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CF20: UCaaS, CCaaS Providers Making the Most of AI
Market hype has raised awareness of AI across many use cases.
JÖRGE RÖSE-OBERREICH/SHUTTERSTOCK
Jon Arnold and S&P Global’s Raul Castanon cited Microsoft among providers making the most of AI.
UCaaS/CCaaS providers like Microsoft are leveraging their trajectory and expertise with AI with enhancements across their product portfolio that include meeting transcriptions, meeting summary and highlights, and automated follow-up, Castanon said. All of these features can impact workforce productivity and customer service automation.
Castanon and Arnold said Zoom is among UCaaS/CCaaS providers leading with AI.
“Zoom has also made significant investments in AI, and Zoom AI Companion, its recently announced generative AI digital assistant, is included at no additional cost for customers with paid services in their Zoom user accounts,” Castanon said. “This will likely give it added momentum and help it further expand its global footprint.”
Arnold counts RingCentral among AI innovators. This month, RingCentral announced the general availability of RingCX, a native, AI-first contact center with new capabilities powered by its RingSense AI platform. Embedded RingSense AI helps agents and supervisors before, during and after every customer interaction.
Arnold said Vonage is among competitors making the most of AI in UCaaS/CCaaS.
“When generative AI is used effectively, it does at least one of two critical things,” said Omdia’s Curt Franklin. “It improves the user experience, or it amplifies the effectiveness of the humans involved in the communication. It’s important to note that if AI claims to do either of these at the expense of the other, then it’s not effective use. No generative AI use can be considered effective if it increases user frustration or makes humans spend time overcoming issues created by the AI tools.”
Cisco is leveraging its trajectory and expertise with AI with enhancements across its product portfolio, Castanon said. That includes meeting transcriptions, meeting summary and highlights, and automated follow-up. All of these features can improve workforce productivity and customer service automation.
When it comes to AI, Cisco has “a better story than most people realize,” Arnold said.
Castanon said Five9 is among CCaaS incumbents that have expanded their capabilities with AI via organic development and strategic investments. And Arnold said Five9 is among UCaaS/CCaaS providers innovating with AI.
Arnold said Avaya is among UCaaS/CCaaS providers innovating with AI. Avaya’s generative CX concept highlights how AI can sit at the core of customer experience transformation, touching everything from agent experience to customer satisfaction, to operations. Integrating generative AI capabilities into the Avaya Experience Platform helps CX leaders to implement workflows and glean precise insights.
Castanon said NICE has expanded its AI capabilities through organic development and strategic investments. And Arnold said NICE is among UCaaS/CCaaS providers innovating with AI.
UCaaS/CCaaS providers like Google Cloud are leveraging their trajectory and expertise with AI with enhancements across their product portfolios, Castanon said. Among those enhancements are meeting transcriptions, meeting summary and highlights, and automated follow-up. All of these features can impact workforce productivity and customer service automation.
Castanon said Zendesk has expanded its capabilities with AI through organic development and strategic investments. Last month, Zendesk debuted new generative AI features that aim to make help desk teams more productive. The features are rolling out for the company’s flagship customer service platform, which is used by about 100,000 organizations worldwide.
Castanon said Boost.ai is positioned as a standalone conversational AI and is a key part of the customer service ecosystem that channel partners should keep an eye on. Its solution automates millions of interactions annually for hundreds of leading organizations around the world in financial services, telecommunications, hospitality, the public sector and more.
Arnold said Mitel is noteworthy because of its recent acquisition of Unify, the UCC services businesses of the Atos group. The transaction cements the combined company with a No. 2 position in global market share for enterprise UC, and increased regional leadership with a No. 1 position in EMEA and more than 10 individual countries, according to Mitel.
Castanon said Ada is among vendors that are positioned as standalone conversational AI and are a key part of the customer service ecosystem that channel partners should keep an eye on. Ada’s AI-powered customer service automation platform helps resolve support inquiries — across channels and languages — with the least amount of human effort.
Castanon said Genesys is among CCaaS incumbents that have expanded their capabilities with AI via organic development and strategic investments. Now with auto-summarization for Agent Assist, the Genesys Cloud CX platform helps organizations drive increased quality, speed and accuracy by enabling employees to capture conversational intelligence from digital and voice interactions.
Castanon said Amelia is among vendors that are positioned as standalone conversational AI and are a key part of the customer service ecosystem that channel partners should keep an eye on. Amelia’s platform develops and deploys AI tools that manage critical tasks and processes, enabling employees to be more productive and deliver better results while reducing operational costs.
Arnold said Talkdesk is among UCaaS/CCaaS providers innovating with AI. In October, Talkdesk announced product updates that deepen the integration of generative AI within its flagship Talkdesk CX Cloud platform and Industry Experience Clouds. Companies across industries can deploy, monitor and fine-tune generative AI in the contact center with no coding experience, eliminate inaccurate and irresponsible AI use and subsequent brand risk, and create a personalized experience for customers.
Dialpad has expanded its AI capabilities through organic development and strategic investments, Castanon said.
“Generative AI is now emerging as the next phase for customer service automation, helping organizations scale by automating agent tasks that would typically require human intervention,” he said. “Although still evolving, the integration of generative AI with customer service platforms has the potential to address personalized customer service at scale, blending digital communications with customer relationship management (CRM), leveraging large language models (LLMs) and natural language understanding (NLU) to deliver automated, personalized customer interactions that were not possible with the previous generation.”
Arnold said 8x8 is among UCaaS/CCaaS providers innovating with AI.
“With AI, things happen so fast and relatively inexpensively now that it's kind of like table stakes,” he said. “No one even knows what the next big thing is going to be six months from now. It could come from any direction. The tools that developers use to build these applications and create these platforms are so accessible now, and your software development capabilities don't have to be hugely massive. It also speaks to the need for the vendors to have a healthy ecosystem of partners because it's easier and faster to develop new things, but nobody can do it all. So the ones that are really effective have that groundswell of partners that support them.”
Castanon said OneReach is positioned as a standalone conversational AI and is a key part of the customer service ecosystem that channel partners should watch. OneReach’s Communication Studio G2 platform provides a microservices-based conversational AI platform targeted at enterprise implementations.
Arnold said Twilio is among UCaaS/CCaaS providers innovating with AI. This summer, Twilio announced new AI tools for its customer engagement platform. The new CustomerAI lineup includes both predictive and generative AI tools that aim to improve customer understanding and drive personalized interactions.
Arnold said Twilio is among UCaaS/CCaaS providers innovating with AI. This summer, Twilio announced new AI tools for its customer engagement platform. The new CustomerAI lineup includes both predictive and generative AI tools that aim to improve customer understanding and drive personalized interactions.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI are revolutionizing the UCaaS and CCaaS industries.
Many use cases for AI are in the market now, such as speech to text, real-time transcription, real-time translation, smart framing for video and more. And new uses are hitting the market at a record pace.
Our latest CF20 is the first of a two-part series on vendors doing business in the channel that are making the most of AI. This first part covers the impact of AI on UCaaS and CCaaS providers.
According to Next Move Strategy Consulting, the market for AI is expected to show strong growth in the coming decade. Its value of nearly $100 billion is expected to grow twentyfold by 2030, up to nearly $2 trillion.
Many Use Cases for UCaaS, CCaaS Providers
Raul Castanon, senior research analyst at 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, said the market hype generated by ChatGPT and generative AI has raised awareness for the use of AI across a wide variety of use cases.
“According to 451 Research's 'Voice of the Enterprise: Customer Experience & Commerce, Vendor Selection 2023' survey, there is substantial business interest in leveraging generative AI,” he said. “The top generative AI use cases cited in our survey are data management and analysis of relationships to identify patterns (37%), automating routine tasks – also cited by 37% of respondents – and automating customer support responses (36%) and assisting customer service agents (31%). Furthermore, about one of four respondents (27%) plans to work with existing customer experience (CX) vendors, suggesting a considerable segment of the market prefers to leverage external expertise to expedite the adoption of machine learning (ML) and AI in their CX initiatives. These numbers highlight the different opportunities for the channel with AI.”
Big AI Advances for CCaaS Providers
Jon Arnold, principal of J Arnold & Associates, said AI is being used in UCaaS to boost productivity and collaboration. And the most popular use in CCaaS is chatbots for self-service.
J Arnold & Associates' Jon Arnold
“The term conversational AI refers to how chatbots are better equipped to handle things like open-ended questions and being more conversational in the dialogue, which makes the participant, the customer, feel more inclined to talk more and communicate more in a self-serve mode, so things they normally would talk to an agent about,” he said. “So the more natural and human like that chatbot is, the more self-service it can handle. That's a good use case for the AI piece there. And of course for agents, they’re getting call summaries and transcripts generated automatically, which saves them a lot of time. Plus, it's a more complete capture of the dialogue. And there’s also this feature called AI assist that’s almost like having a little guy on your shoulder who leans over and says, 'This customer is maybe not as happy as you might think,' and it will suggest phrases or language, or tone that you could use that might be more appropriate for the situation.”
Another new feature in CCaaS is auto-suggest, which can help agents when facing an anxious moment or heated discussion with a customer, Arnold said.
“The agent might be just on the verge of typing something that says, 'Well, if you don't like that, that's just the way it is,' and the AI that's monitoring everything will say, 'Here's another way you could phrase this more delicately, more professionally and more empathetically,'” he said. “It’s not the little guy on your shoulder anymore. It's like this big genie behind you who's watching everything you're doing. But that can be very helpful, especially for rookies, the newer agents who don't know how to handle some situations. That's something the supervisor just can't manage. They can't babysit every call and step in. So that's the power of AI at scale. It can do it for every call.”
Rapidly Changing Market Landscape
Curt Franklin, principal analyst with Omdia, which shares a parent company with Channel Futures (Informa), said the market landscape for generative AI is changing rapidly.
Omdia's Curt Franklin
"One year ago there was one significant generative AI provider — OpenAI," he said. "Today, Alphabet and Microsoft have joined the general-purpose generative AI market, while Cohere, Anthropic and Jasper offer generative AI for specific purposes, and Hugging Face provides open-source support. Open-source tools are rapidly improving and generative AI of all types is becoming a possibility for an increasing number of organizations due to better tools, more economical AI models, and generative AI hosting support from companies like AWS.
Generative AI's use is expanding in nearly every market, Franklin said.
“The expansion is due to a number of factors,” he said. “One factor is customers asking vendors how they’re using the technology or what their plans are for its use. Another factor is the rapid increase in the number of options available for generative AI technology, which can be included in products and services. A third significant factor is the realization that, in many cases, the best use for generative AI is a targeted application with a limited model suitable for responding to very specific prompts.”
Based on feedback from analysts and recent news reports, we’ve compiled a list, in no particular order, of 20 UCaaS and CCaaS providers that are incorporating AI into their offerings. Our list above offers a mix of well-known providers as well as lesser-known companies that are making big strides in AI.
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