[00:00:21] Speaker A: Hello listeners and thanks for tuning in to this edition of our Metric Hut metrocast podcast. I'm Beth Schultz, I'm the Vice President of Research and a principal analyst at Metro G. And here with me today are Robin Garris who's our CEO and principal CX analyst, Irwin Lazar, who's 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 2026, which took place March 10th through 12th in Las Veg and Robin, Diane and Irwin had the pleasure, maybe pleasure of attending the event and they'll be sharing some takeaways from their time on site. So I wanted to start with the big change, the move from Orlando, where you know, EC has been for decades, literally decades to Vegas. I wasn't able to attend. So I'd love to get your guys thoughts on the conference vibe in this new locale. You know, how much is it the same? How different was it?
What are some positives and maybe some not so positives that you guys experienced? Erwin, you want to take that?
[00:01:31] Speaker B: I would say on the positive it seemed like the event had a good vibe. It was much more compact than it had been the last few years at the Gaylord. It wasn't as spread out so it seemed. You know, having people in a smaller space maybe made it feel a little bit bigger. It definitely was a smaller event. You know, rough guesstimate. There were probably about 500 seats in the keynote room where you know that you surely would have been in the thousands in years past. The sessions that I participated in had maybe 20 to 30 attendees. You know, on the negative side, it's definitely a scaled down smaller event. I did have some good conversations during with Diane. We ran, Diane ran a half day session on the future of collaboration. On Tuesday morning we did some breakout tables. I participated and moderated a session focused on security and around the during the roundtables. You know, the folks there were from very large, well known companies. There just weren't a lot of them. So you know, the Enterprise Connect press release that came out after the event said they had about 2,700 attendees. 68% were first time attendees. I think, you know, having it on the west coast definitely made it easier for or having it in Las Vegas definitely made it easier for west coast attendees to come out. There's probably a different group of people who know enjoy coming to Vegas versus those who went to Orlando who could bring their families, take advantage of the water park And Disney and all of that. So, you know, again, it was definitely different, definitely smaller. I heard mixed feedback from the vendors I spoke with. Some thought, you know, it really was not a lot of customers. Others said that they had a good amount of leads.
So, you know, they're going to keep it in Vegas next year at the last week of March at the mgm and you know, we'll see what happens from a sponsorship standpoint if the 70 or so sponsors that were there this year return.
[00:03:17] Speaker A: Smaller doesn't necessarily necessarily have to be bad or worse. I mean, more opportunity for in depth conversations perhaps for example, but with fewer people.
[00:03:28] Speaker B: Yeah, you hope. Quality over quantity perhaps.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: Right? Right. Yeah. Okay, so let's look, let's look at the product announcements. EC is traditionally a big show for the communications collaboration vendors to sort of get out there with their, their latest and the greatest. So Robin and Erwin, from your respective areas, CX and workplace collaboration, what did you see or hear at Enterprise Connect of product announcements? Tell us about the ones that most excite you and why.
And at this point is it really all about AI? I mean, does that go without saying at this point? Robin, why don't you go ahead and start us here from the CX perspective and then Erwin, take us down the workplace collaboration road.
[00:04:07] Speaker C: Sure. So definitely most if not all had something to do with AI. There were some partnership type of announcements from some of the CX providers and as you can see after going to the long show, I'm losing my voice. But anyway, there were a lot of CX related announcements that I thought were pretty interesting. Obviously you know, one of the big ones that got a lot of play at the show was the sales force at Agent Force Contact Center. So Salesforce actually getting into the full contact center, you know, full voice ACD in their contact center, which is a big, a big deal because there's not that many providers out there that do full fledged CRM digital channels Contact center and AI. And Salesforce is doing it now. So in the past it's relied on its partnerships with companies like Vonage and aws and it will still keep those partnerships going, but it's also going to be so going to be competing more competition which is just standard in our industry.
I also thought the ujet Agent Experience Orchestration Axo announcement was very interesting. I attended a dinner the night before EC started with the ujet executives. It was very, very in depth and informative about this new product, which is basically an orchestration layer where it uses AI to pull in data from conversations and relies A lot on its Spiral acquisition. Spiral is a very, very interesting company that does a lot with conversation and Interaction Analytics. We're by the way, writing on all these, so you'll be able to see more details on that shortly. Then NICE had a good announcement, even though at the same time, which is what Beth was, they had their cognitive conference, in their Cognitive Nexus conference in Germany, they had an interesting announcement that is kind of tied to Interaction Analytics. Basically what I think is one of the hottest areas and it's essentially if you use Interaction analytics and let's say you find a bunch of issues based on your conversations and Interaction analytics recommends some actions that you can take on those, NICE will then spin up an agentic agent to actually act on those recommendations. And that's where a lot of companies get stuck with Interaction analytics is they don't move to the next thing. They don't actually, you know, do. The piece of advice that they get from, you know, from AI. And the other one I guess I put out too, which is a little, we, we knew about a little bit before because of the conference is RingCentral's Air Pro for Healthcare, which takes its AI receptionist and you know, kind of puts that on steroids. And, and by the way, they, they came out with a pro and a Pro for Healthcare. So it's, it's sort of the same product but having a vertical focus.
And it's basically an agentic voice AI platform and does a lot to help companies leverage AI during in those customer conversations as they're answering calls and knowing where and how to route them.
So those would be the ones I would pick back. There are others.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: Yeah, those are great. And I had the opportunity to be a Best of Enterprise Connect judge. And some of those products you JET and Nice in particular came up during that judging process. And yeah, some really interesting stuff going on among these companies and plenty of others at Enterprise Connect. On the CX side. Erwin, what about you? On the workplace collaboration side, what announcements kind of struck you?
[00:07:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I think there were definitely a lot more on the CX side. The ones that struck me, I guess the biggest one at the.
There was one big one at the event and several that were not at the event. So the biggest one at the event was Zoom expanding their AI platform. They introduced their Agenic 3.0 Agenic AI 3.0 platform that brings new AI agents to the, to the table, new integrations to be able to allow the Zoom AI companion to pull data from external sources.
They introduced a native mobile solution that allows you to Use the native dialer on a mobile device, but have that call handled by Zoom Phone. They introduced SMS capabilities as part of their AI receptionist, some new security capabilities. And I guess the biggest part of the Zoom announcement was that they introduced essentially an office productivity suite.
They're calling it AI Slides, AI Sheets, and they already had Zoom Docs. So it's an expansion onto all of those.
And so what Zoom's vision is with those capabilities is that you take the content that you created during a meeting and rather than just summarize it and throw it in a note doc, you can actually do more with it. So you can take tasks that were created and discussed and turn those into a spreadsheet that becomes essentially a project management capability. You can create a presentation using a conversational interface that starts with the content out of the meeting and then allows you to modify it over time. Zoom has been pretty careful to say that these aren't alternatives yet for Microsoft Office or Google Workspace, but you can certainly see the direction they're heading. And that AI content capability is the ability to query and create content through a conversational interface. Certainly something we're seeing a lot of.
I'd say there weren't a lot of pure use workplace collab focused announcements. Mitel had one that we wrote up that we'll be publishing soon that was essentially a common application architecture for cx, Frontline, Back Office and uc. So that was another one. But I think the two biggest announcements actually happened outside of Enterprise Connect. We had an announcement from Google of expanded AI capability within their Office apps, within Workspace. So similar what we saw out of Zoom, that ability to use a conversational interface to say, I want to create a presentation and here are the things that that presentation needs to cover and have that automatically generated and then converse with the presentation tool to tweak it and get it to where you want. So they have that for Docs, for Sheets and for Slides. That was part of their big announcement. And then Microsoft, who came up in just about every conversation because A, they weren't at Enterprise Connect for the first time and as far back as I can remember. And then B, because they launched a new license package again during Enterprise Connect, but not there with a whole new set of AI capabilities. So they launched something called their E7 license, which includes a new capability within Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, now including Claude capabilities, so allowing people to choose the AI model that they want, an agent management capability and then a bundled, that E7 bundled license that includes what formerly was an E5 license along with 365 copilot agent 365, their agent management platform, and their Microsoft Entra security capabilities. The list price for that is $99. If you were to buy all of that separately, it was about $1,200, I believe, if my math is correct, offering a discount to potentially spur adoption of the AI capabilities within the Microsoft Office 365 license. Kind of interesting again that they weren't at Enterprise Connect, but they probably made the biggest wave from a collaboration stand point in terms of this new license. It's what a lot of the conversations I had were focused on.
[00:11:36] Speaker A: Interesting. And maybe that strategy worked well for on their behalf. They didn't have to spend to be at Enterprise Connect. It still got a lot of attention nonetheless. Right.
[00:11:45] Speaker C: And there were others, you know, definitely other announcements there that we'll be writing about. Avoxi, Charter 5, 9, Cinch, Talkdesk, plenty of other announcements and we'll be writing about those. We only have limited time here, so we can't talk about all of them, but. And then even Crescendo, which didn't really make its announcement at the show, but it did win best of show.
[00:12:05] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. As Erwin had mentioned earlier, you know, networking, the show is really all about networking, or very much about networking. So give us a sense of what were some of the more interesting topics that you guys came across during your one on one conversations with folks, or at least those that you can share publicly. Because I know a lot of those would be under, you know, under NDA. Diane, why don't you start us off here since you haven't had a chance to talk yet. Yeah.
[00:12:31] Speaker D: So I had a chance to sit down with a handful of enterprises during the time at Vegas, and some really interesting themes came out of those discussions and I ended up sharing them with folks as the week went on. But it's worth reiterating here for others is that. Let's start with the first one is that there's a lot of companies right now that are in the middle of doing meeting room refreshes and those are underway. And there are a lot of decisions that are happening. What was, it's interesting is because of returning to the office, right. And they're dealing with older equipment, older systems that they cobbled together during COVID Right. And so, you know, there's some really interesting decisions and I think that will spur definitely some growth in video sales, video equipment sales, definitely here in 2026. Another thing that came up in some Discussions is analytics, right? And I'm not talking about, you know, workplace collaboration or cx, right? It's just across the board, right? Across all their comm systems that companies have a lot of data, right? They're, they're using the analytics, not using the, they're gathering a lot of this data, but it's just sitting around unused. And that came up with a lot of discussions that came up is how our companies, you know, they were looking for insight from, from other businesses in terms of how are you using this data? Because what they're tending to find, and this became a common theme, is that, you know, the insights aren't getting to the right decision makers or maybe it is, but then nothing is being, you know, the data isn't being acted upon, right? So there's a lot of like, oh, what are we doing with this, all this analytics that we have, right? Why are decisions not being used and how can we, how can we do things differently? So that was the second point. So video rooms analytics and then AI, right? Within some, and this came across within some verticals. And the one that I can think of off the top of my head was on the finance, but also there was a gentleman from illegal, right? In terms of the really needing to tightly control or feeling the need to tightly control the AI tools that are inside the company or not inside the company. And so that started to spur discussions of on prem or kind of what we consider to be maybe locked down AI. So how, you know, use the benefits of AI but having it locked down. And there are some businesses that came up. Cisco has some, you know, in terms of let, let's do an on prem AI. So that was kind of interesting and one I hadn't really thought of or considered or heard about which was, you know, on prem AI. And then the last thing was around did something that doesn't seem very exciting and you know, and shiny. But more businesses were saying that they are eliminating dids. And that' discussion I had had, you know, maybe five, six years ago, especially as teams phone started to take off. But that was coming up, right? You know, businesses saying, oh look, you know, we're limiting dids. And it wasn't just the, the general cost savings of the dids, but it was the cost savings of managing them. And, and that really was some interesting theme that came up, right? So something maybe not as exciting and, and you know, the shiny objects, but some really core fundamental things like video rooms and dids and you know, and analytics and how companies are using them. Those are real World things that businesses are, you know, dealing with. And I thought those were some interesting things for me that weren't a, you know, that weren't all just AI focused.
[00:15:40] Speaker A: Yeah, that, that's great. And you know, you, you hear both from the CX and the workplace collaboration side. It's interesting. Robin, what about you? And you, I know you had a jam packed schedule. So what are some of your sort of key discussion points that you came, you had this week? This past week?
[00:15:55] Speaker C: Yeah, definitely a lot of discussion around verticals, which is good for us because we're doing a lot more vertical research in 2026 with a focus on financial services, healthcare and retail. But at the show in particular, healthcare seemed to be just a very big vertical now. Could have been because HIMSS was going on, you know, just across the street. But there was a lot of interest in what companies can be doing to help healthcare providers. Goto, for example, is focusing on the healthcare vertical for the small mid market companies, which I think is a sorely needed push in that segment. And I already mentioned ring is spending on HealthC Air Pro service. So definitely seeing not only vendor announcements but among the enterprise organizations that I talked to in that space, interest in buying products and services where there's some expertise in healthcare and then other industries as well.
Dan already mentioned analytics. It's a topic that is near and dear to me. I feel in both of both of my sessions that I did and by the way, they were very, very well attended earlier. We talked earlier about some of them being smaller. We had a full room for both the SEAC summit the first day and then I did a session on the economic models of AI and a lot of people there, great interaction. But one of the things I said in both of those is the number one thing that you should be investing in right now of any area of analytics particularly I really like interaction or conversation analytics. That got a lot of good review.
It's a really hot topic at this point. I think a lot of companies are starting to adopt it. I don't think they're all using it right. I think most are just scratching the surface. But I do think that that's an area where we need to really advance. You know, set of discussions I had with quite a few people. Does everything have to be AI and no it doesn't. There are plenty of workflows that can be rules based automation. You know, there are plenty of interactions that should be human. Now can AI help those humans? Should AI help those humans? In most cases, yeah. But in many cases it won't. You know, you look at our consumer AI and CX research is coming out very soon, our consumer indexes and there's retails. Retail is one of the industries that does very, very well from a consumer perspective in how they're interacting with their customers. And one of the big ways they're interacting is in person. And with humans don't always think everything has to be AI. I think that's one of the big misnomers that a lot of people walk away with, like, oh gosh, I've got to start implementing AI everywhere. And you don't have to.
Not everywhere, but it does help in many areas. And then the last thing I would say is that humans really do matter sort of in relation to does everything fba, AI. And I would say that the sales pitch for vendors early on with AI has been wrong. And we've seen this before when it comes to convergence of voice and data networks years ago, when it comes to some collaboration applications where the sales pitch was, hey, bring your buy our product in will eliminate half your team for you. So it's not a great sales pitch to say, we're going to eliminate your people, so buy us and you can go lay off a bunch of your colleagues. That's not a great sales pitch. And AI started like that too, like, okay, bring us in and we're going to automate so many functions that you're not going to need half your people. That's again, not a good way to sell something. So now you hear a lot of companies saying, oh no, we're not trying to replace employees, we're trying to complement them. And I just wrote a blog actually last week in no tutorial where it's like, let's be realistic, there are going to be layoffs, but that shouldn't be the main reason you use AI. The main reason is really to, in my opinion, to grow revenue, to improve customer service, to, you know, improve CSAT scores, to again grow revenue even more. And then, yes, you're going to cut some costs. But what we're seeing more so than anything is that companies are reducing their teams from attrition. So somebody leaves, they don't replace them, or it's cost avoidance. We were planning to hire 200 more people. We only have to hire 70 because of AI. So companies are still growing. Only about 17% are laying people off. And there was definitely a sort of a realization or discussion point of this isn't the right way to sell AI. So that was why I some of
[00:20:02] Speaker A: my discussions that's a great point. I love being able to prove or show that humans do in fact matter as we go forward with AI.
[00:20:11] Speaker C: Right.
[00:20:12] Speaker A: Erwin, how about you? What, what interesting topics came up in your one on ones?
[00:20:16] Speaker B: I think Diane and Robin covered most of the same things that I heard certainly around verticalization voice still really important that a lot of we saw a lot of voice specific announcements. We saw a lot of focus on how do we continue to improve the experience for people who pick up the phone and call into contact centers. AI I think has really transitioned this year from a hype phase to a shomi, the value phase that a lot of the folks that I spoke with are trying either on the vendor side to demonstrate or on the buyer side to figure out, you know, what is the actual ROI for AI. I moderated a session focused on AI ethics and bias, which was kind of a new topic area that I think is really interesting that as you allow AI to make decisions, AI is only as good as what it's been trained on and therefore could be making decisions based on bad information. And how do you uncover that and who's responsible when AI goes wrong? Security compliance certainly came up in almost every discussion I had around. Again, often in the context of AI. If AI is generating content, generating responses, coaching people what happens when there's a lawsuit involved, what happens when you need to replay how AI reached the decision it reached. And I think companies are struggling with that as well. I tell you, interestingly, one topic that I kept bringing up in a lot of conversations with vendors that isn't really yet being addressed is the impact of things like OpenClaw and the digital twin and AI enabled browsers where it's very small right now, but you have that ability to create an AI again as a consumer you have I have the ability now to go into a service like Pine and create my own personal agent or openclaw and have that do things for me. So maybe by the end of this year tech centers are starting to see automated calls coming in that are human voice that are but but our actual AI and I don't think the CX world is prepared for that. I think I was surprised that there wasn't a lot of mention of the impact given what we've seen certainly in the media around OpenClaw over the last few months and the continued advancement. And as we're recording this yesterday, there was a big security framework that was released by Nvidia to govern the use of OpenClaw agents. So that's really a hot space right now. And I almost feel like the CX market is missing it or not really ready for it.
[00:22:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I think definitely something that everybody knows that they need to start paying attention to. Right. Whether they're, they have a solution in mind yet or not. But anyways, a lot of our listeners, you know, they probably wouldn't have been able to attend EC or whether they were there at ec, maybe not your guys sessions in particular. So let's just give a quick recap of what, what did they miss? Robin, you mentioned some of what you talked about in your AI session on sort of the economic model. Why don't you start us off here?
[00:23:07] Speaker C: Yeah, so I did talk about the economic models of AI and cx. I guess you could use it in other ways as well. But that one was, you know, was definitely very interesting.
Sorry about that. That one was definitely very interesting. As we went through the different models, it's not like I said before, it's not just, it's not just cost savings that you want to look at. The five models that I went over were cost efficiency, revenue acceleration, risk mitigation experience, like a customer experience boost and employee stability. And I talked through what the value of each of those models are, what metrics companies use to measure them and what the typical results are. We do have a complimentary report on our website about these models if anybody would like. You can certainly go to the website and just look up economic models of AI and you can get a complimentary report on that. And then I also kicked off our CX summit looking at the trends in CX adoption.
So looking at how for a growing number of companies, technology is becoming more important than people. And I explained them why that is. It's not quite as bad as it sounds because technology actually makes people a lot better. So that's something we talked about. We looked at some of the different technologies that are delivering value. So interaction and conversation analytics, like I already mentioned, workforce engagement, management capabilities, both agent and supervisor assist and what kind of metrics we're seeing there. Authentic AI agents and proactive strategies. We also looked at some of the consumer perspective. So what do consumers want? What don't they want? Do they want to use AI when they interact with, with companies?
Industries are doing best there. So those are some of the things we talked about. Good interaction. A lot of people talking to me afterwards about some of the data and some of the conclusions that we made as well.
[00:24:53] Speaker A: Great. How about you, Diane?
[00:24:55] Speaker D: Yeah, so I kind of emceed a half day session on collaboration. Right. And the kind of the Future of collaboration and secure. And, and we had sessions that, you know, Erwin led on security and we had someone else on video rooms. But for me, right, my panel and this kind of was pervasive in some of the comments I mentioned before. But it was around the foundation, right, that businesses still view voice messaging, you know, meetings, chat, as is kind of core to what we think about in terms of collaboration, right? When we think about ucas, if I'm going to go out and look for a solution. But those are the four and our research shows that, right, Our research shows that those are still the important core. But that said, companies are looking for enhanced features around UCaaS, right? And we know this, right? We see that, you know, they're looking for AI tools, they're looking for integrated meeting schedulers and email and document creation. So that's happening, right? And we see that obviously being driven by large companies like Microsoft and even Google, right, who have a lot of those capabilities. So if I'm going to go to Microsoft Teams, I'm getting a lot of those integrated capabilities within my larger UCAS solution. But I think even more important than that is what I saw and what kind of my takeaway overall was that and it ties into this, is that while we have so much great technology, especially around AI and it's continuing to grow in adoption and companies are using it across CX and collaboration, it really comes down to solving business problems. And some of the best discussions I had, particularly with the vendors, it was case studies in real world examples of how companies are using some of the enhanced features in ways that I'm not just selling AI, I'm selling a solution, right? I'm selling a how am I solving your problem? And so it's a lot of consultative, but it's, but it's consultative selling in a repeatable format, right? And so this maybe ties into some of the vertical pieces, right? So here's a solution, here's what we've done and now we, we can repeat it because we're solving a problem.
And this was not even just around core foundational services like voice and meetings. Burrow is also using APIs, right? And so I think while we know, right, and when I think about 2026, you know, foundation, foundational services are continuing to grow and expand, especially around CCAs and UCAs and a lot of those areas that we look at and we forecast. But the companies that are setting themselves up for, for really true long term success are those that are embedding themselves inside of businesses where they're really helping them solve problems, not just throwing technology at them. And that was something that just really kind of hit inside me that said, yeah, you know, this company, this vendor, this service provider is helping someone solve a problem. And when they're doing that, they then become a trusted advisor. And that is going to be core to who we see succeed long term.
[00:27:44] Speaker A: Okay, that's a great forward looking perspective. Diane Irwin, wrap us up here with some takeaways from your sessions.
[00:27:51] Speaker B: Sure. So I moderated three sessions. I already mentioned the AI ethics one. The second one was part of Diane's half day on Tuesday that was focused on security and compliance around unified communication collaboration. So a lot of the discussion there was around, as I mentioned earlier, also the impact of AI. We talked about how to protection against deep fakes, protection against customer employee impersonation attacks. These are all ones that in our research and our recent security study we see companies really struggling with and the attack, the number of attacks is growing. We published in our last study that the, over the last five years the number of companies in our study that are reporting an attack has grown by 300%.
More than 30% of companies that reported an attack, attack on their contact center or communication collaboration environments over the last year. So that AI is making it easier for people to carry out large scale automated attacks. Hopefully it's also providing better defenses as well. And then the third session I did, I moderated a panel which is one I've done now of 10 plus years at Enterprise Connect, focused on 911. And you mentioned earlier the DID numbers are going away. It's going to be really interesting to see how companies continue to meet 911 legal requirements when people don't have D.I.D numbers. But that's a discussion for another day. But there continues to be real world issues with organizations achieving compliance with Terry's law and Rebounds act, even though those laws have been on the books for a long time. We're seeing now the phase out of TDM Voice globally, especially now in the US which is changing the way that organizations are connecting to 911 call centers. It's creating an opportunity for next generation 911. We talked a little bit about that. Something we think, think companies should, should have on their radar and should be investigating, if not already deploying it through their communication providers to enhance the ability to provide information to 911 call centers. Those are kind of the, the three sessions or the, the key takeaways I'd say from the three sessions that, that I moderated.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: Well, that is great. I think that we have given our listeners a lot to think about from your guys experience experiences coming out of Enterprise Connect. So with that I think that just want to remind everybody we will be writing more on these topics in metronotes coming out shortly. So please be sure to visit metrogy.com and look for those metronotes. Look for the economic AI model for CX report that Robin mentioned and all of our other research and reports. Again, you can find
[email protected] always. We're happy to hear from you, so feel free to reach out to us. You can use you email any of us directly or also just use the contact button on the metrogy website. So folks, that's all for now. On behalf of the metrogy team. Goodbye till next time and take care everybody.
