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The hybrid work pendulum seems to be swinging back toward high-profile return to office (RTO) mandates – or at least the press coverage is going that direction. Amazon, AT&T, JP Morgan Chase, and the U.S. federal government have all issued high-profile RTO directives in recent weeks. So it’s once again time to consider how collaboration, AV, and video technologies will enable the next vision of the office of the future. Room video systems were being impacted by AI even before ChatGPT upended the market in late 2022. AI has been heralded as the key ingredient to improving the quality of conference room video, by knitting together video streams from multiple cameras, cleaning up room-based audio, and providing single-speaker shots of room-based participants instead of the one-camera “bowling alley” view. But are enterprises really using these capabilities, and if so, are they getting enough benefit from them?

This is now our third Enterprise Connect cycle in which the dominant technology trend is AI, with a specific emphasis on Generative AI. At Enterprise Connect 2023, the main issue was just understanding what this technology was, how it worked, and whether it merited the staggering amount of hype it was receiving in the wake of OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT 4.0. By last year’s Enterprise Connect 2024, GenAI had been productized and a few applications, such as call summarization for contact centers and AI assistants for collaboration, had become the leading use cases promoted by vendors. So as we approach Enterprise Connect 2025, where are we in relation to AI?

If you’re at the managerial or above level in an enterprise IT/collaboration/CX tech shop, 2024 wasn’t a bad year for you, according to Enterprise Connect and No Jitter’s annual Career & Salary Survey. But you might want to check in with your staff; they may not be doing as well. The just-released survey found the median income increased for managers—but it actually decreased for staff. And staff seem to be reacting about how you’d expect, with increased levels of dissatisfaction. Download now to continue reading!

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Enterprise Connect, the leading conference and exhibition for enterprise communications and customer experience (CX), today announces keynote presentations from Microsoft and AWS. Over three days of an expo and four days of the conference program, Enterprise Connect offers expert-led educational sessions, along with extensive peer networking and an exhibit floor featuring all the major industry players. Enterprise Connect takes place March 17-20, 2025 at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando, FL.

Happy New Year and welcome to 2025! This year is shaping up to be a crucial juncture for some of the biggest technology trends driving the enterprise collaboration/CX industry. The most obvious example is AI, where enterprises need to move from proof of concept to proof of value – but there are other critical trends including cloud migration, where CCaaS continues to grow and UCaaS needs to add value beyond just telephony replacement. Then there’s video collaboration, which is entering its next phase as (some) enterprises take another run at forcing remote employees back into the office.

So often, IT’s work consists of putting out fires, dealing with installed base or technical debt issues, or scrounging for new ways to cut costs. Those parts of the job will never go away, but what if you could step back and look at the big picture? That’s one of the things Enterprise Connect 2025 is going to try and help you with, and to do so, we’ve enlisted the best possible sources: Your peers. The last couple of years, we’ve been fortunate to get a plethora of terrific enterprise pros to lead sessions on the EC program, and 2025 will be the biggest yet. One new and exciting area centers on a few sessions aimed specifically at helping you think strategically about your enterprise communications/collaboration/CX technology.

Remember the Metaverse? We were all supposed to be working there by now, the technology so advanced that our digital avatars would have legs and everything. Instead, the biggest Metaverse proponents (like, uh, the guys who changed their name from “Facebook”) are chasing AI dreams. Meanwhile, Amazon is leading yet another round of return-to-office (RTO) demands.

On No Jitter this week, Robin Gareiss of Metrigy has one of the best overviews I’ve seen of AI’s role in the contact center. Since CX is probably the leading use case for AI right now, her article provides a useful way to understand where CX AI is likely to break through, when, and how.

Simultaneous, real-time speech-to-speech language translation has become a hot topic. Microsoft made a high-profile announcement in this area during its Ignite conference this week, and most of the other major collaboration platform vendors are also making moves in this space. In theory, it’s a dream as old as civilization: Erase the language barriers that keep diverse people all over the world from communicating. No Jitter has a witty headline hearkening to this ancient yearning with its recent article on the subject, Power of Babel: The Evolution of Real-Time Translation Features.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Enterprise Connect, the leading conference and exhibition for enterprise communications and customer experience (CX), today announces Duncan Lennox, VP and GM of Applied AI of Google Cloud will deliver a keynote presentation. Over three days of an expo and four days of the conference program, the event offers expert-led educational sessions, along with extensive peer networking and an exhibit floor featuring all the major industry players. Enterprise Connect takes place March 17-20, 2025 at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando, FL.

Communications will always be a mission-critical function for enterprise IT. Your end users work more collaboratively than ever before, and even if your executive leadership has hopped on the latest return to office (RTO) bandwagon, end users will continue to work with colleagues and partners in dispersed offices around the country or globe. And of course your customers engage with you digitally and are continually expecting a better experience when they do so. But so much is changing about how enterprise IT teams deliver communications/collaboration/CX capabilities. How do you keep up?

If your IT role includes contact center/CX technology, you’re almost certainly struggling with the question of AI adoption. The promise is undeniable, but the challenges come at you on all sides—from the customer experience itself to new security challenges that you’ve probably never had to consider before.

Over the past couple of years, the Venn diagram circles for “CX” and “AI” seem to have been moving toward near-total alignment, at least in public perception—with the “AI” circle threatening to eclipse “CX.” But IT pros with responsibility for contact center technology know that there’s a lot going on in CX tech that isn’t (directly) related to AI. Start with the fact that we’re nearing the tipping point between on-premises and cloud-based contact center implementations; in fact, Omdia is forecasting that 2025 will be the year when cloud-attached agent positions finally surpass premises-attached seats. We’ve been hearing about CCaaS for so long that it’s been easy to forget how difficult the migration has been for many enterprises, and how challenging it is to make this large a change to such a customized, business-critical platform. Indeed, large enterprises are finding CCaaS migrations to be incredibly complex and multi-faceted. That’s why I’m pleased to have a pair of case study sessions on the Enterprise Connect 2025 program focused on large CCaaS migrations, aimed at helping you overcome the many issues you’re likely to encounter if you’re embarking on your CCaaS migration.