the midmarket, which I believe is very sensible. Most competitors are targeting large enterprises, but there are many more mid-market organizations that need the products and capabilities that Zoom provides. ·      UCaaS and CCaaS convergence is an important element of Zoom’s strategy and success, building upon each other and encouraging additional customer sales. For example, a large number of Zoom CX customers are adding Zoom Phone, while Zoom Workplace customers are adding Zoom CX. ·      WorkVivo is an important differentiation for the company, which I expect to be leveraged increasingly going forward. Zoom discussed the pull-through opportunity from WorkVivo for the rest of the Zoom platform, noting several WorkVivo customers that moved to the Zoom platform. While the WorkVivo team didn’t present at the event this year (a missed opportunity), I spent time speaking with them and continue to be impressed with the value WorkVivo brings to Zoom and its customers. ·      Zoom briefly talked about Value Realization and how the company helps customers get onboarded and enabled. I would have liked to have heard more about this, as this becomes increasingly important in an AI world. Zoom mentioned providing personalized onboarding for improved time to value, and how Zoom’s customer success teams help meet customers “where they’re at.” Customer adoption is critical, and Zoom is in a position to do more to help customers get the most out of their solutions. ·      Integration into various third-party applications and workflows remain key, with a focus on helping developers and partners integrate various solutions. One channel partner noted, “Zoom makes it easy to work with other ecosystem partners so we can deliver robust solutions with Salesforce, ServiceNow, and others.”   It’s been clear for some time that Zoom is no longer just a video or meetings company. Even as the company expands into different areas, Zoom remains true to its core mission and philosophy – helping people connect, collaborate, and get more work done, while delivering happiness.

NICE recently hosted its annual customer event, NiCE Interactions, drawing an impressive 3,000 CX leader attendees from 20 diverse industries. The central theme, "Creating a NiCE world through the power of AI," underscored how businesses can leverage NiCE solutions to achieve greater profitability, enhanced efficiency, and increased customer satisfaction. This year's event featured several notable changes and announcements. First, NICE is now NiCE, representing the new branding and focus on AI. Attendees also had their first opportunity to hear from new CEO Scott Russell, who infused the event with palpable energy and excitement. The event also marked the final Interactions for CMO Einat Weiss, who has played a pivotal role in establishing NICE as a market leader. While her contributions to NICE will undoubtedly leave a lasting legacy, her presence will be missed.   CEO Scott Russell Welcomes Attendees to Interactions 2025   Reimagining Customer Experience   In a high-energy presentation, CEO Scott Russell elaborated on his decision to join NICE and the company's mission to "create a NICE world, where every experience feels human and personal, and every connection creates value." Russell explained that he was drawn to the opportunity to blend human connection with the power of technology, transforming human engagement by enriching it, not replacing it.   Russell noted that while real progress is being made, many organizations are still uncertain as to how best to leverage Ai and innovation to transform customer experiences.   Russell asked the audience: ·      What if customers didn’t have to find service – it found them? ·      What if issues could be resolved before customers knew they had a problem? ·      What if interactions create new opportunities?   He answered that in a NiCE world, every experience feels human and personal; every connection creates value, and the power of AI is proactively used to turn knowledge into action, fusing automation and human empathy to make experiences matter. Human and AI agents interoperate within the same interaction in a way that feels as cohesive as a single pane of glass.   The key and foundation to all of this is NiCE’s platform, CXone Mpower. CXone was recently rearchitected to CXone Mpower, “an AI platform to make a NiCE world a reality.” CXone Mpower is a purpose-built AI-based end-to-end platform built on an open cloud infrastructure, with workflow orchestration in a single ecosystem.   CXone Mpower combines three key elements: ·      Workflows ·      Knowledge ·      Agents It centralizes AI knowledge in one place to improve experiences, and provides workflow orchestration, empowering (pun intended) customers to automate their workflows, while blurring the lines between front-, middle-, back-office teams.   To discuss the event and the changes taking place, I spoke with VP Corporate Communications, Chris Irwin-Dudek.       CXone Mpower Agents   The biggest announcement at the event was the introduction of CXone Mpower Agents, AI-driven assistants that adapt, learn, and scale with a business. Based on reasoning, context, goals, and guardrails, these AI agents can be created and deployed in seconds and work across the front, back, and middle office to automate service workflows. CXone Mpower Agents are built for CX and trained on billions of interactions. They use real-time reasoning based on a business’s data to automate customer service workflows, enabling these agents to operate fluently across the front and back office, executing tasks and triggering reactions. In this video, VP of Product Marketing, Andy Traba, describes these AI agents and how they work.   After presenting an impressive demo on stage, Jennifer Wilson, Director of Product Marketing, sat down with me to discuss the power of NiCE’s AI agents and copilots for agents, supervisors, and customers, and how they’re being used across the organization. In this video interview, Wilson also describes the new AI Voice Services, including real-time translation, noise suppression, and voice modifications to match dialects, as well as CX Mpower Desk, a new workspace for agents, back-office workers, and others (who I call “engagement workers”).       Orchestration Another key topic was around orchestration and CXone Mpower Orchestrator, an intelligent command center to manage customer service workflows end-to-end. CXone Mpower Orchestrator takes a holistic approach to provide real-time visibility into work to analyze, unify, optimize, and automate workflows. In this video, Tim Harris GM, Interaction Orchestration, discusses how CXone MPower Orchestrator helps unify and optimize workflows. He also discusses the CXone Mpower Desk workspace for back-office workers.       In this video, Mike Harwell, Senior Director of Product Management, drills deeper into CXone Mpower Orchestrator and how it works. He explains how NiCE begins with a discovery process to identify existing and inferred workflows, then moves to mapping, publishing and optimizing the workflow using AI, and lastly, executing the workflow.   Key Takeaways   Customers: While it was great hearing from NiCE about their innovations, it was even better hearing from their customers. In addition to the various customers on the big stage (Disney, Walmart, Charles Schwab, Carnival UK, H&R Block, and ALG Vacations), many of the breakout sessions were led by customers sharing their experiences and best practices. Most of the customers I spoke with were experimenting with AI in one way or another, experiencing impactful business benefits. During one breakout session I attended, panelists from Sony and Disney helped attendees identify ways to encourage AI adoption, differentiate from competitors, and get the most out of their AI deployments. Hearing from their peers was very powerful and impactful, and the response from attendees showed how much they appreciated these insights.   Platform is key: The word I heard most often (aside from AI) at Interactions was “platform.” CXone President Barry Cooper discussed the value of having a single platform, encouraging businesses exploring the best way to get started with AI to “start on the platform.” As a single, unified platform and AI foundation, CXone Mpower connects intelligence across the platform to make everything work better together. NiCE customers agree. Anderson Wilkins, Head of Global CCaaS Product for Walmart, noted that Walmart selected NiCE in part because of its single platform to help optimize costs, remove friction, and simplify Walmart’s technology stack. Other customers I spoke with agreed that having a single platform was key to their decision to choose NiCE. Barry Cooper, President, NICE CXone Division   Openness and partnerships: It was refreshing to hear NiCE discuss technology partnerships and openness. During his keynote, Russell discussed new partnerships to enhance CXone Mpower’s depth and synergies, including ServiceNow, AWS, Snowflake, and others. This is key, as one of NiCE’s challenges in the past has been its limited partnerships, which are essential in today’s CX world.   AI Agents: While the term “agentic AI” wasn’t used as frequently as expected, it’s clear that NiCE is being very aggressive in this area. The demos during Barry Cooper’s keynote on Day 2 really brought home the power of these AI Agents that complete tasks based on the goals that they’re given, and how easy it is to create these agents without any code or programming. Even an industry analyst can do it!   Front and Back Office: It was refreshing to hear about several announcements that focus not just on contact center agents and workers, but also middle- and back-office workers who interact with customers. NiCE presenters discussed how the AI Agents operate fluently across the front and back office, while the new CXone Mpower Desk is an all-in-one workspace to unify and streamline front- and back-office work, connecting frontline agents, back-office employees, and specialists to collaborate in real time. This aligns with concepts I’ve been promoting for many years, including the role of back-office “engagement workers,” who interact with and support customers. Unified Communications?: While there was a demo booth in the exhibit hall showcasing 1CX, NiCE's UCaaS offering, there was no mention of it during any of the keynote presentations or demos. This is understandable, given that UCaaS is not a priority for NiCE, but a mention on the big stage would have helped to inform customers that this offering is available. While i was at the 1CX booth, a couple of customers noted that they weren't familiar with this offering and didn't know it was available. Perhaps NiCE could be a bit more vocal about having these capabilities.   Closing Thoughts   NiCE always does a fabulous job at its events, with dynamic speakers, impressive graphics and visuals, and educational sessions. This year was no different. Scott Russell did an impressive job at his first Interactions, bringing a dose of Australian energy. I especially appreciated his focus on partnerships and openness, which should help NiCE expand to other areas beyond the contact center. While he certainly will make changes in NiCE’s approach in some areas, he understands what made NiCE a CX leader, and isn’t looking to fix what isn’t broken.   With a new CEO and CMO, there will certainly be lots of changes ahead, but similar to CXone Mpower, the company is built on a strong foundation that will help accelerate growth. And of course, we all had a great time seeing One Republic perform as part of the Customer Appreciation Event.

BCStrategies Expert David Danto interviews Expert Kevin Kieller related to the April 2025 Comms vNext conference which focused on the Microsoft ecosystem. Kevin recounts his overall impressions and discusses the two sessions he delivered: An AI Assistant Comparison, and Leveraging Copilot Analytics.

Avaya has been sharpening its focus for the future of customer and employee experiences. In this conversation, Blair Pleasant catches up with Pete Lavache, CMO of Avaya, to discuss where the company is focused, what’s different in the contact center space today, and how Avaya is approaching AI.   Blair: “You joined Avaya as CMO last November. Would you be able to tell me what the company’s been focused on since you joined and how your team is supporting those efforts? “   Pete: “Yes, it’s been a busy time. First and foremost, we’ve been laser focused on aligning and operationalizing the company to serve the largest and most complex enterprises and governments around the world—a market Avaya is best fit to serve. Centering the strategy and associated investments has helped us not only exhibit the necessary financial discipline required to baseline Avaya’s cost structure in a way that streamlined operations but, more importantly, helped build a much more agile organization. I’ve also been partnering closely with Tony [Lama, our product leader] and David [Funck, our Chief Architect] on the product strategy targeting the enterprise. We are continually refining our approach to better align with the needs of that market, including how we service these customers and ensure that our solutions are personalized for organizations at scale.    I’m very much a product-focused CMO, and the product aspect of this role was something that further piqued my interest about joining Avaya—the company has an incredible legacy as a technology pioneer. Additionally, the Edify acquisition and the potential to streamline and simplify operations and hyper-personalize experiences was a big draw. When combined with our core hallmarks of  reliability and scalability, which are things we do head and shoulders better than our competition, Avaya is able to meet customers where they are and enable them to go where they want to go.”     Blair: "You’ve spent time in the contact center space before, then pivoted into cybersecurity— and now you’re back. Given that unique perspective, what’s different about the contact center industry today? What are you seeing now that maybe wasn’t as front and center before?"   Pete : “Honestly, it kind of feels like everything old is new again. The problems we were trying to solve years ago — they haven’t changed all that much. It's still about improving agent experience, customer satisfaction, and making things work better. But what has changed is the toolkit we have to address these problems.   As I mentioned, one of the things I was really excited about was the Edify acquisition. When I looked at that technology and how it fits into our space, it opened a whole new set of possibilities — especially around customers being able to go back and modernize the parts of their infrastructure that maybe they didn't get quite right the first time. You know, those original systems that were implemented years ago but never really delivered the value they were supposed to. Now, with AI-driven tools and more flexibility around deployment options – whether on-prem, cloud, or hybrid – we can help optimize workflows, make agents more efficient and ultimately streamline operations in a way that’s scalable and future-ready.   Whether its agent assists or sentiment analysis or voice analytics — things customers have been chasing forever — you’ve now got a whole new generation of tech to solve these problems in new ways. If you look at players in many of these spaces, they were desparately trying to transform those features into standalone companies when I left. Now, with the shifts in the market especially around AI, many of these companies are struggling because those features are finding their way back into platforms. This creates opportunities for companies like Avaya, because we can bring those capabilities back into the platform and do it in a way that’s scalable and reliable — what Avaya has always done well.   If you look at our competitors, everyone’s leading with AI in their boilerplates and overall marketing.  We’ve been intentional about not just jumping on buzzwords. We’re focused on practical AI — what value AI will drive for our customers. To me, this is a big shift we’ve made and one that presents both an opportunity and a responsibility for us  as business leaders. We can either let AI be shaped solely by scale, or we can design it to foster richer, smarter, and more trusted relationships between companies and their customers, and between organizations and their employees.”    Blair: “I’m glad you brought up AI — let’s talk about that. What’s different between Avaya’s AI strategy compared to what we’re seeing from others in your space?”   Pete : “The big thing with us is we’re not trying to become an AI company. Does Avaya have modernized AI features in our platform? Yeah, absolutely. But our approach is centered around the things that help reduce costs and frees agents to focus on more valuable, human interactions that result in better customer retention and loyalty. We’re not here pretending we invented AI or that we have the world’s most secret, best algorithm.   The reality is our approach is a lot more pragmatic. We’re building a platform that enables customers to use whatever technology, AI or otherwise, that they think is best for their business. That’s where we’re putting our investment — in giving them the flexibility and simplicity to integrate the tools that make sense for them. Whether that’s ChatGPT today, DeepSeek tomorrow, or something else entirely, we can support that without requiring armies of developers. We’re doing it through a drag-and-drop workflow interface that’s faster, easier, and doesn’t lock you into one vendor’s ecosystem.   When you think about AI-driven automation — that’s where this gets powerful. We’re helping reduce operational costs and free up agents to focus on more meaningful work. That’s the unlock. It’s not about building some mythical AI — it’s about making it usable, flexible, and valuable right now.”    Blair: “What do you say to those who write this off as just the next strategy and talking points from Avaya?” Pete : “I’d say, look, I get the skepticism – but you are wrong if you read into what we are doing as business as usual.  And although I’m sure there were reasons for prior leadership’s decisions, let me be clear – this is a management team that’s perfectly comfortable building a fact-based plan and making the hard calls necessary to execute that plan. I’d also say, as evidence by the amount of spotlight we seek - we really don’t do talking points or believe trying to make ourselves a part of every conversation is an effective strategy. The fact is, in the short run the market is going to believe what it wants.  All the while we’ll continue to stay maniacally focused on our core customers and markets and what delivers value for them. We’ll continue investing in and aligning our resources to focus on delivering that value in those markets.  And we’ll continue to explicitly implement broad based fiscal discipline and talent management to ensure we have the right workforce focused on the right opportunities.  Funny thing is, if you heard that and didn’t know it was Avaya, you’d likely think that’s exactly how you’d want all the companies you do business with to operate.  And that’s who Avaya is. I guess that’s my long way of saying we don’t obsess about the nay sayers. And the reason for that is simple. As a private company, with an execution focused management team, we have both the latitude and support to make the changes necessary to create a formidable competitor serving the needs of the largest and most complex requirements in this market and that's exactly what we are doing.    Blair: “So, tell me what’s next for Avaya?”   Pete : “First off, we're going to focus on the customers we’re best equipped to serve and do so to the best of our ability. And the customers we’ve been speaking with are genuinely optimistic about what we are delivering. We’re laser-focused on execution—and the difference now is that we’re not just talking about what’s possible; we’re showing real software in action. Customers can see, touch, and test it, providing direct feedback that’s shaping where we go next.     We’re continuing to build a durable, enterprise-focused business that helps our customers achieve their goals on their terms—not ours. Unlike the market, we’re not pushing a one-size-fits-all approach. Avaya remains committed to supporting on-prem, private, and sovereign cloud deployments because we understand that enterprise and government customers demand security, data sovereignty, privacy, and rich customization.   While many in the industry have moved toward multi-tenant public cloud solutions, the reality is that they don’t always meet stringent regulatory and operational requirements. With Avaya, customers have real choices—whether they need the flexibility of cloud, the control of on-prem, or a hybrid approach that balances both. In other words, we are committed to ensuring they have the right solutions to support their long-term success.

It was another whirlwind Enterprise Connect, with tons of announcements and news – especially around AI. Analysts are in high demand at this event, as it’s a great way for vendors to spend time with many of the analysts in attendance. I participated in 20 1:1 vendor meetings, attended 10 analyst breakfasts/dinners/receptions, and only had time for a few keynotes and a couple sessions. I also moderated two sessions -   Harnessing the Combined Power of UCaaS amp; CCaaS for Enhanced EX and CX: A Customer Case Study with Reggie Scales of Vonage, and GAF’s Christine Baumeister Re-tool Your Teams (and Users) for AI with representatives from Microsoft, Google, and Miratech discussing the need for upskilling IT teams, AI training and training programs for both IT teams and end users and driving user adoption. By now you know that the major theme of the event was AI, and the word of the week was “Agentic,” as in Agentic AI and AI Agents. Every vendor meeting and keynote included discussions on how Agentic AI impacts how businesses communicate, serve customers and get work done. During my many meetings, whenever someone brought up the term “agentic,” I asked how they define agentic AI or AI agents. While every vendor defines agentic AI/AI agents differently (usually based on what they offer), there’s some consensus that it involves reasoning and action, and the ability to perform tasks on behalf of someone (or something) without explicit instructions. There are some differences of opinion in whether AI agents are autonomous, with some vendors noting that there’s a continuum, with autonomy being the end goal that hasn’t been achieved yet. For example: NICE defines AI agents as having reasoning and taking action, while maximizing value through workflows, rather than being fully autonomous. AI agents take action and connect with other systems to resolve complex intents with automation. According to Zoom, agentic AI does the work for you, takes action, and executes on your behalf. Zoom notes that agentic AI includes four skills: reasoning (it can size up situations and map out the best game plan to complete a goal), memory (it learns from the history of interactions), task action, and orchestration. Salesforce sees agentic as the ability to reason and take action, including the ability to form and execute a plan - whether done autonomously or in assisted mode. While unified communications and collaboration have been the central theme of Enterprise Connect for many years, Enterprise Connect is quickly becoming a contact center event. Many of the keynotes and announcements focused on customer experience (CX), especially as most of the traditional UCC/UCaaS vendors have made significant strides in their CX efforts. A few examples include Microsoft, Cisco, Google, and Zoom. Throughout the event (when time permitted) I did short vendor video interviews, which are included throughout this article (yes, I know – if you took the time to watch every video this article would take hours to get through, but the videos are a great source of information). The following covers some of the key CCaaS/CX announcements and news and my video interviews. AWS AWS launched the next generation of Amazon Connect, which provides “AI everywhere,” while continuously analyzing interactions to improve the customer and agent experience. In his keynote presentation, Pasquale DeMaio, VP of Amazon Connect, described some of the new features being introduced, including native integration of AWS AI. This makes it easy to AI-enable every customer touchpoint in the contact center with one click, adding AI capabilities such as GenAI self-service, GenAI Agent assistance, conversational analytics, GenAI post-contact summaries, screen recording, GenAI Performance evaluation, forecasting, and scheduling. This next generation of Amazon Connect includes Amazon Q for Connect, providing automated agent assistance and end-customer self-service, as well as Contact Lens for conversational analytics, screen recording, and performance evaluation. According to DeMaio, AWS is taking what they’ve learned about AI in the past eight years and making it a key part of Connect, with everything in one package. AWS also announced the general availability of Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect, which integrates all of Connect’s digital channels into Salesforce Service Cloud. In this video interview, DeMaio and Heidi Elmore, Senior Product Marketing Manager - Amazon Connect, discuss how AWS brought together all the key capabilities in one solution, while making things simple with pay-as-you-go pricing. This helps companies think differently about the way they interact with customers and provide more proactive service. DeMaio also describes the various AI capabilities for customers, agents, and supervisors, while Elmore provides insights about customers using the new Amazon Connect and AI capabilities. Cognigy In addition to its strong conversational AI capabilities, Cognigy provides fully pre-trained AI agents, including AI Voice Agents, AI Agents for Chat and Messaging, AI-Powered Agent Assist, and AI Agents for Sales & Marketing, in addition to AI agents for various vertical industries. Cognigy launched its AI Agent Console, providing workforce management for AI Agents to monitor human and AI agents in real-time to manage the workforce. In this video, Cognigy’s VP Marketing, Alan Ranger, talks about the AI Agent Console, which sheds light on AI agent performance, along with relevant metrics to help organizations better manage these agents. The same console interacts with human agents using the Cognigy copilot to measure success. Ranger also provides some interesting predictions about how everyone will have an AI agent on a mobile device that will act on our behalf to interact with other AI agents for tasks such as booking a restaurant reservation. The AI agents will use a conversational interface when interacting with other AI agents to complete the tasks. Cisco Cisco isn’t new to the contact center world but has made some major strides recently, adding new capabilities to its Webex Customer Experience portfolio, notably Webex AI Agent and AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center. At Enterprise Connect, Cisco introduced new agentic AI capabilities, including the general availability of the Webex AI Agent, as well as new workflows in AI Assistant for Webex Suite, Webex Calling Customer Assist, and AirPlay on Cisco Devices for Microsoft Teams Rooms.   Webex AI Agent will be GA at the end of March, providing “a 24/7, self-service solution that works alongside human agents to answer routine and high-volume customer questions and executes actions to fulfill customer requests.” Cisco notes that businesses can design and deploy AI Agents tailored to their requirements, choosing between autonomous agents for dynamic conversations or scripted agents with pre-configured responses. Webex AI Agent integrates out of the box with Webex Contact Center and provides omnichannel, multilingual AI agents (supporting nine languages), and real-time intent fulfillment. Cisco  added several new features   to AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center ,  including suggested responses and real-time transcription for agents. The Cisco announcement that intrigued me the most was Webex Calling Customer Assist, aimed at frontline workers. This allows workers in local and regional branches, including retail stores, bank branches, pharmacies, and healthcare clinics, to assist customers and resolve issues. Available through a new Webex Calling offer, capabilities include voice queues with custom messages, advanced auto attendant, click-to-call, AI Assistant for Agents, call sentiment for supervisors, analytics, and more. This offering helps break down the walls of the contact center, enabling frontline workers to assist customers and resolve customer issues, enhancing customer interactions. At a noisy airport on the way home from Enterprise Connect, I spoke with Vinod Muthukrishnan, Webex Customer Experience VP & COO about some of Cisco’s new announcements. Dialpad Dialpad demonstrated its Ai-Powered Customer Intelligence Platform, combining its Ai Contact Center, Ai Sales, Ai Voice, and Ai Meetings with Ai Messaging. The company recently introduced its Ai Agent, an AI-powered virtual assistant that offers 24/7 digital assistance. Using RAG and genAI, Ai Agent searches an organization’s knowledge base to provide answers and information that’s presented to customers conversationally and naturally. Other recent contact center offerings include Launchpad for real-time performance insights, Ai Assistant with integrations into existing knowledge centers and systems, and WFM based on Dialpad’s acquisition of Surfboard.   In this video, Vice President of Product Management Sara Jew-Lim, and   Fabrice Della Mea, Vice President of Product Management, Contact Center, discuss these recent announcements, including information on Dialpad’s WFM integration with HR IS systems to improve agent scheduling. Lastly, they discuss Dialpad’s own large language model and how it provides real-time benefits, such as real-time coaching and guidance. Five9 Five9 announced Spotlight for Five9 AI Insights, powered by Five9 Genius AI to extract actionable insights from conversation transcripts. The Spotlight feature for AI Insights analyzes customer conversations to provide operational data and relevant intelligence that can be tailored and used by sales and marketing teams. For example: Sales teams can  prompt AI Insights to  "Track the most common objections that cause a possible sale to stall," Marketing teams can prompt it to "Identify which elements of our messaging customers reference the most in conversations," Product teams could  prompt it to  "Spot what product-related issues are generating the most support tickets."  In this video, Jonathan Rosenberg, Five9 CTO and Head of AI explains how Five9 uses genAI for analytics and insights. He explains how Five9’s AI Insights transcribes each call and uses genAI to figure out the reason for the call, adding additional metrics like customer sentiment and customer satisfaction. Rosenberg provides examples of how various people in organizations can easily prompt the system to get information and mine data for relevant insights. As Rosenberg notes, with Spotlight “You think it, you type it, you graph it.” GoTo GoTo launched several products recently, including AI Receptionist, the first offering in GoTo Connect’s new Digital Workforce portfolio aimed at complementing human employees. GoTo Connect AI Receptionist uses genAI to greet callers and create human-like conversations. Supporting more than 10 languages, it handles mundane tasks, resolves routine inquiries by leveraging knowledge bases and FAQs, and intelligently routes callers to the right destination when needed, providing always-on coverage. GoTo also launched AI Quality Management (QM) for GoTo Connect Contact Center, using genAI to simplify agent coaching and training through automated AI-powered reporting and analysis. The company has been doubling down on several vertical industries, and introduced GoTo Connect Automotive, which integrates GoTo’s platform with dealer management systems and CRM systems for automotive dealers. In this video, Joe Walsh, VP Global Marketing & Site Leader provides insights about GoTo Connect AI Receptionist, GoTo Connect Automotive, and AI QM. Microsoft Microsoft has been making important headway with its Dynamics 365 Contact Center, a Copilot-first contact center solution that is built to work with a business’ existing CRM or Dynamics 365 Customer Service. The big news at Enterprise Connect was the integration of Teams Phone and Dynamics 365 Contact Center integration, enabling customers to use Teams Phone as their contact center telephony system. By offering a single telephony solution, Microsoft reduces operational complexity, improves billing processes, and provides broad geographic coverage, leveraging the global availability of Teams Phone numbers. As Ilya Bukshteyn, Corporate VP, Microsoft Teams Calling, Devices, and Premium Experiences, explained during his keynote presentation, this integration lets organization levering their Teams Phone PSTN investment to work with their contact center solution of choice, starting with Dynamics 365 Contact Center. Businesses can take advantage of Teams Phone enterprise features, including the Teams management interface. Teams Phone Extensibility will support certified ISV contact center solutions, including Anywhere365, AudioCodes, ComputerTalk, Enghouse, IP Dynamics, Landis, and Luware. As someone who’s been advocating the integration of UCaaS and CCaaS for many, many years, I was extremely happy to hear this news. I’ve long touted the benefits of having a single, consolidated phone system to eliminate the need for separate UCaaS & CCaaS solutions. With Teams Phone integration, organizations using Dynamics 365 Contact Center will have access to various capabilities, while reducing cost and complexity, and simplifying deployment and management. Microsoft also added features in its Teams Queues App, aimed at groups and departments that don’t have or need full contact center capabilities. New features include monitor, whisper, barge, and takeover capabilities for supervisors. Mitel Mitel’s big news at Enterprise Connect was the general availability of its omnichannel CX and contact center suite, Mitel CX, which includes genAI-powered virtual agents, agent assistance with real-time prompts, suggested responses, and intelligence-based coaching, and real-time analytics. It also provides customizable workflow automation, including Mitel’s Chatbot Builder and low-code/no-code Workflow Studio. Mitel CX’s UC integration lets businesses analyze omnichannel customer interactions, workforce performance, and operational trends. In this video, Mitel CMO Eric Hanson and Luiz Domingos, CTO, Group VP Large Enterprise and Vertical Solutions R&D discuss the Mitel CX and how it fits in with Mitel’s hybrid strategy. They also provide information on Mitel’s partnership with Zoom, offering a unique hybrid cloud solution that integrates Zoom Workplace and Zoom AI Companion with Mitel’s communications and telephony platforms. MITEL 6526 NICE NICE introduced CXone Mpower Orchestrator, the winner of the Best of Enterprise Connect award and Best Innovation in Customer Experience award. Built natively on CXone Mpower, Orchestrator automates customer service workflows with agentic AI across the entire customer service organization, including both the front and back offices. It unifies all touchpoints, including virtual agents, live agents, and back-office workflows, on a single AI platform while integrating AI-driven insights, third-party applications, and enterprise-wide workflows into a unified, automated, and optimized framework. In this video, Andy Traba, VP of Product Marketing, discusses how CXone Mpower Orchestrator integrates data, AI models, and knowledge to optimize and automate workflows across teams and applications. He also discusses how NICE defines agentic AI, which involves workflows across the entire business, as well as openness and flexibility to interact with third-party applications. Lastly, Traba discusses how NICE’s vision for automating customer service goes beyond the contact center to ensure the right resources are in place across the entire workflow. I also spoke with NICE’s Jennifer Wilson, Director of Product Marketing, about NICE’s copilots that assist agents, supervisors, business leaders, and system administrators. Wilson notes that AI augmentation is not just for agents, but also other personas and employees within the customer experience space. For supervisors, copilots can identify coaching opportunities and create and deliver personalized agent coaching models. For business leaders, copilots can provide more insights into KPIs, uncover how different touchpoints are intertwined, identify bottlenecks in processes, etc., and provide full visibility to the customer experience workflow ecosystem. Salesforce As shown below, Salesforce announced a slew of Agentforce innovations to assist customers, customer service representatives, and contact center supervisors. The company announced Agentforce 2dx, providing agentic reasoning for workflows with the ability to take action on its own. Agentforce 2dx   offers new low-code and pro-code tools for admins and developers to configure, test, and deploy Agentforce faster. The new version lets  organizations integrate autonomous agents into their existing data systems, business logic, and user interfaces, helping agents be more proactive. I met with Ryan Nichols, Chief Customer Officer for Salesforce Service Cloud, who explained Salesforce’s views on agentic AI. Nichols sees a progression in AI agents and discusses how customers can get started: First, start with an AI agent that can answer a question based on information that’s grounded in a company’s data (e.g. What’s your refund policy?) Next, personalize the answers based on data that’s specific to the customer (e.g. Where’s my order?) Take action on behalf of the customer using the same workflows for contact center agents. (e.g. Cancel my order) Upcoming Agentforce innovations include the next generation of customer support assistants that help agents respond to complex and tricky questions and guide the rep on generating a plan to subsequently resolve this in self-service. In this video, Nichols describes Salesforce’s platform approach, the company’s view of AI agents, and Salesforce’s new integration with Amazon Connect. He gives a glimpse into Salesforce’s next generation of customer support assistance. Talkdesk Talkdesk’s key announcements at Enterprise Connect included: Talkdesk Knowledge Creator, which uses generative AI to create and maintain knowledge for customer service. It automates knowledge gap discovery and transforms conversations, transcripts, and agent responses into AI-generated knowledge. Talkdesk AI Agents for voice, powered by agentic AI, that analyze, decide, and act in real-time, providing a more natural customer self-service experience. It can match the customer’s language and even switch languages mid-stream in an interaction. Talkdesk After Hours, which extends a business’ contact center availability, creating a 24-hour operation. Supporting 59 languages, it uses AI to address customer inquiries with natural, conversational responses. It can then capture key customer details and schedule a callback when necessary. In this video, Crystal Miceli, Talkdesk’s VP of Product and Industry Marketing, and Kevin McNulty Senior Director of Product Marketing discuss these new offerings, as well as Talkdesk’s AI agents for various vertical industries. Verint Verint has long touted its various bots that perform a range of functions and continues to evolve its bot story and deliver outcomes at scale. During a meeting at Enterprise Connect, Verint discussed micro-workflows, where bots and AI are injected into workflows to drive outcomes. Rather than focusing on the bots themselves, the focus is on solving one specific problem and then moving on to solve another specific problem. This makes it easier for customers to see the business outcomes and understand the value that Verint and the bots provide. One thing that stands out is Verint’s hybrid approach, which enables the bots to be plugged in to on-prem systems if needed. This lets on-prem businesses still get value and benefit from AI without having to move to the cloud. In this video, Dave Singer describes how Verint bots automate micro-workflows, which are steps in larger workflows, such as call handling. As Singer notes, “generative creates things, agentic does things.” He explains how Verint daVinci AI looks at what’s needed and then chooses and optimizes the right model to power the bots for the specific workflow and situation.   Zoom   Zoom added new agentic skills to its AI Companion, which is embedded across the entire Zoom platform. On the CX side of things (which Zoom refers to as part of its Business Services), announcements included: Zoom Virtual Agent New capabilities for Zoom Contact Center, including AI Intent Routing, AI Expert Assist for Video, Team Chat as a Channel, Unified Reporting, Zoom CX for Microsoft Teams, Zoom CX for Chrome OS Quality Management and Workforce Engagement Management In this video, Michelle Couture, Global Lead, CX Product Marketing, discusses the addition of AI Companion with Agentic skills to Zoom Contact Center, including Zoom Virtual Agent with AI capabilities through voice and chat channels. In the second video, Couture discusses Zoom’s contact center momentum, and new video capabilities for Zoom’s AI Expert Assist.   I also spoke with Ted Yoshikawa, Head of Product, Zoom CX, about how Zoom defines agentic AI and how Zoom is adding agentic AI throughout its portfolio. He also discusses how customers are using Zoom’s AI today. Conclusion It’s impressive to see how quickly the industry moved towards adding agentic AI capabilities to their portfolios and roadmaps. Of course, some (most?) of the demos we saw were just that – demos – and it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s slideware at this point. But there’s no denying that vendors are working feverishly to develop AI agents and fully integrate them into their CCaaS/CX offerings in various ways. CX/CCaaS vendors will need to clearly articulate their agentic AI stories (and define how they view agentic AI) while being forthcoming about what’s currently available and what’s in development or on the roadmap. Seeing demos is great, but the proof is in actual customers and use cases and delivering these capabilities at scale. I expect to see more real-world deployments and implementations in the coming months, providing insights into how customers are using AI agents and the value they provide. As always, I’ll be looking for best practices to help customers get started and successfully deploy these solutions, as well as insights about user adoption. And I expect to see some high-profile failures along the way as customers rush out to deploy AI agents that aren’t quite ready for prime time. Looking back at Enterprise Connect, it's truly the end of an era as the conference moves from the Gaylord Palms - with its alligators, turtles, and beautiful foliage - to Caesars Forum in Las Vegas in 2026. As always, special thanks to Eric Krapf and the Informa team for all their hard work in bringing together the unified communications & collaboration and CX communities year after year. I guess all we can say is, see you later, alligator. The alligators at Gaylord Palms

You are investing money in your UCaaS (unified communications as a service) platforms like Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, and Zoom Workplace. You think this investment is boosting productivity, improving customer service, making employees more engaged and driving innovation. You invest for return, focus on ROI (return on investment), and yet while organizations track their investment they often “guesstimate” the return, or even worse, simply “hope” for a return. Hoping is not a strategy to drive adoption. “Thinking” you are getting return is not proof. You need data, “hard numbers”, to understand what is working and what is not. This is where analytics comes in. The Imperative of Data-Driven Decision-Making The deployment of UCaaS solutions generates a substantial volume of data pertaining to call patterns, meeting dynamics, messaging activity, and employee/customer interactions. This data, when properly analyzed, provides invaluable insights into the operational efficiency and strategic impact of these platforms. Analytics tools turn data into actionable insights, helping you measure, and optimize your return on unified communication investments. Key Metrics for ROI Assessment To effectively quantify the ROI of UCaaS deployments, organizations should focus on the following key performance indicators (KPIs): Usage and Adoption: Who is using which tools and what features in your communication and collaboration tools (adoption)? How much of specific service are being used (usage)? ➡️ Adoption is typically more important than usage in terms of delivering return on investment. Where adoption is low, consider if more training is required, different tools need to be deployed or existing tools reconfigured. Consider surveying users to gather qualitative data. Quality and Reliability: Are calls being reliably connected and maintained from and to all locations? Is call quality in offices or for remote users adequate? Are meeting join times on laptops and video conferencing devices fast? Is meeting video, screen sharing, or audio quality being impacted for some users, locations, or devices? ➡️ Poor call quality or reliability can impact adoption or user satisfaction. Alternatively, users may choose to use other, sometimes more expensive options, for example using their mobile devices to make calls. ➡️ Laptop processor, memory, or other running applications often impact UCaaS communication quality as much as the network. Meeting Productivity/Efficiency: Evaluation of meeting attendance, frequency, duration, participant engagement, screen-sharing activity, and chat interaction within Teams, Webex, and Zoom Meetings. Identification of unproductive meeting practices and implementation of strategies to enhance meeting efficiency. Assessment of feature adoption to ensure optimal utilization of platform capabilities. ➡️ Gathering and interpreting actionable insights related to meetings is often more difficult. Many analytics tools ignore this area. Messaging and Collaborative Workflows: Monitoring of message volume, channel activity, file-sharing patterns, and integration with third-party applications within Teams, Webex, and Zoom chat functionalities. Identification of collaborative bottlenecks and implementation of strategies to streamline workflows. Analysis of feature utilization to ensure employees are using the tools correctly. ➡️ Effective use of the various collaboration channels (chat, email, calling, SMS) often involves establishing and communicating organizational best practices. Employee/Customer Experience Metrics: Evaluation of user satisfaction scores. Where UCaaS solutions are used for internal “contact center” processes, for example an IT, HR, or travel coordination service desk, “call center light” metrics such as call volumes, average hold time, handle time, abandonment rate, etc. is valuable. Identification of areas for improvement in customer service delivery. ➡️ Not all UCaaS platforms directly capture user satisfaction scores. You may need to survey your end users. ➡️ Follow-up conversations with users who repeated score low for user satisfaction is often insightful. In my experience, low scores may be related to technical issues, training issues, or simply a reaction to change. The Distinct Advantages of Cloud-Based Analytics Cloud-based platforms provide several distinct advantages in the realm of analytics: Centralized Data Repository: Cloud-based architectures facilitate the consolidation of communication data, enabling streamlined data collection and analysis. Real-Time Data Visualization : Cloud analytics platforms offer real-time dashboards and reporting capabilities, enabling prompt responses to dynamic operational conditions. Scalability and Adaptability: Cloud-based analytics solutions can readily scale to accommodate evolving data volumes and organizational requirements. Translating Data into Tangible Business Outcomes The utilization of analytics in UCaaS deployments yields tangible business outcomes, including: Reduction of Operational Expenditures: Identification and elimination of superfluous communication expenses. Optimization of resource allocation and network efficiency. Enhancement of Productivity : Usage, adoption and meeting metrics can help streamline workflows, improve team collaboration, and mitigate meeting fatigue. Improvement in Employee Satisfaction : Matching the right tools to the right people and providing adequate initial and on-going training can drive broad-based adoption, improve employee satisfaction, and improve ROI. Promotion of Innovation: Properly deployed and used, UCaaS can foster collaborative environments, facilitate and speed knowledge sharing, and accelerate product development cycles and issue resolution. Enhancement of Strategic Decision-Making: Data-driven insights inform strategic decisions regarding technology investments and business strategies. Conclusion The implementation of comprehensive analytics is indispensable for quantifying the ROI of UCaaS deployments. Organizations that fail to adopt a data-driven approach risk operating in a state of uncertainty, unable to ascertain the true value of their technology investments. By embracing the power of calling, meeting, and collaboration analytics, enterprises can optimize their UCaaS deployments, enhance operational efficiency, and drive sustainable business growth. About CallTower CallTower provides industry-leading Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS), and collaboration solutions along with analytics services that support these solutions. CallTower does this using 15 geo-redundant data centers strategically located around the globe, providing connectivity in 80+ countries . CallTower provided me with this opportunity to highlight the importance of using analytics to optimize the return on investment associated with UCaaS solutions and some of the best practices in doing so.

(Podcast length: 31:33) BCStrategies Experts Kevin Kieller, David Danto, Thomas Brannen, Jon Arnold, Melissa Swartz, Robert Harris, and Steve Leaden cover their key takeaways from Enterprise Connect 2025 -- the most surprising, interesting, or thematic items from the great conference put on by Eric Krapf and his team.

(Podcast length: 20:14) BCStrategies Experts Blair Pleasant, David Maldow, and Martha Buyer discuss their key takeaways and observations from Enterprise Connect 2025 (moderated by Kevin Kieller). They then share expectations and hopes related to hashtag EC26 as it moves to Las Vegas for next year.