Newsroom

February 6, 2025

Communications systems have never carried more of the enterprise’s critical data than they do today, and this reality will only continue to grow, partly thanks to the rise of AI. It’s now a given that every technology advance will increase the security risk faced by communications pros, who for example had to learn new governance and security requirements as communications modes such as instant messaging and videoconferencing became ubiquitous. After all, everything contained in such communications is enterprise data, which has to be protected, stored (or not), and made available according to policies. Now as AI assistants create meeting summaries, transcripts, and even translations, those elements too will be enterprise data, and will have to be protected.

January 23, 2025

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?

December 19, 2024

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.

December 5, 2024

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.

November 7, 2024

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.

October 24, 2024

If you’ve worked in tech for any length of time, you don’t need statistics to tell you that women are underrepresented in general, and particularly in leadership roles. Just look around you.

Nevertheless, here’s a particularly eye-opening statistic, as cited in a recent ITPro article: Of the respondents to a recent survey of women in STEM, half report never having received a promotion.

One bit of good news, according to ITPro, is that mentoring can make a real difference for women working in STEM. According to the same survey, 31% of women with women mentors had received a promotion in the last year, and having a mentor also correlated with getting salary raises.

So it’s critical to lift up women as role models to encourage colleagues as well as younger women entering the field. 

October 17, 2024

Times are uncertain for IT leaders and practitioners whose focus is collaboration or CX technology. Whether the topic is AI, cloud strategy, security, or CX, enterprises are dealing with new and complex issues, from governance to evolving technology trends. That’s why I found this recent article from CIO Dive compelling: It describes the upskilling requirements that IT organizations are facing, and suggests a key way of addressing these challenges is to build a “learning culture.”

I’d argue that a learning culture has never been more important for IT. There’s obviously a massive job of upskilling and re-skilling as AI comes into the enterprise. But all of the critical technology issues are morphing and becoming more challenging, while IT is being asked (as always) to do more with less.

October 3, 2024

With the inaugural Enterprise Connect AI event now completed, our team is now full steam ahead on Enterprise Connect 2025 the week of March 17 in Orlando, FL. One of the questions we’ve been asked is, given that we’ve just finished an event devoted to AI, what role will AI play in the big March 2025 event?

The answer is that AI will have a role to play in Orlando, but the event will, as always, stretch well beyond just AI. We’ll also be striving to put AI in the context of the many other issues that enterprise collaboration/CX pros deal with.

September 19, 2024

As collaboration platforms acquire features such as the ability to create call transcripts and summaries, and to integrate more tightly with other productivity and line of business apps, the security implications have become more urgent. Increasingly, all collaboration apps—whether using voice, video, text, or a combination--produce corporate data at a furious rate. And that data has to be protected and handled correctly.

Comms/collab/CX pros have been aware of their heightened responsibilities around compliance for some time. When enterprise-grade instant messaging hit in the early 2010s with the likes of Skype and Jabber, IT leaders had to reckon with the fact that these text-based communications were legally discoverable and needed to be archived appropriately. Now that most internal corporate meetings happen on collaboration platforms where a call can be recorded with the press of a button (often by anyone on the call), enterprises have had to begin raising awareness on when and how recording must be handled.

September 5, 2024

AI may be moving quickly as a technology, leaving enterprise leaders feeling pressured to do something now. But the wisest strategy may be to approach AI like you’re in it for the long haul.

That was one of the key messages from an Enterprise Connect virtual event last week. Derek Top, senior analyst at Opus Research, said in a keynote that while it’s important to keep up with the state of play in AI, it’s a “fool’s errand” to try and adjust to every announcement that comes out about a new Large Language Model or other apparent AI breakthrough.

It’s still early days for AI, Top reminded the audience: “The technology is ahead of where most people are at.”

August 22, 2024

Last week the tech world mourned the death of Larry Tesler, inventor of the cut, copy, and paste commands. Many social media accounts paid tribute to Tesler by simply copying and pasting the headline announcing his death, a clever way to honor someone—by using his innovation and thereby demonstrating just how significant it is. Cut, copy, and paste is so fundamental to how we work that we take it for granted. But it really is one of the great productivity tools of the computer age.

The occasion reminded me, though, of how old-school journalists used to feel about cut-and-paste. Believe it or not, they didn’t like it. I was in journalism school in the mid-1980s, and many of our teachers hated the idea that it would become easy to rearrange your copy. What if, they asked, you’re out on an assignment and you have to phone a story into the rewrite desk (drawing from the pocketful of quarters you were instructed to carry at all times, to feed into payphones)? 

August 8, 2024

One of the fundamental questions about AI is: Can Generative AI deliver productivity improvements? And according to a recent survey, the short answer seems to be: No, AI can’t deliver productivity gains. It may enable productivity gains, but for these to materialize at scale, enterprises will have to put in the effort to make it happen.