Newsroom

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 14, 2024

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?

October 31, 2024

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.

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.