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Over the past few months, the Enterprise Connect team has conducted extensive surveys and studies to deepen our understanding of what our stakeholders want from the event. Among the many takeaways on which we’ve already begun to act, we heard loud and clear that you want the conference program to allow for more engagement and interaction. Attendees want to learn, and some of the best learning comes in smaller-group, peer-to-peer formats – even as expert-led presentations remain valuable if they’re on point and filled with actionable insights. We’ve been applying these findings as we’ve started to build the EC2026 program, and in particular we’ve married them to our efforts to make content more flexible and easier to buy into: We’ve created a trio of half-day summits for the first morning of the conference, March 10, 2026.

No Jitter recently posted a debate between two industry analysts, entitled, Focus on AV or AI? Like many debate propositions, this dichotomy is a little artificial – as with so many issues, the real answer for most observers is going to be, “Both.” But the debaters, David Danto of TalkingPointz (Team AV) and Kevin Kieller of EnableUC and BCStrategies (Team AI) use the question to get closer to the issue of what enterprises are trying to do with each of these functions, and what IT must prioritize as it seeks to provide better employee experience. I stress “employee experience” here because this discussion really centers on internal communications rather than customer-facing applications, where the drivers are different. In the No Jitter debate, Danto seems to focus more on the experience itself, while Kieller is concerned with business issues.

Overhyping a technology like generative AI can be dangerous, but sometimes the debunking urge can be almost as unwelcome. Take for example last month’s MIT report claiming that 95% of generative AI projects fail. The most dogmatically anti-AI folks took that statistic as confirmation that AI is as pointless as it is, in their minds, evil. But if you look a little closer, there’s a lot more nuance. As I noted in this space a couple of weeks ago, it’s down to execution. The MIT report’s lead author blamed the high failure rates on enterprises’ choice of tools and use cases, as well as poor integration; Fortune reported that, “MIT’s research points to flawed enterprise integration. Generic tools like ChatGPT excel for individuals because of their flexibility, but they stall in enterprise use since they don’t learn from or adapt to workflows.” “The data also reveals a misalignment in resource allocation,” the article continues. “More than half of generative AI budgets are devoted to sales and marketing tools, yet MIT found the biggest ROI in back-office automation—eliminating business process outsourcing, cutting external agency costs, and streamlining operations.” These are the kinds of use cases where contact center managers are hoping for big AI payoffs. And on this point, there’s reason for optimism.

AI’s most enthusiastic promoters rarely resist the temptation to go big with their predictions about the technology’s long-term future, such as the prospect of AGI (artificial general intelligence), when machines start reasoning independently. Nor can popular culture seem to resist far-fetched pointless questions like, Can AIs Suffer? These aren’t necessarily the pressing issues that keep IT folks busy all day and awake at night. But there’s a case for at least familiarizing yourself with concepts that may flow from the interaction that’s already been set in motion between technology, business processes, human factors, and governance. That’s why we’ve added a new, futuristic track to the Conference program for Enterprise Connect 2026, called, “Future Shock: Communications Tech Beyond the Horizon.” We see this as very much a compliment to the practical, actionable content that makes up the bulk of the program.

The first keynote-level session we ever ran on AI at Enterprise Connect took place in my first year leading the event, back in 2016. Here was my brilliant idea: We’ve got this great venue in sunny Florida each March, there’s a beautiful outdoor space for events – let’s have a session outside! To go with the fresh thinking about the location, we decided the session should be about the potential of AI – and of course back then the conversation was very much about potential, in areas like customer journey. What I didn’t consider was that, although Orlando is usually quite pleasant in mid-March, some years are hotter than others. I also failed to take into account the almost total lack of shade on the event lawn at the Gaylord Palms venue. So when the temperature hit about 85 that day, my panelists and I took the stage in our shirtsleeves, and even that wasn’t enough to keep us from getting drenched in sweat. Worse, the audience largely gave it up before we were halfway through the session. The remaining few opted to ride out the session by huddling together in the few slivers of shade available on the lawn. I guess that session taught me more about AI than I bargained for – namely, a great idea that sounds really cool will fail without the proper execution. And in fact, your situation may not even allow for “proper execution.”

I had an interesting conversation with a security consultant recently, who told me that identity is poised to be one of the leading areas of focus in the cybersecurity segment in coming months and years, with much of the impact landing squarely in the enterprise communications sector. The rationale was that, among other things, as AI avatars and deepfakes continue improving, it’ll be critical for enterprises to be able to ensure that those participating in video meetings are legitimate users with valid permissions. This consultant noted that the avatar need not even be perfect and able to flawlessly interact like a human being; it can introduce itself, then sit back idle, “listening” – which might anyway be the goal of the bad actor behind the avatar, to eavesdrop on the meeting. The larger point here is that AI is going to influence the way we work – and the way that IT builds and manages our communications systems – in ways we may not even imagine yet. It’s just one element of what we at Enterprise Connect are calling, “Workplace Reimagined: Engineering Tomorrow's Collaboration,” the title of one of our five tracks for the 2026 version of our event (which is itself being reimagined in numerous ways).

A couple of weeks ago, I shared the new approach we’re taking to the Conference session tracks for Enterprise Connect 2026. I noted that we’re hoping to align our content with the strategic issues and challenges our enterprise audience faces, as well as to better highlight the exciting new approaches we’re taking. Over the next few weeks in this newsletter, I want to go through each of the tracks to give you a more specific idea of just what we’re hoping to achieve with each one, and how this relates to Enterprise Connect’s ongoing mission. I’ll start where each of our enterprise attendees has to start: With the legacy technology. Our track, Legacy Unleashed: Optimizing Your Communications Backbone, aims to make ample space and time for the issues you face in maintaining current services, keeping them on a migration roadmap that optimizes cost and functionality, and keeps it all running to the five-nines (or better) standard that enterprises require for mission-critical communications and collaboration, both internally and with your customers.

Last week I discussed the evolving state of Return-to-Office (RTO), noting that big companies like Starbucks are amping up their demands for employees to report to offices more often, if not full-time. Now there’s yet another twist, as the political website The Hill reports on something it calls, “The Great State Government Return-to-Office U-Turn. States that rushed to implement stringent RTO mandates earlier this year are already starting to bow to the realities of downsized office space and employee recalcitrance, and are open to increased remote work, according to The Hill. What’s interesting about this apparent trend is that The Hill claims RTO mandates are as much about leverage in salary negotiations as they are about high-flown rhetoric around state employees being needed in state facilities. In short, some state employee unions are trading off wage concessions in return for remote-work flexibility. At a time when state budgets are likely to come under increasing pressure, controlling salaries in this way could be a valuable tool for governments looking to make up for cuts to Medicaid and other programs. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen RTO not really be about people coming into the office.

The RTO (return to office) drumbeat continues, with Starbucks the latest enterprise to order office workers back on site for an additional day per week, and more workers required to move to corporate hub cities of Seattle and Toronto. The company’s CEO clearly thinks he has the leverage now, with an implied take-it-or-leave-it suggestion that, “updated in-office culture may not work for everyone.” Right after the pandemic ended, the RTO pendulum seemed in constant motion, with RTO mandates being issued only to be revoked, postponed, or quietly ignored. As a result, the discussion in our industry about the impact of RTO seemed to stagnate, and the topic became somewhat tired. But the whole workplace-of-the-future issue is getting new energy from the ramped-up RTO pushes, along with developments in AI that are transforming the workplace in ways that hadn’t yet emerged in the immediate wake of the pandemic. That’s why the future of the workforce will be one of our 5 tracks and areas of key focus at Enterprise Connect 2026 – obviously, from the perspective of how these developments impact IT/communications pros. And what are some of those impacts?