Industries change with the times, and so it is with the conferences and events that support those industries. Enterprise Connect is not what it once was, either in terms of attendance or influence, but it is still the place where many (not most) of the key providers in contact centers and customer experience (CX) convene. It’s been described as a place where providers meet with and seek out partners, more than it is a place to appeal to buyers. I think that’s an apt description, based on floor traffic, number of booths and a general sense of ennui pervading the proceedings.
Even so, the event in Las Vegas in March was an important marker for software providers that use it as an effective platform to make announcements and discuss roadmap and trends. Artificial intelligence (AI) was the main topic of both conversation and provider development, so a good deal of what was new fell into the category of “agentic” applications and their infrastructure support structures: tools for analyzing customer data and turning those insights into actionable, automated orchestration processes. There was some remarkable and groundbreaking product on view, along with some surprisingly innovative approaches to CX problems. More on that in a moment.
But first, let’s acknowledge that buyers are confused. They are confronting a wave of overlapping claims around agentic AI, automation, analytics, customer relationship management (CRM), voice and workflow orchestration, often without clear boundaries between them. That’s made it hard for buyers to find clarity on some very fundamental questions about architecture, ROI, operating models and pricing. In that context, the event mattered less as a venue for product launches and more as a place to gut check where the market thinks CX is actually heading. And that destination is clearly towards automation and AI. The question now is not who has AI (literally everyone), but which providers can turn it into measurable operational advantage.
Salesforce, for example, has formally entered the Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) space with two launches: Agentforce Contact Center and Agentforce Voice. I have had countless conversations over the last 10 years with many different Salesforce execs wherein the company was either going to or not going to develop specific call handling tools akin to CCaaS. So why now? The argument they are making tracks with what we know about how the general CX stack is evolving: there is too much fragmentation even among large platforms. This is not the old days when fragmentation meant you had an interaction platform (ACD plus digital) and the complexity was born of having to integrate an analytics or WEM application from a third-party provider. No, today the problem is that CCaaS, CRM, ITSM and even back-office systems are themselves in competition to be the definitional centerpiece of the service environment. And even the idea of the “service environment” is inseparable from larger enterprise CX efforts that incorporate marketing and sales.
So if you want to own the entire panorama of CX platforms, you have to have an integrated CCaaS component as well. There are others making this same play. From where Salesforce
Verint had a different objective at Enterprise Connect, which was to demonstrate the success to date of its merger with Calabrio. The merger completed in November, and by February the company had announced its continuation under the Verint name. At the event, the company was able to report a very fast set of initial integrations, announcing that Calabrio customers now have direct access to Verint bots through the Verint CX Automation Platform, while Verint customers gain access to Calabrio’s workforce and analytics capabilities.
The expanded access doesn’t require customers to migrate or replace existing infrastructure, and Verint pointed specifically to additions such as Genie Bot, TimeFlex Bot, Agent Copilot Bots and IVA for Calabrio customers. Despite two providers coming together from a common legacy origin space (in workforce engagement tools), there appears to be a surprising amount of unique capability in each of the two product portfolios, thus delivering potentially serious functionality benefits to both sets of customers. One might expect that two divergent product lines would require more time to integrate, not less, so seeing the first fruits of the merger manifest so quickly is surprising and welcome.
UJET used Enterprise Connect to unveil its Agentic Experience Orchestration, or AXO, which it describes as a persistent AI layer designed to unify customer data, enterprise systems, virtual agents and human agents across the service journey.
The underlying logic is that as we transition from early generative AI (GenAI) applications that mostly benefit self-service and front-end interactions, newer agentic apps can create similar improvements in the agent experience. AXO combines autonomous virtual agents, in-the-loop escalation to humans, real-time summaries and next-best actions into agentic workflows that cross into the back office.
Zoom announced expansions to its agentic platform, calling out new workflow orchestration capabilities in Zoom CX and other connected platforms. The company released AI Expert Assist 3.0, an agentic AI layer for the contact center that provides contextual guidance and intelligent orchestration for human agents. Customer Workflow Orchestration allows for the design and automation of customer journeys across systems, channels and teams using natural-language workflow creation triggered by contact center events or signals from enterprise systems, such as CRM or ERP. Zoom’s announcements appeared to be aimed at connecting the company’s contact center tools with its own business communications infrastructure along with external information and process sources (CRM, ERP, etc.), using agentic AI or “orchestration” as the glue between applications.
Zoom appears to be arguing that contact center AI should not stop at recommending the next best action; it should execute workflows, update systems and maintain customer history across automated and human touchpoints. A fair assessment on their part, but one that puts them in the mix with a lot of competition.
Dialpad’s Enterprise Connect message was one of the clearest at the event because it focused less on AI theater and more on the mechanics of getting from pilot to production. The company said its latest Agentic AI Platform enhancements were designed to help enterprises identify high-impact use cases, validate ROI before deployment and scale governed AI agents with greater confidence. Dialpad is arguing that the biggest enterprise problem is no longer whether agentic AI is viable, but whether it can be deployed safely, measurably, reasonably quickly and with minimal disruption. Dialpad has invested a great deal in injecting AI directly into contact center processes and projecting itself as an innovator. As the rest of the industry has also landed on similar messaging, Dialpad now needs to differentiate by making AI adoption look less speculative and more like an executable program with controls, measurable outcomes and a clearer path to scale.
Finally, AWS continues its incremental but significant efforts to deepen the capabilities of Amazon Connect. It has already become a fundamental component of the contact center and CX tech stack, with core components on par with any other CCaaS provider. Now the company is using its AI resources to scale analytics and management insights. It previewed an upcoming AI-powered manager assistance tool: a natural-language interface for querying Amazon Connect metrics, including scheduling, self-service, and performance evaluation data. This feature can also diagnose underlying issues such as identifying queues at risk of missing service levels and recommending recovery actions. It’s shifting AI’s role upward from agent assistance to operational management, turning analytics into something supervisors can interrogate directly rather than assemble manually.
These features dovetail with enhancements to Amazon Connect’s AI-powered predictive insights, which now feature support for trigger-based campaigns through message templates and claim better model accuracy. The strategic message is consistent with AWS’ broader posture in CX: AWS is now layering in more proactive personalization and more actionable operational intelligence on top of its existing core platform.
Overall, the products and innovations on offer revealed an industry powered by incredible energy and drive but very unsure of itself and its direction. AI is now pervasive enough that its mere presence is no longer differentiating. Instead, we’re learning more about how this generation of AI tools fit into larger architectures. Buyers are grappling with questions about how broadly new tools connect across voice, data, workflow and workforce operations, and how quickly anything new can be turned into measurable outcomes. Individual software providers may have greater or lesser clarity into those issues, but in general we were shown an industry with more questions than answers for AI-curious enterprises and their CX teams.
Regards,
Keith Dawson