Executive Summary

Collaborative AI Suites

The necessity for collaboration across the enterprise has evolved dramatically, modernizing sophisticated digital interactions across all channels and devices for both internal teams and external stakeholders, including customers, partners and suppliers. Technological innovations have significantly reduced the complexity of enabling these essential interactions, streamlining communication between teams, departments, business processes and distributed workforces. Successful collaborative applications empower enterprises to create seamless experiences enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI), strengthening relationships and driving business outcomes, regardless of location, device or communication channel preference.

The market has shifted toward an experience-first approach, emphasizing seamless workflows over feature sets and prioritizing AI-powered support for all work- and team-related needs.

ISG Research defines collaborative AI suites as a comprehensive portfolio of sophisticated tools that integrate traditional communication methods (voice, video, messaging), documents, email and meetings with AI-infused capabilities for search, tasks, writing, meetings, virtual agents and digital assistants. These suites are designed for enterprises with simple to more complex needs, supporting a wide range of communications—from unstructured to structured interactions—while providing AI-powered experiences and comprehensive analytics. Essential capabilities that support broader work and productivity needs include creating and managing documents, tracking interactions and following up on tasks. The market has shifted toward an experience-first approach, emphasizing seamless workflows over feature sets and prioritizing AI-powered support for all work- and team-related needs.

The evolution of collaborative capabilities can be traced through the development of unified communications software over the past decade. The technology industry has focused on creating sophisticated platforms that support unified communication as a service (UCaaS), alongside deeply integrated collaboration tools and embedded communication among all business systems and stakeholders. This integration combines traditional unified communication experiences across departments, locations and devices while also providing the governance, security and management capabilities necessary for enterprise-scale deployments.

Recent technological advances have introduced immersive communication capabilities that enhance remote collaboration, including spatial audio, virtual reality meeting spaces and digital twin technology. The integration of edge computing has improved performance through distributed processing for video and audio streams, reducing latency and enhancing quality in global deployments. Expanded collaborative AI suites include extensive webinar and training features, eliminating the need for separate specialized systems. This allows enterprises to manage external communications—including sophisticated webinars and comprehensive training programs—on the same platforms used for internal collaboration. Despite these advancements, many enterprises still operate with fragmented communication technologies. Through 2027, two-thirds of enterprises will realize that enterprise-wide collaborative and communications software does not satisfy workforce expectations in use of AI, resulting in decreased productivity and worker engagement.

Enterprises with complex collaborative needs struggle to manage interactions among distributed teams across retail locations, corporate offices and remote work environments. Many operate dozens of disconnected communication tools across departments with minimal integration, leading to unnecessary costs, security vulnerabilities and administrative inefficiencies. This fragmentation hinders the ability to maintain consistent collaborative experiences, ensure proper governance and effectively leverage communication data across the enterprise.

Enterprises require collaborative software that integrates with existing business applications and offers advanced capabilities for specialized use cases. The market has shifted decisively toward a hybrid-first design, focusing on creating applications specifically for hybrid work environments rather than simply retrofitting remote capabilities. Collaborative AI suites must support these sophisticated hybrid work models by providing seamless experiences across all devices and communication channels.

Today’s enterprises need platforms that scale globally while ensuring consistent performance and compliance with complex data sovereignty and cross-border transfer regulations. Also critical are applications that leverage generative artificial intelligence for purposes beyond basic assistance, such as content creation, meeting summaries and contextual recommendations. These systems must strike a balance between functionality and intuitive interfaces to encourage adoption among both technical and non-technical users while also meeting new demands for transparency and accountability in AI-powered communication features.

Successful collaborative AI suite software must offer extensive capabilities beyond basic functions. It should be built on a sophisticated cloud platform that supports all communication modalities through intelligent automation and workflows, with comprehensive analytics that provide insights across audio, text and video interactions. Implementing zero-trust architecture and context-aware security controls is increasingly essential for communications security. Additionally, workers should experience seamless transitions between devices and communication methods, including chat, collaboration and telephony features that function consistently across internal and external networks.

Collaborative systems should fully leverage AI—spanning from generative to agentic AI—built on machine learning to deliver intuitive experiences across text, video and voice.

Collaborative AI suites must provide robust administration capabilities for governance and management, catering to complex organizational structures with detailed policies for access, compliance and content management. Enhanced privacy controls have emerged in response to stricter consent management and personal data protection requirements. Archiving and storage applications should integrate seamlessly with enterprise information management systems while utilizing advanced consumption and usage-based subscription and billing models. Additionally, these platforms must surpass standard accessibility requirements, including Section 508, Web Content Accessibility guidelines (WCAG), and European standards like EN 301 549. Moreover, their integration capabilities should foster deep connections with enterprise applications, including contact centers, CRM systems, marketing platforms, sales tools, websites and customer experience applications.

Importantly, collaborative systems should fully leverage AI—spanning from generative to agentic AI—built on machine learning to deliver intuitive experiences across text, video and voice. This requires deep integration with enterprise knowledge bases, contextual understanding of conversations and intelligent workflows powered by rules and prompts. Successful collaborative suites also include advanced digital experience features such as real-time translation, text-to-speech capabilities and intelligent notification prioritization. Meeting functionalities must support innovations like customizable avatars, participant consent mechanisms, dynamic polling, panel management and large-scale town hall support.

Analytics capabilities must extend beyond basic reporting to deliver conversational insights and interaction intelligence. Collaborative suites should include advanced speech and video analytics to capture usage patterns, sentiment and engagement levels. Monitoring tools need to provide comprehensive visibility into call quality, infrastructure performance and resource utilization. The integration of generative AI and large language models should further enhance communication experiences by enabling intelligent assistance, automated content creation and predictive insights that drive more effective collaboration.

Depending on organizational needs, suites should offer appropriate capabilities for meeting management, webinar hosting, training administration and specialized communication functions such as contact center integration or broadcast messaging. Webinar and training support should include advanced features for event management, participant engagement and content delivery—covering registration systems, interactive presentation tools, comprehensive polling and surveys, detailed analytics and certification management. Collaborative suites should also provide comprehensive marketplace ecosystems with extensive partner networks, offering deep third-party integrations and specialized add-ons that enable enterprises to extend platform capabilities.

Enterprises should approach the selection of collaborative suites as a strategic investment that influences organizational effectiveness, customer experience and competitive advantage.

Enterprises should approach the selection of collaborative suites as a strategic investment that influences organizational effectiveness, customer experience and competitive advantage. This process begins with assessing the current communication landscape, identifying requirements beyond basic functionality and evaluating how advanced capabilities address specific business challenges. When choosing providers, enterprises should prioritize applications that deliver seamless user experiences across complex environments, offer sophisticated integration with business systems and provide robust security and compliance features.

IT and business leaders should work together to establish detailed requirements based on specific use cases and strategic objectives. During the evaluation, enterprises need to assess customization capabilities, integration flexibility, global deployment support and long-term platform evolution. Additionally, buyers should consider each provider's innovation trajectory, particularly regarding artificial intelligence capabilities, immersive collaboration technologies, workflow automation and compliance with emerging AI regulations and cross-border data governance. By selecting the right collaborative AI suite, enterprises can create a robust communication foundation that enhances collaboration, streamlines processes, improves experiences and positions the organization for ongoing innovation and adaptation to evolving business needs.

The Collaborative AI Suites category research is a specialized evaluation focused on the most advanced collaborative and communication technologies for enterprises with complex requirements. This research emphasizes suites that offer extensive capabilities beyond basic collaboration functions. It addresses the unique needs of enterprises seeking seamless collaborative experiences across distributed teams, sophisticated integration with business processes and advanced features for specialized use cases.

This research aids enterprises in identifying software that offers comprehensive functionality for complex collaborative scenarios, including global deployments, regulated industries and those with unique security or compliance requirements. By evaluating providers against detailed criteria, the research helps enterprises find technologies that meet the most challenging collaborative needs while allowing flexibility to adapt to evolving business requirements. It recognizes that while many enterprises' collaborative AI needs are still evolving, those with complex requirements often need more foundational platform support, sophisticated functionality, robust integration and comprehensive management capabilities.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Collaborative AI Suites evaluates software providers and products in key areas of collaboration support with chat, meeting, phone, productivity suite with AI, analytics and insights, chat support, communication administration and integration, intelligence workflow and a marketplace for third-party applications. 

This research evaluates the following software providers offering products that address key elements of advanced communication suites as we define them: 8x8, Avaya, Cisco, Dialpad, Google, GoTo, HCLSoftware, Microsoft, RingCentral, Salesforce, Zoho and Zoom.

Buyers Guide Overview

For over two decades, ISG Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise.

ISG Research has designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business requirements in any enterprise.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Collaborative AI Suites is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for collaborative AI software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment.

In this Buyers Guide, ISG Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the ISG Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for collaborative AI to an enterprise’s requirements.

The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of collaborative AI technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise.

ISG Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of collaborative AI software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating collaborative AI systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology.

Key Takeaways

Software Provider Summary

Collaboration AI Suites have evolved to meet the growing need for seamless, intelligent and secure communication across distributed teams and workforces. Enterprises now demand AI-powered suites that unify messaging, meetings, documents and workflows with deep business integration, hybrid work support and strong governance. These platforms must go beyond basic tools, leveraging generative and agentic AI for content creation, meeting support and workflow automation—while ensuring compliance, accessibility and security. Selecting the right collaborative AI suite is now a strategic priority, aligning with business goals and user expectations to enhance productivity and drive competitive advantage.

Product Experience Insights

The evaluation of collaborative AI suites reveals that while all providers offer rich features, not every capability is equally valuable to every enterprise. Overly complex feature sets can create usability challenges, whereas a focused set aligned with business priorities is more effective. The Product Experience, which contributes 80% of the overall rating, emphasizes five key areas: Capability, Usability, Adaptability, Manageability and Reliability. Overall Product Experience Leaders like Microsoft, Google and Zoom performed highest overall, while providers like Salesforce and RingCentral also performed strongly in specific categories such as Adaptability and Capability. These high performers were rated Exemplary and demonstrated robust integration, reliability and configuration flexibility critical for supporting today’s hybrid work environments.

Customer Experience Value

Customer Experience accounts for 20% of the overall evaluation and reflects the software provider’s commitment to customer success across TCO/ROI and Validation. Salesforce, Zoom and RingCentral were Overall Leaders in this category, excelling in demonstrating business value, ongoing support and lifecycle engagement. Providers like Microsoft, Google, Dialpad and Zoho also met enterprise expectations, offering transparency and tools for ROI evaluation and customer onboarding. Providers that struggled often lacked clarity in customer success strategy or tools to help enterprises build a strong business case, limiting the appeal to organizations seeking long-term partnership value.

Strategic Recommendations

Enterprises should treat collaborative AI suite selection as a strategic initiative, balancing features with usability, integration and customer experience. Salesforce, Microsoft and Zoom earned high placement in both Product and Customer Experience categories and were rated Overall Leaders, signaling suitability for organizations with complex needs. However, no single provider fits all use cases; organizations must assess alignment with specific goals, technical environments and user roles. The evaluation highlights that a provider’s innovation in AI, clarity in value delivery and support through the software lifecycle are critical differentiators in achieving business productivity and collaboration outcomes. 

How To Use This Buyers Guide

Evaluating Software Providers: The Process

We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes.

1. Define the business case and goals.
   Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. 
2. Specify the business needs.
Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology.
3. Assess the required roles and responsibilities.
Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. 
4. Outline the project’s critical path.
What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. 
5. Ascertain the technology approach.
Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. 
6. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria.
Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. 
7. Evaluate and select the technology properly.
Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products.
8. Establish the business initiative team to start the project.
Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. 
   
   

The Findings

All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software.

Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs.

Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories

The research finds Microsoft atop the list, followed by Google and Zoom. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Salesforce has done so in six categories; Microsoft in five; Zoom and Google in three; RingCentral in two; and Cisco, Dialpad and Zoho in one category.

The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.

The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance.

Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Dialpad, Google, Microsoft, RingCentral, Salesforce, Zoho and Zoom.

Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: 8x8, Avaya and Cisco.

Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience.

Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not surpass the thresholds for the Assurance, Exemplary or Innovative categories in Customer or Product Experience. The providers rated Merit are: GoTo and HCLSoftware.

We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every enterprise or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how enterprises handle collaborative AI, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular enterprise’s needs.

We advise enterprises to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products.

Product Experience

The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an enterprise’s life cycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an enterprise’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust.

The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Usability (20%), Capability (30%), Reliability (10%), Adaptability (10%) and Manageability (10%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. Microsoft, Google and Zoom were designated Product Experience Leaders. While not Leaders, RingCentral and Zoho were also found to meet a broad range of product experience requirements.

Customer Experience

The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire life cycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey.

The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation (10%) and TCO/ROI (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research.

The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are Salesforce, Zoom and RingCentral. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs. While not Leaders, Zoho, Google, Microsoft and Dialpad were found to meet a broad range of enterprise customer experience requirements.

Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide sufficient information on their customer experience and the leadership supporting it and why it is a world class approach and valuable for customers. The selection of a software provider means a continuous investment by the enterprise, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.

Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion

For inclusion in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for Collaborative AI Suites in 2025, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $225 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents and have at least 100 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the past 12 months.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Collaborative AI Suites requires software providers and products to have minimal collaboration support; support for meetings and phone; a productivity suite with AI; analytics and insights; chat support; communication administration and integration; intelligence workflow; and a marketplace for third-party applications.

The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.

All software providers that offer relevant collaborative AI products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.

Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.

Products Evaluated

Providers of Promise

We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”