Cavell’s View from Enterprise Connect 2024

As usual, Enterprise Connect did not disappoint. AI discussions drove the agenda in both the keynotes and Cavell’s meetings, companies were talking about new AI products, AI deployments and how to safeguard and audit AI deployments. One of the other main topics was the discussion of how to enable the hidden “customer communicators” or the “informal contact centre” within companies.

Last week the Cavell analyst team had the pleasure of attending Enterprise Connect 2024. This annual show brings together the best of enterprise communication technology into one conference building, and is a great event for news, meetings, and catching up with the industry.

Key Trends

AI and CX were the buzzwords of the show, and it demonstrates how integrated CX has become into overall enterprise communications. Whereas, a few years ago standalone UC vendors would have been much more common, now even the UC traditionalists are talking about their CX integration, or how they enable workers to join the ‘Distributed Contact Centre’ and become part of the CX ecosystem through their UC or collab platform.

AI was also top of the agenda, with most companies describing some form of GenAI or Conversational AI system or deployment. This year also saw more of a focus on the auditing of AI, with most large contact centre companies talking about how they could test and verify all the new AI operations they have started to roll out to customers. This was seen in smaller companies as well, with AI audit specialists like Cyara winning show awards for their QA platform focused on AI workflows.

Microsoft was also present, continuing its strong push into the communication and collaboration space, with an ongoing discussion from multiple companies on how to bring Team’s users into the CX fabric.

AI pricing was also a huge topic, with vendors and enterprises all having different takes on this topic. Some companies like Microsoft are charging a flat rate for AI services ($30 pupm for Copilot), while others like Zoom are giving away substantial AI services for free. Typically, AI services charges come in three main types, either customers are given the service for free, they are charged for the cost of running the service or they are sold the service as a separate service or as a listed addon.  Some companies also choose to just charge running and maintenance costs (bandwidth and server capacity) when adding AI to an existing contract.

Enterprises are torn, with some that Cavell spoke to happy to pay for AI services as they can see the clear benefits they receive in terms of efficiency and productivity. Others feel that they are already contracted for expensive services with money from their contract going to R&D, so being asked to pay for the latest AI service upgrade as an addon every year or two is too much. The rate of change in the industry is making it difficult to accurately price and sell an AI add-on when that add-on might become obsolete or table stakes and then needs to be free within two years.

News

As expected for a show like this, many companies brought their latest and greatest announcements to the event. For a really good summary, Cavell recommends these three articles from No Jitter who also run the show, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3.

The highlights Cavell wants to draw attention to (in no particular order) are:

• Zoom Workplace – Zoom announced its new Workplace, an AI-powered open collaboration platform coming with new AI companion expansions. This new AI companion will be included at no additional cost within many paid Zoom user accounts.
• Talkdesk Ascend Connect – Talkdesk launched its new Ascend Connect solution which will bring Gen AI to on-prem environments, specifically four components, Talkdesk Autopilot for conversational AI, Talkdesk Copilot as a real time virtual assistant for agents, Talkdesk Interaction Analytics, and Talkdesk AI Trainer to validate the Gen AI. This new solution isn’t tied to one specific on-prem technology and can be deployed across many forms of legacy third-party on-prem contact centre solutions.
• AT&T – Launched AT&T Cloud Voice with Microsoft Teams Phone Mobile. AT&T has integrated Microsoft Teams Phone Mobile into its 5G service using the Azure Communications Gateway Platform. This will allow Microsoft Teams Phone users to use an AT&T business mobile number to have a single business identity across multiple platforms.
• Amazon Connect – Introduces new AI features into Amazon Connect. Amazon’s CCaaS offering, Amazon Connect, made a few announcements at the show, including some interesting additions to its CCaaS platform like Contact Lens, which provides AI based post-contact summarisation.
• NICE Enlighten XM (Experience Memory) – Enlighten XM is the latest announcement of upgrades to NICE’s CX AI solution. This update includes more use of interaction analytics and metadata from the enterprise CX ecosystem to provide snapshots of customer preferences. It also caters for agent assistance by suggesting the most optimal next action based on the existing CX knowledge base. NICE also announced Enlighten Copilot to bring more AI powered tools to CC managers and decision makers.
• Five9 – Launched a new GenAI studio, to enable what it calls a “Click-and-customize” approach to the contact centre. According to Five9, this new product will allow organisations to take off-the-shelf GenAI models, such as OpenAI and customise them for the contact centre in just a few clicks. It will also be gradually rolled out to power all AI applications within Five9.
• RingCentral RingEX (Employee Experience) – RingEx is an AI-powered replacement for the RingCentral MVP that was aimed at small businesses. It brings real-time notetaking, action item capture, and summarisations to the SMB customer contact market alongside other AI-powered features like translation, transcription, and omnichannel search.
• Twilio – Launched unified profiles a new open data layer that brings customer data from multiple sources (including CRMs) together into one real-time profile to provide a detailed customer view to whoever needs it. Twilio also launched its own Agent Copilot system to help with intelligent routing and provide insights on each customer interaction, and summarisation.
• Vonage – Launched enhanced noise cancellation into its Vonage Contact Centre solution. This uses Krisp’s AI technology to remove background noises and voices. Vonage also announced a new generative AI for Vonage Conversational Commerce, powered by Jumper.ai.
• GoTo – GoTo has announced that it has added over 60+ new product enhancements to its portfolio including AI features. This includes features like Translation, AI Optimisation and meeting summary as well as, an Attendant Console to provide a centralised interface for managers.

Meetings

Cavell had over 25 meetings with individual companies this event, including most large industry players like Microsoft, Genesys, Cisco, RingCentral, Talkdesk, Avaya, GoTo, Five9 and Zoom. Cavell also had lots of interesting meetings with smaller or newer (some new to Cavell) companies like LeapXpert, Uniphore, and HumanFirst.

These meetings provided large amounts of insight into industry trends, as each company told us how they were interacting with, safeguarding, or deploying AI. One common theme that did come out across many of the meetings (which is supported by Cavell’s latest Telecom’s Buyer research) is that enterprise customers, especially large ones, are still very wary of AI. Many are demanding audits and guardrails or waiting for another company to provide a successful use case before embracing the technology. For this reason, Cavell saw that many companies were focusing heavily on…

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