Any merger creates a certain amount of uncertainty about how it will impact customers: Questions about the roadmap or duplicate product lines invariably arise. In the case of Verint and Calabrio (now collectively named Verint), June’s Verint Engage customer event was an opportunity to finally discuss the changes and demonstrate how it plans to move forward.
And expectations are high: The industry is looking for indications that the company has a firm grasp on its future strategy, a consistent finger on the pulse of its users and buyers, and understands how the market is changing. What I look for in these situations (in addition to those factors) is whether a company can tell a coherent story about adaptation and change without alienating any of its core constituencies.
From the start, the main keynote, anchored by Dave Rhodes, made it clear that Verint understood the mission. The singular message that I heard there and throughout the event was that the Verint/Calabrio combination does not put any customer’s stack or planning at risk. The company has initiated a plan to unify the product sets without forcing customers to make choices or accept a shift they aren’t inclined to make. Rhodes and his colleagues on the main stage were at pains to emphasize that they have used the last few months to synchronize the two teams and find a customer-friendly pathway towards unifying the sometimes-overlapping portfolio.
Defining and rolling out the combination appears to have been successful thus far. The team emphasized messages that will be important to buyers: no sunsetting of products in use, for example, and no forced migration from one platform to another. The leadership team now consists of key members of both legacy companies, and to all appearances, they are unified on product and market direction. Discussions of the roadmap indicated that tools from both legacy companies will feature in the overall platform, with some being reoriented in logical ways to leverage strengths and to cover areas that are actually genuinely new to both groups. They were careful to point out that whatever AI innovation ships from this point forward will be available to all customers, regardless of which system is used.
That appearance of collective harmony allows the company to build out a needed, coherent
Verint’s early strategy for contact center AI was to roll out a series of GenAI bots for narrowly defined CX use cases. Those use cases were chosen because they were easy opportunities for automation and demonstrated a clear ROI. Verint was one of the only firms to align dollar savings with AI applications in the first couple of years of contemporary AI. Looking back, you can see the outlines of agentic AI in those bots, which were capable of automating key processes in areas such as quality assurance, workforce engagement and knowledge retrieval. There were some areas where multiple bots could be connected to extend processes into broader workflows, but for the most part, each bot was a self-contained engine. The bots were a true step forward at the time (as well as a somewhat unique way of bringing them to market), but, over time, as the field improved and evolved, Verint lost whatever market differentiation had accrued as others developed similar tools.
At Engage, Verint launched a tool called Agent Factory, which is a canvas for users to design more complex workflows and processes using those bots. And in this case, I think Verint created a form of agentic tooling that’s more steeped in contact center operations than AI development. Several things are notable about Agent Factory. First, it’s not a development environment or programming tool. It’s a place for users to assemble the components necessary to accomplish a particular task, and then use the interface to connect and test the combined output. To my eye, it more resembles how a contact center user would connect ACD routing parameters, or IVR call flow, than how you’d build a piece of software.
Agent Factory gives users control over a wide range of functions, many of which are deeply complex, such as model selection and governance controls. Users can build agentic AI agents and use them alongside Verint AI agents. And human workers can be embedded into these workflows. Instead of managing a series of fragmented tools and one-off agents, Agent Factory is a (relatively) straightforward way to connect AI agents to the workflows and human teams that make them effective.
Agent Factory and the idea of “orchestration” demonstrate how the broad conversation around AI usage is evolving to better reflect the need for specific outcomes. Verint tools like Workforce Intelligence and Desktop Intelligence also highlight ways users can link conversational analytics to how agents (human and automated) actually work across systems. It hearkens back to an earlier Verint strategy to position its tools as “Open CCaaS,” only now we’re putting aside the whole ACD/CCaaS issue and looking at how intelligence, analytics and an outcome-focused orchestration layer are what centers need to layer atop core operational tools.
Verint’s presentations were interesting in another important respect. Providers in this space tend to talk about AI and the seismic changes underway as if every center were at the cutting edge of an advancing technological army, and every company should be talking about vast transformational changes. Verint, to its credit, boiled the message down to a simpler set of themes reflecting a cooler-headed reality: keep what works, bind existing processes together, disruption isn’t necessary, focus on outcomes. Enterprises should continue to consider Verint in RFIs for WEM, analytics and workflow automation and orchestration. Verint is meeting people where they are, rather than where they’d like them to be.
Regards,
Keith Dawson