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March 10-12, 2026

Caesars ForumLas Vegas, NV

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Aligning Your Technology Strategy and Business Vision

With the Enterprise Connect 2026 Call for Speakers (CFS) deadline set for tomorrow, July 18, I wanted to give everyone an update on our content planning for the re-imagined EC that will take place next March 10 – 12, 2026 in Las Vegas. Specifically, I want to share the evolution of our thinking about how we’ll organize our content. We’ve shaped the CFS around core technology tracks like AV/Video, Collaboration/UC, CX/contact center, etc., so we can easily categorize the over 100 submissions we’ll receive. But we know that increasingly, IT professionals are challenged to match technology decision-making with business objectives, and to understand technology in the context of user and customer experience. That’s always been true, of course, but it’s become even more critical as technologies like AI and advanced meeting room systems roll out. Simultaneously, IT decision-makers need to view their installed base through the lens of efficiencies and the business benefits, and requirements of the emerging systems. Again not a new reality, but one with unique challenges in the current environment. So we’re building out the Las Vegas conference tracks to fit the problems and/or opportunities you face.

AI Agents: Proceed with Caution

This interview between tech legend Guy Kawasaki and Meredith Whittaker, president of encrypted messaging app Signal drew some attention recently among the AI-skeptical. At the 50-minute mark of the linked video, Whittaker raises the issue of Agentic AI, and describes the multiple points of vulnerability encountered in a single agentic transaction, positing a scenario where the agentic AI looks up a concert, books a ticket, schedules it in your calendar, and messages your friends to tell them you’re attending. Such transactions would require accessing your browser, credit card information, calendar, and messaging app, which creates, according to Whittaker, “a profound issue with security and privacy.” Whittaker oversees an app devoted to placing security above all other considerations, so it’s not surprising that she’d raise this alarm. Wired called her “one of the world’s most prominent tech critics,” and her own view can be inferred from her offhand remark in the video above about agentic AI letting users “put our brains in a jar” while the agentic AI serves as a “magic genie bot that’s going to take care of the exigencies of life.” Nevertheless, I think it’s incumbent on the technology providers, whether enterprise- or consumer-focused, to explain in detail why users shouldn’t be concerned about the level of access Whittaker describes, and the potential for catastrophic security breaches it threatens. Yet there are signs that users aren’t worried enough about this.

Content is Still King

In advance of our move to Las Vegas for 2026, the Enterprise Connect team is already deep into the preparations for an all-new experience that we hope will wow attendees, sponsors, and all our other stakeholders. And as always with Enterprise Connect, it starts with the content. Last week we opened our Call for Speakers, which is just the first step in putting together a conference program that balances the practical with the visionary, the bleeding edge with the nuts and bolts challenges on which you’re continually expected to deliver cost savings, efficiencies, and better service. Our core tracks will remain -- AI, AV/Video, Collaboration & UC, CX/contact center, and Security/Compliance – but look for some exciting new areas of focus as well. And we’re planning to offer a broader range of session formats, to ensure ample opportunities to learn from experts as well as engage with peers.

Contact Center Complexities

Contact centers’ cloud migration continues apace, but for the larger CX picture, it seems likely that enterprises will be wrestling with heterogeneous environments requiring considerable integration among call handling, data, AI, and mobility elements. Companies must bring all of these to bear if they want to provide the level of CX that customers increasingly demand. A recent Twilio survey, flagged by CX Dive, highlights the extent of the need. “The vast majority of businesses — 96% — plan to build custom CX solutions instead of buying them off-the-shelf, leveraging application programming interfaces to integrate new tools [and] technologies,” CX Dive reports. “However, while best-of-breed solutions offer businesses the opportunity to tailor their tech stack to meet their specific needs, they can pose greater integration and onboarding challenges than less specialized all-in-one suites, which are designed to work together harmoniously,” the article notes. In other words, it’s the eternal tradeoff, which may be leaning toward best-of-breed.

Navigating AV Uncertainties

If you’re an IT leader whose responsibilities include AV technology, this is a challenging time. As you try to plan for upgrading your meeting spaces, the most obvious issue is the uncertainty brought on by the current international trade environment. I’ve talked with IT pros who say their planning has been seriously affected by the potential cost implications for hardware manufactured partially or entirely outside the U.S. – though others have told me they can’t afford to put planning on hold while the tariff issue is resolved. And it looks like the uncertainty will continue. A federal court last week put Trump’s sweeping tariffs on hold, but the matter is likely to end up at the Supreme Court, leaving the issue up in the air at least for now. So where does that leave enterprises?

A New Home for Enterprise Connect

One thing was clear this week at Enterprise Connect 2025: It’s a time of big changes in the communications/CX tech industry. And we’ve also got a big change in the works for Enterprise Connect: We’re moving next year’s version of the event to Las Vegas. Enterprise Connect 2026 will take place March 10 – 12 at Caesars Forum convention center in Las Vegas, and the EC team couldn’t be more excited. Florida was our home for some 20 years, and it’s been a wonderful place for the event. But this change will benefit our attendees and sponsors in many ways.

What I’ll Be Looking for at Enterprise Connect 2025

Enterprise Connect 2025 kicks off in less than a week. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been previewing the event in this newsletter by talking about the questions I’m taking into the show, and what I’m hoping to learn by getting together in person with a few thousand of the smartest people in the enterprise communications/CX industry. For the last couple of years, the questions have begun with AI, and this year is no different. But with 2+ years’ experience under their belts, enterprise IT leaders are beginning to discover at least a few paths forward--for example with AI assistants. One common theme I’m hearing from enterprise IT leaders is that their end users like the AI assistants and are making Microsoft Copilot, Zoom AI Companion, and/or Google Gemini a part of their productivity toolkit. A few IT leaders have raved about their satisfied users – while noting the growing wait lists among those who haven’t been lucky enough to get the tool yet.

Enterprise Leaders Take the Main Stage at Enterprise Connect

With Enterprise Connect 2025 just over a week away, there’s a ton of great content and activities that I’m excited about. One improvement this year that I’d like to highlight: We’ll have more enterprise leaders on the main keynote stage than ever before. On Monday, industry analyst Jim Burton of C-T Link and I will co-moderate a pair of sessions tackling strategic issues in enterprise communications. The panels for each conversation will feature a mix of vendor execs and enterprise leaders, a format that we tried last year to great success. The enterprise leaders offered an irreplaceable perspective on the key issues, helping to bring the conversation back around to real-world concerns.

Cloud Communications: How the Issues are Evolving

One thread running through the content program for Enterprise Connect 2025 is the evolution of cloud communications services – UC as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). These offerings have been around for over a decade now, and have been widely adopted, though CCaaS uptake has been slower than UCaaS. But the services themselves, and the way they’re being adopted into enterprises, continue to evolve and create new challenges that IT/communications/CX tech pros need to constantly re-assess.

Where Do We Stand with AI for CX

Customer Experience (CX) is the area of enterprise communications technology where AI has seen the fastest-growing interest. Part of this is in the nature of the contact center: Enterprises track a plethora of metrics that can reveal the impact of AI-driven enhancements. The oft-used example: If you can shave a few seconds off every agent’s post-call work by using GenAI-driven call summarization, the payoff is clear. But widespread GenAI adoption remains elusive even for the contact center. Not to be deterred, the industry has come up with a whole new buzzword: “Agentic” AI. This term is particularly unhelpful for those in our industry, since “agentic AI” relates to the operation of AI-driven systems throughout the enterprise stack--it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with “agents” as in contact center agents (human or AI). Just getting past this confusion is a new hurdle for enterprise IT pros as they size up AI for the contact center.

What's Next for Enterprise Collaboration

Think about the typical remote meeting you participated in when the pandemic was at its peak, say in late 2020/early 2021. Now think about the last remote meeting you participated in today. What was different about the technology? Probably not much. I’m not talking about the way people did meetings four years ago. There are clearly a few differences there: I think we’re less indulgent about pet/child/delivery person interruptions now than we were, and most of us try a little bit harder to avoid those. I also see a lot more people keeping their cameras off if they have a choice.

You Need Security Knowledge - Enterprise Connect 2025 Has It

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.

Is Your AV/Video Estate Ready for the Next Era of Hybrid Work?

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?

Keeping a Practical Focus on AI

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?

IT Salaries and Satisfaction: Room for Improvement

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!

Press Release - Enterprise Connect 2025 Announces Keynotes from Microsoft and AWS Leaders

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.

See How Enterprises are Tackling AI, Cloud, and More

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.

Hear How Your Peers are Thinking Strategically

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.

Compliance and the Office of the Future

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.

Fitting Technology for Contact Centers’ Needs

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.