[00:00:22] Speaker A: Hello listeners and thanks for tuning in to this edition of our Metro Psych podcast. I'm Beth Schultz, Vice president of Research and Principal Analyst at Metro G. And here with me today is Robin Garris who's our CEO and principal CX analyst, Erwin Lazar, President and principal Workplace Collaboration Analyst, and Diane Myers who is our senior Research Director and Principal analyst for our MetroCast market forecasting service.
Our topic for today IS Enterprise Connect 2025 which took place last week in Orlando.
So, hello everybody.
As, as it has been for the last couple of years, AI has really been the main theme of ec.
So let's start. Well, let's start with a discussion around announcements. So Robin, from an announcement standpoint, did any AI products or capabilities for CX stand out to you as being really particularly innovative or potentially game changing or was it sort of just more of the same?
[00:01:24] Speaker B: You know, it was, honestly it was a little bit of both. There were a lot of announcements, you know, a lot of AI related announcements for sure. And you know, some of them were more like me too announcements like, yeah, we've got now, you know, we've kind of caught up. But there were some that definitely stood out. Obviously one would be the best of show, right? You always look at those, at those product announcements. I think this year Irwin Lazar was one of the judges and I've done it in the past as well and it's a pretty rigorous process and there's a lot of competition. So you know, whoever wins the best to show, you know, it's a pretty good product. So the, the one that won this year was nice CX1 empower orchestrator. And I really like this product. I mean the value of it is that it's, it's going to reduce complexity for companies because you know, when you, when you build any sort of CX platform or CX technology stack, you've got all these silos and the goal of this is to eliminate those silos that you know are going to typically exist. So it integrates with, with AI insights, with third party apps, with enterprise workflows, putting it all into, you know, sort of one framework. And what I really like about it is that it provides visibility into metrics. You know, we love metrics here that help operational leaders identify patterns, you know, ways that they can continually optimize what they're doing in the world of CX. So I really like that one. I also liked 5:9 Spotlight for AI insights. Now this covers a very hot area right now, conversation analytics. And there were other announcements in the space too. I love this area, again, because we love metrics, but it provides operational data beyond what you typically see in the contact center.
I mean, it does provide that, but it also delivers useful data for people in sales, marketing, product organizations. So that's pretty cool. And what I also think is really neat about it is that it tracks some unconventional insights. So things like, oh, how are we doing with Upsell? Or what's our customer retention in churn? Or what are the trends in discounting right now? So things that you really might use in sales and marketing. And I really like that. I think that's a big area. All of our research points to that being a pretty big area right now in CX is it's not just customer service, it's also sales.
I don't think you can ignore aws, which is basically re architecting its place platform. It's bringing together a lot of AI native capabilities over the AWS platform so you can kind of get this full picture of what's happening end to end. It's not like a piecemeal approach that you. You tend to find companies doing a lot because they're pulling different products together from different companies. So I also like the fact that the pricing is tied to underlying channel usage versus consumption. So you're kind of encouraged to just keep using it. Right? Uh, so that's, that's another one. I guess the other big one I would say would be Google announcing its, you know, kind of CCI platform as opposed to just having CCAI that it's reselling to other, other CX providers. So it's bringing together a lot of these features under the Google umbrella. They're also increasing their sales team and their, you know, their partner program just really jumping full force into the CX market, which I think they should be doing. They're still working with ujet on the voice side as sort of their main partner for like the voice plumbing side of things. But they're adding their own AI features to the platform, which is logical and makes sense for Google. I mean, there were plenty of other announcements, but those are ones I would say are kind of highlights for me.
[00:04:56] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. Four great examples. Okay, Erwin, let's switch over to you on the workplace collaboration side. So same question. You know, AI differentiators, AI products using AI that are kind of caught your attention.
[00:05:09] Speaker C: Yeah, there were a lot. Again, as we mentioned, it's AI, AI and AI. So I think a couple of the ones jumped out at me. Some that were made just before Enterprise Connect, some at Enterprise Connect I think the AI receptionist from RingCentral is one that we're watching pretty carefully as a way of providing an AI enabled virtual agent as a replacement for sort of the standard default IVR that most organizations use when they're setting up their phone system. So having an IVR that has intelligence to be able to access back end knowledge bases, to be able to answer customer questions, to be able to provide again a higher level of service and reduce eliminate some of that customer frustration. I think on the AI front as well, Zoom's AI companion expanded capabilities, including a workflow or a studio to allow people to build AI solutions on that. Again we've seen Zoom take really an aggressive approach with AI in the marketplace and that they were the first ones to essentially give it away, make it a free add on across their portfolio. And now they've gone from having just AI capabilities within applications to having an AI virtual assistant that can see that it provides a common place where you can go and query information. And we've seen in our the research I published late last year for employee engagement specific AI, the biggest need of user population was to have a place where I can go and ask questions of all the different data that I've got stored across my different collaboration channels. I think Cisco again in a similar vein, adding capabilities within their AI agent, the WebEx agent, to enable workflow automation to enable to make it easier to create virtual agents and provide those with access to the data that they need to be able to function. On the Microsoft front there was an absolute slew of announcements. It would take me the next 40 minutes to go through them all. But bringing more AI capabilities within teams, including the Microsoft Agent. I think one of the big ones that came out of the Microsoft space bleeds into cx, which was the team's phone capabilities to enable Contact center partners. And there are about six Contact center partners that were part of this launch to be able to take advantage of Azure capabilities and have teams calling be the voice component within the Contact center solution driven out of Azure. So Teams Phone Extensibility for Microsoft or Teams Phone Extensibility is the umbrella. They launched it for their own Contact Center. They also launched it in conjunction with support from audio codes anywhere365, computer talk in house, IP dynamics, Landis and Luware. For those of you who are familiar with the teams Contact center integration story, this is essentially the power model that they've been talking about for years that they hadn't delivered up to that point. So I think those are some of the ones that jumped out saw some other ones out there from Jabra. A new panacast room system I thought was really interesting. That ability to take the people that are say around a table and pull them so it looks like you're looking directly at them from the far end. And then we also talked to HP around what they're doing to bring their recent Viopta acquisition into the workforce experience platform. I think that's another area of interest.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: So AI, AI, AI as you said. But not everything is AI. So what product news caught your attention that wasn't AI focused?
[00:08:46] Speaker C: Yeah, I think the Jabra and the Vyopta HP announcements were probably the ones that jumped out, but beyond that. Yeah, I think it was almost all AI as far as the announcements that were being made at the event, at least the ones that I was tracking.
[00:09:03] Speaker A: What about you, Robin?
[00:09:06] Speaker B: Yeah, pretty much everything in the CCX world is AI focused, but there were certainly some announcements that were important and especially to the customers of these companies. There were some integration announcement like my talent ServiceNow or AWS was Salesforce. There were some others like that. So I think whatever your, whoever your provider is, it's always important to look at where those integrations that can help you with, you know, other companies you also might be working with.
A couple interesting conversations as well, like Avoxy. I spoke with Barbara Dondiego and Mike Kaplan about some of the interesting developments that they're doing. Wasn't really formal announcements, but some of the things they're doing to combat, to combat fraud from their network. So things like identifying and mitigating voice DDoS attacks or using intelligent caller ID to improve compliance for outbound caller ID. So that, that's always an issue. And then even building some machine learning models at the phone number level to detect abnormal traffic patterns. So they're doing some really innovative things there on the network side and I think that that's really worth looking at as well. Especially for companies that have global, you know, global communications, you know, zoom, like Irwin said. I mean they did a lot with AI, but Michelle Couture gave us some really good details on a lot of different applications that they're adding in the contact center space for workforce management. So again, kind of AI related but you know, things like inferred sentiment and query transcripts, some compliance checks. But they're also, what I really like is adding assistance within the video channel. I think that's pretty huge given the number of consumers in our consumer research who really want businesses to be offering more video communications capabilities. They're also doing Things with like auto dialers and interoperability, you know, with Microsoft and you know, some other AI capabilities like virtual agents and agent builders. But I do think that they, you know, peppered that with some non announcements as well.
[00:10:59] Speaker A: It's interesting you mentioned fraud relative to Voxi fraud prevention from the network and that was certainly a theme of of several conversations I had. But from the network API standpoint really kind of coming out of Mobile World Congress still kind of a hot topic led by Vonage and then CPAAS providers talk to Cinch, Twilio, Infobip, Cisco, all working towards that sort of network API ideal.
Erwin, what about you and Diane, what did you hear of interest during conversations that you guys had?
[00:11:37] Speaker C: Yeah, I can jump in. I talked to a lot of the conversations we had were based on some of the announcements that were made, but ones that I had mentioned. I think the fraud issue is certainly a big one.
Surprisingly number reputation management and branded calling came up in I think four different conversations which wasn't something that really even came up at all previous to what I heard last year at the sipnock event here in Virginia. So companies like numerical and bandwidth that are trying to help companies identify calls that are marked as spam and address those and then help to improve the trust of of outbound calling so that you have a higher chance of being of that call being picked up. For me, one of the big areas of focus every year at Enterprise connect is around 911. This year we did a previous years our panels were really focused on understanding compliance and what companies need to do to adopt. This year it was focused on next generation 911 and what the capabilities that that brings to the table in terms of improved data sharing with emergency call center operators. Also had a great meeting with a company called 911 Secure. That interest introduced a product called Sentry GeoCell which is designed to address the challenge that the fact of the matter is when most people need to call 911 they're going to grab their mobile phone. So enterprises are operating under regulations that are largely geared to the world of desktop phones and even soft phones and aren't quite suited for the reality that if I pick up my personal mobile phone and I'm in an office building and I dial 911, those first responders show up to the door and no one will know where that call came from. Where if I picked up my desktop phone there would have been notification to the security desk that a 911 call was made and from where it came from. So 911 Secure, another company called 911 are both trying to solve that through interfacing the mobile phone system with geolocation capabilities to identify when a 911 call has been placed from within a facility and where that call has come from. So I think those are all interesting, I guess. One other area where I had talked about the panacast product, the one other area is talking about how companies are still trying to solve those challenges within a meeting room of what happens when someone comes in, how do they quickly hop on a meeting, how do they share content from their own device? There was an announcement from Cisco being able to support airplay on mtr, met with companies like netspeak that are trying to solve some of the performance and provisioning related issues. So meeting rooms are still a hot area. I talked to Barco as well, also trying to solve that sharing challenge. And I think that that's one area that probably doesn't get enough attention in the discussions as everything's AI dominated now, but certainly still an important area for enterprises.
[00:14:37] Speaker A: Yeah, that dang meeting. That dang meeting room, right.
Diane, what about you?
[00:14:43] Speaker D: Yeah, I'll jump in. I have probably a little bit of a different perspective because a lot of my discussions were, you know, some were on the CC side, you know, the customer experience side or vendors, and some were on the collaboration side. But one thread that seemed to come up quite a bit over the course of three days was a lot of discussions around how do we better support small businesses, whether that be on the collaboration or even, you know, small contact center operations. Right. With maybe 10, 15 agents and the whole discussion around, you know, these guys don't need all the bells and whistles, they don't need all of the AI, they don't need all the features. So how, you know, a lot of just discussion around how do we simplify and focus on, you know, what are the problems, what are their challenges and what are we solution. And I think One and Erwin had touched on this.
You know, the big at the top was there was a lot of announcements, a lot of discussion around what we consider to be kind of like business assistance receptionists, AI and and really focusing it on not the AI, but what's the problem we're trying to solve. You know, RingCentral had demos, you know, I had a demo similar with Verizon with, you know, in conjunction with One talk and there was others. But I found walking away it was, you know, we've got so many tools but the small business opportunity is still quite significant. And how do we just Kind of simplify it for what they need. And that was a thread that really seemed to resonate with me.
[00:16:09] Speaker A: Okay.
Okay. So you guys, based on everything that you saw and heard at Enterprise Connect, have you had any sort of shifts in your expectations of how you thought we'd see some technologies or trends panning out for the rest of the year?
Robin, you want to start?
[00:16:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, of course, we've already been through this. Have we said Agentix yet? I don't. I don't know, but no. Everyone talked about Agentix, and interestingly, in our research, only about 52% of the research participants of 1100 or so even were familiar with the term. So it's relatively new. But as you talk to vendors, I think it's going to move more swiftly than I thought as of, like last summer, ish. When I kind of first started hearing that term emerge, at least from the vendor side, I think that was a key discussion. And what I learned more was from our AI for Business Success research study that we just completed that tells us that, you know, vendors have work to do when it comes to Agentix. Customers need to know what it means, how, why do we use it, when do we use it and show the value to their customers. I think ROI is becoming increasingly important, especially in this space, and it needs to happen fast. From our research, we're actually seeing that vendors need to show an roi, like summer. The tip of the bell curve is about six to 12 months. Our research success group is less than six months of deployment. So I think that's a big thing that we need to think through.
But I'm also, I can mention, I'm also really bullish on the whole customer or, I'm sorry, conversation or interact interaction, analytics side of things. And I had a lot of discussions and there's so many announcements about that as well. Just backing up the whole idea of using LLMs to glean insights from customer calls. And I think that this data needs to be expanded beyond the contact center, for sure.
Couple other areas I guess I'll mention before I turn it over to my colleagues. I do think we're seeing a lot of, you know, vendors talking, a lot of vendors and organizations talking about proactive outreach. I did a panel on that, like, where can we be using this whole proactive, you know, kind of philosophy, not only with customers, but with agents and supervisors and the business themselves, you know, the business itself, like through analytics. So I think the whole idea of being more proactive, but doing it in a way that's not annoying. Is something we're going to be seeing a lot of enterprise organizations addressing this year and also vendors trying to, you know, come out with other products that will help them do that for sure. And I also, one other point I guess I would make is that we're seeing vendors working with companies more in their chosen architecture. It wasn't that long ago that all Enterprise Connect was about was cloud, cloud, cloud, everything. Everything has to move to the cloud. Well, in the contact center space, you know, we still see about 44% of companies still on premises. And Diane, I think you've shared with me figures that the revenue is even higher. I mean, the spending in that space is even higher than the 44%.
[00:19:12] Speaker D: Or the agents. Right? If you think about the agents.
[00:19:15] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. So. So, you know, I was talking to Varint while we were there and they, they talked about a bunch of, like, documented use cases of companies that are really seeing success with what they're doing with their whole bot army and their CX automation capabilities. And, but, but the cool thing about it is that they're doing it with contact center platforms, both in the cloud and on premises. You know, so they kind of have this philosophy that, you know, you can start small, you know, particularly when you're on prem and you're moving to the cloud or you have a hybrid environment, you can use this technology regardless of your architect. Because you're on premises doesn't mean you can't use some of these really cool applications and developments and AI capabilities that are in the cloud.
So, yeah, that's about it for me.
[00:20:00] Speaker A: What about you, Erwin?
[00:20:03] Speaker C: Well, I'm hoping to recover from the getting sick at Enterprise Connect, of course, but I think so. Kind of echoing a little bit about what Robin said, I'd say I did a panel on security compliance governance that was very much focused on AI and we had a really good crowd for a Thursday morning session. So that tells you that this is a big topic. I think companies are still struggling with the speed of AI development, how quickly they can adopt, how they can do it safely, how they can protect themselves against things like hallucinations, ensuring the quality of the data, ensuring data protection, so that if I'm searching, I'm querying an AI bot that that bot only has access to data that I should be able to receive. These came up as, as topics that companies are really struggling with. A lot of challenges around training people to use AI properly, how to write prompts, how to build the workflows and build these agency AI capabilities.
We've definitely seen that companies that address that proactively tend to be more successful. I'd say one area we haven't really touched on as well that came up. I did one of the closing sessions on Thursday that was focused on return to the office and are we at the future of work? That topic has somewhat gotten glossed over. Although employees and enterprises and folks responsible for collaboration are really struggling with how do I adapt to mandates that are requiring people to come back in the office. We found in research we published last year that more than half of companies now require people to be back at least some period of time, and employees are generally rebelling against that.
Management tends to see value in having people under the roof. But we're finding scenarios where, you know, the return to the office wasn't quite set up properly. And so people come in and they don't have a place to work. Or I talked to some folks who said, you know what, I go in the office, I sit at my desk all day, I do my teams or zoom calls, and I sit with a bunch of people from finance who I have nothing in common with, and then I go home. Why am I here? So roughly about half of companies in our research said that they expect to use the rest of this year to reevaluate, to try and figure out do they have the right policy, is it working, is it not working, how do they get that. That data from, from their employees, whether it's through surveys, whether it's through looking at utilization of spaces, trying to find out if you can measure productivity gains and so on. So I think that's going to be a big challenge going out through the rest of this year as companies try and figure out what the right strategy is for them in terms of work location.
[00:22:43] Speaker A: Okay. And, Diane.
[00:22:46] Speaker D: Yeah. So, you know, when I think about buying decisions and, you know, and I'm. I'm looking at forecasting and, you know, how things are going to change over the course of this year. You know, something that really came out of last week in Orlando was that obviously there's still movement to the cloud. Right. You know, people are still migrating to CCAs and UCAs and all of that. But some of the things that have really changed is that companies are leading with contact center first. Right. So they're making that vendor decision first on who's that Contact center. You know, I'm moving to the cloud, I'm moving to, you know, CCAs. Who am I doing there? That's the lead. And then the collaboration will come. If they have not already done that or Maybe they'll make some shifts. Right. So CC leading and then the collaboration coming after. And then what really, really struck me a couple times was that some of the big evaluation criteria for CCAs, you know, and who those vendor decisions are is around AI. And the AI is the leading piece of evaluation. Right. So I'm going out and that has kind of flipped the switch. Right. It's definitely, AI is definitely driving and an important driver for the move to ccas. You know, you don't have to have it, but it's definitely, you know, helps and it's all in that thing. But evaluating the AI piece really in terms of leading on the ccas, which was not necessarily the case even a year ago, even though AI was still big a year ago. But terms of like, what is that leading and, and what are those pieces? So some things to think about as, you know, we look at, you know, how it's going to impact different vendors and, you know, in some of the criteria.
[00:24:23] Speaker A: Great. Okay. Any last thoughts on EC before we wrap up?
[00:24:29] Speaker C: Oh, we're heading to Vegas, so next year, March 10th through 12th at Caesars Forum. So it's going to take some getting used to, I think. You know, we, we've. If my math is correct, this was the 20th year at the Gaylord. I think most of us have been all of those. So, yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be a change. I'm going to. Personally, I'm going to miss the Gaylord, I think.
[00:24:50] Speaker A: Yeah, it's going to be a big change.
Before I sign off, I just want to point out Robin. You heard Robin mention our AI for Business Success study. Next episode will be on that study. Robin's going to share some, some of her highlights from it, so don't miss out on that.
In the meantime, be sure to Visit
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