What’s Next for Enterprise Collaboration?

February 13, 2025

Written by Eric Krapf, General Manager and Program Co-Chair, Enterprise Connect Publisher

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.

But is there anything new about what you can do in a meeting? The big vendors will tell you it’s all about AI. They’ll say the new generation of AI-driven meeting assistants will fundamentally change how people approach the basic idea of meetings: Call summarization lets you catch up on meetings you miss, letting you allocate your time more efficiently. Note-taking lets you focus on the discussion itself. (Though folks like me, who still take notes by hand, will tell you our process helps you concentrate and analyze in real time. I’ll concede that you look disengaged when you’re taking notes.)

Anecdotally, my impression is that enterprise IT pros are all over the map when it comes to AI assistants. I’ve talked to some whose end users are piloting the likes of Microsoft Copilot or Zoom AI Companion and love it. Others have told me they find these applications to be of very limited use. On the critical question of whether you’d pay for everyone to have the AI assistant (Zoom’s is free), the jury seems to be out.

But here’s the thing: Even if end users like their AI assistants and find them useful, that’s not a guarantee that these applications will be transformative rather than incrementally improving the collaboration experience. You know what I think has been the most transformative application for collaboration in the last 5 – 10 years? Ubiquitous, easy screen sharing. That changed how people do meetings. When was the last time you were on a call and someone didn’t share their screen?

Real-time communications is people interacting with other people, and that problem was solved over a hundred years ago. Everything since then has been adding enhancements: Video, screen sharing, text chat. (Again, when was the last time you were on a call when someone didn’t say, “I’m going to drop the link to that page/document/etc. in the chat.”)

What’s the next enhancement that could truly transform the experience of collaboration? Simultaneous language translation comes to mind, assuming it attains nearly perfect accuracy. That would transform not just meetings, but, I guess, the world. Another possibility is agentic AI, which could be running around in the background of a meeting, collecting and delivering relevant information in real time. But how transformative is that, really? It saves the time of people searching manually. Very useful, but transformative?

The Enterprise Connect 2025 program has many touch points for the state of collaboration. On Monday, Jim Burton of C-T Link and I will co-moderate a keynote panel featuring vendors and enterprise execs addressing the question directly: Is There a New Model for Collaboration Technology? And throughout the week, our Collaboration Platforms & UC conference track will break down many of the issues I’ve discussed here. For example, we have a case study session with IT leaders from Fannie Mae describing their company’s Microsoft Copilot rollout.

At the same time, we know that many enterprises are refining and advancing their plans around more immediate issues, which is why this track features a UCaaS Case Studies session, a discussion on integrating UC and Contact Center on the same platform, and even a session on whether you should consider keeping UC and/or CC on premises.

For over 30 years, Enterprise Connect has been the place to see where the enterprise communications industry is headed, while also getting practical learning about how to keep your enterprise’s communications strong and able to provide the mission-critical capabilities your users require today. You can get our best Early Bird rate if you register now. See you in Orlando!