These past few months have been busy for business communication vendors and analysts, with conferences and industry events taking place practically every week. I attended (in-person or virtually) seven conferences in the past three months, including five in-person (Verint, NICE, Five9, Talkdesk, and Enterprise Connect AI), as well as two I attended virtually (Zoom and Cisco).
While each conference has its own distinct character, several common themes about the future of communications technologies emerged across these seven events.
Theme #1: CX Takes Center Stage
It’s been clear for a while that the contact center market is where the action is. Most UCaaS vendors have added CCaaS capabilities to their offerings, and many are now leading with CCaaS rather than UCaaS. While the EC AI, Zoom, and Cisco conferences weren’t CX events per se, CX was a big area of focus, especially when discussing AI capabilities and innovation. In fact, at the EC AI event, one enterprise attendees I spoke with noted that it was more of a contact center conference than a general AI conference.
Theme #2: CCaaS is Dead, Long Live CX
Most contact center vendors have rebranded their CCaaS solutions and offerings as CX. At many of the analyst summits, the term CCaaS was hardly mentioned. In some cases, it felt as if vendors are simply doing a “cut and paste” of their slides and marketing material, replacing “CCaaS” with “CX.”
The vendors define CX in varying ways, based on what they do and don’t offer. While most CCaaS vendors focus on customer service, which is a subset of CX, they’ve been using the term CX, which is generally a broader term, encompassing all interactions with the brand, including marketing, sales, and service. This led to some spirited discussions with the analysts, especially with the CX purists.
Theme #3: Platforms, Not Products
Most of the vendors now offer “platforms,” whether a workplace, collaboration, or CX platform. Again, each vendor defines “platforms” differently, but it’s essentially the underlying foundation for supporting and deploying applications. Generally, platforms support APIs to integrate with third-party applications, allowing developers to build custom applications and services that extend the platform's capabilities. Platforms allow for extensive integrations with third-party applications and workflows, and are generally more customizable. Most of the vendors whose events I attended do indeed have what I would classify as platforms, with a focus on APIs and integrations, as well as comprehensive analytics and insights.
Theme #4: If it isn’t AI, it Doesn’t Fly
Every vendor is totally focused on developing new and innovative AI capabilities. While developing AI capabilities is obviously important, and any vendor that isn’t focused on AI is missing the boat, this AI obsession is resulting in a lack of innovation in other areas. Discussions about innovations and developments related to cloud migration, continuity between channels, enhancing the user interface and experience, and UCaaS/CCaaS integration, for example, have given way to an almost obsession with AI copilots and autopilots.
However, just because vendors are focused on AI doesn’t mean every actor in this scenario is as committed to AI. While AI is the way of the future, not all customers are ready to jump in yet, and vendors shouldn’t take their focus off of their core offerings. Customers are still concerned about long hold times, being passed from agent to agent (or machine to agent) having to repeat themselves over again, the inability to talk to a human agent, lack of empathy from agents, etc. Business users are still struggling with ease of use, improving the work-from-home experience, meeting and video quality, device integration, and so on. While AI will certainly help with some of these issues, it’s not the cure-all.
Theme #5: What Used to Be Cutting Edge is Now Table Stakes
When ChatGPT arrived on the scene a mere two years ago, most business communication vendors rushed to find ways to leverage these capabilities within their offerings. It became clear that there were several contact center/CX use cases that were ideal starting points – notably, assisting and augmenting agents with various capabilities, such as post-call wrap up and summarization based on a call transcript, and Agent Assist tools to provide real-time guidance for agents. In the UC/collaboration world, meeting transcription and summarization, as well as action item and task assignment and follow up were the low-hanging fruit.
Most vendors have introduced their version of a “copilot” – whether it’s called an assistant, companion, or something else. While these use cases and capabilities were cutting edge a mere 12 months ago, they’re now table stakes, as most vendors have rolled out these capabilities. Now vendors need to find new and innovative use cases for GenAI. Which bring us to the next key theme…
Theme #6: The New Shiny Object - AI Agents
Move over Generative AI – the new cool kid on the block is agentic AI, or AI agents (not to be confused with contact center agents). As I noted in a recent No Jitter article, AI agents leverage AI technology to performs tasks or activities on behalf of others, and can autonomously make decisions, do reasoning, and handle complex situations. agentic AI has “agency,” or the ability to act
At the various events I attended, agentic AI was a hot topic, with vendors’ AI agents available in varying degrees of readiness; most won’t be generally available until sometime in the first half of 2025. I expect to hear a lot about AI agents at Enterprise Connect 2025, as vendors demonstrate how these autonomous agents can schedule meetings, book flights, process loan applications, and provide hyper-personalized customer service, without the tedious programming that was needed in the past.
Theme #7: The Big Challenge for Vendors Is Differentiation
It’s getting harder and harder for vendors to differentiate their offerings and value proposition. As soon as one vendor develops a new capability, others shortly follow, making product differentiation a challenge. Differentiation requires finding creative ways to stand out from the crowd. Some examples we heard about include:
Final Thoughts
While attending all of these events is physically and mentally draining, the benefits received are worth it. Aside from the insightful and informative sessions, I had the opportunity to interact with executives, product leaders, partners, customers, and others, providing opportunities to really understand the vendors’ strategy, value proposition, positioning, and more, while creating and enhancing relationships with some pretty bright and awesome people.
This post is written on behalf of BCStrategies, an industry resource for enterprises, vendors, system integrators, and anyone interested in the growing business communications arena. A supplier of objective information on business communications, BCStrategies is supported by an alliance of leading communication industry advisors, analysts, and consultants who have worked in the various segments of the dynamic business communications market.
