Articles, papers, and resources I find valuable. Curated weekly.
The agentic AI story stopped being theoretical this week. NiCE Cognigy's Nexus event had practitioners talking about production deployments, not roadmaps. Salesforce showed the real engineering problem: you can't get an LLM to follow a structured business process 100% of the time, so they built deterministic if-then scaffolding around it. Meanwhile Oracle shipped coordinated agent teams inside Fusion Cloud, and No Jitter covered what happens when employees start feeding meeting transcripts to consumer AI tools and no one has a response plan. Busy week.
Salesforce added a programmatic scripting layer to Agentforce called Agent Script — if-then conditions that constrain what the LLM can do. The honest framing: LLMs can't be trusted to follow structured processes 100% of the time, so they wrapped deterministic logic around the probabilistic core. Good primer on the real engineering problem behind enterprise AI agents, not the pitch deck version.
NiCE Cognigy held its Nexus event and four analysts walked out with the same takeaway: agentic AI is in production now, not just in demos. The NiCE/Cognigy deal is looking like one of the few CCaaS acquisitions that actually made both products better. Worth reading for the Careington case study alone — shaving 45 seconds off a call funded the whole AI program.
The scenario: an employee pastes a meeting transcript into a consumer AI tool, and now that data lives in a third-party model. Most orgs don't have an incident response playbook for this. The piece treats shadow AI exposure as a data breach class problem, not just a policy violation — a framing shift that's overdue.
Vonage embedded voice and real-time AI directly into ServiceNow's CSM and ITSM workflows. The problem they're solving is real: voice has always been the odd channel out in omnichannel stacks, sitting next to the CRM rather than inside it. If you're running ServiceNow and Vonage, worth a look before the next contract renewal.
Oracle shipped coordinated agent teams inside Fusion Cloud — agents with defined roles, decision authority, and human escalation paths built in. The architecture difference from copilots: these agents can actually change records and progress workflows, not just suggest next steps. The governance piece (human override, exception surfacing) is doing a lot of work here.
Gartner says 40% of agentic AI projects will get cancelled by 2027. This piece argues the failure mode isn't model quality, it's silo architecture — each AI tool optimizing its own metric without contributing to shared intelligence. The "Silo Paradox" construct is worth the read if you're designing contact center AI and not just buying it.
Meta killed Horizon Worlds this week — which nobody is crying about, but the CX industry should at least acknowledge what it quietly built with VR before moving on. Meanwhile the mobile UCaaS space is getting interesting: dual-persona eSIM plays from NetSapiens and Crexendo are moving past the "separate work phone" era. And Jon Arnold raises a point worth sitting with: the same AI that's supposed to fix enterprise communications is expanding the fraud surface at the same time.
Meta's Horizon Worlds shuts down June 15 after burning $80B. The tech press is filing this under "hype cycles that didn't survive reality," and they're not wrong about the consumer play. But inside the contact center, VR found a real job: agent training. Gartner's 2022 prediction that 25% of people would spend an hour a day in the metaverse by 2026 looks embarrassing now. The enterprise training use case actually held.
The dual-persona phone idea is getting real: a business eSIM and a personal line on the same device, with enterprise controls only touching the business side. NetSapiens ships this as "Extend," Crexendo has a similar play. The technology works. Whether IT teams will actually manage eSIM provisioning at scale is a different question.
Jon Arnold covers an angle that doesn't get enough airtime: as AI makes it easier to synthesize voice and automate calls at scale, the fraud surface expands with it. Enterprise comms vendors are selling AI as the solution to communications problems. It's quietly becoming the source of new ones too.
UniFi pushed MLO-STR (Multi-Link Operation, simultaneous transmit/receive) to the UDB switch via firmware update. MLO is the Wi-Fi 7 feature that matters most in dense environments — bonding multiple bands simultaneously instead of switching between them. Small community post, but if you're running UniFi gear this firmware is worth grabbing.
Informatica (Salesforce-owned) deepening its Microsoft partnership means Azure and Salesforce Data Cloud are getting tighter integration for enterprise data governance. Worth watching for anyone running AI-driven CX on either stack — data quality upstream determines a lot about what AI agents can actually do downstream.
Enterprise Connect landed in Las Vegas this week and the identity shift is complete: this is a CX show now. Infobip and AudioCodes both shipped AI agent architectures aimed at CPaaS and Teams markets, each from a different angle. And quietly, the FCC dropped a proposal that could reshape how offshore contact centers operate in telecom. A lot moved this week.
CX took over. The whole show — keynotes, expo floor, hallway conversations — had moved decisively to customer experience. Enterprise communications is becoming infrastructure now, not product. If your pitch is still "better phone system," that framing has a shelf life.
Infobip launched AgentOS, an orchestration layer that lets AI agents call into their CPaaS platform. First CPaaS player I've seen productize agent-to-channel routing this explicitly. Whether it becomes a template or gets absorbed into something larger is still open.
AudioCodes pushing past SBCs into live conversation intelligence — real-time insights during calls, not just post-call summaries. The Teams Contact Center angle puts them inside Microsoft's ecosystem, not just behind it. That's a different kind of bet than most SBC vendors are willing to make.
Salesforce shipped Agentforce Contact Center, natively unifying voice, digital channels, and CRM in one platform. Zendesk made one of its largest acquisitions the same week. The standalone CCaaS market is getting squeezed from both ends — faster than most people expected.
The FCC wants disclosure requirements on overseas contact centers in telecom. Not a ban — transparency rules. This is regulatory pressure on the offshoring model that has kept contact center costs low for two decades. Worth watching where this lands.
MWC 2026 is running in Barcelona this week, and the pre-show announcements already tell the story: carriers are moving from AI pilots to agentic infrastructure at real scale. Meanwhile Jeff Pulver dropped the clearest vCon explainer I've seen, right as Zoom ships Virtual Agent 3.0. Feels like the industry is converging on something, even if nobody's agreed on what to call it yet.
Jeff Pulver's clearest vCon explainer yet. The framing most people miss: it's not about voice. It's a structured container for any conversation, carrying consent metadata through the entire chain. If you're still fuzzy on why this standard matters, start here.
66% of telecoms are running AI now, up from 49% last year. One carrier deployed agents managing over a million network devices in real time. The 6G framing is forward-looking, but the present-tense deployments are real.
Zoom's going after full resolution, not just deflection. With 43% of consumers saying bots fail them, the bet is that end-to-end automation can close the gap. Worth watching how this lines up against what Genesys and NICE are shipping.
The headline number is striking, but the governance architecture underneath it is the real story. AI specialists inherit enterprise permissions and can't self-escalate. CVS Health's CISO explains why that design choice matters more than the model.
MWC is running in Barcelona this week and Microsoft showed up with operator case studies. One carrier has 60% of NOC operations AI-assisted, running 10,500 automated tasks per month. Lots of marketing framing, but the numbers are worth extracting.
Practical breakdown of the AI voice agent stack as it stands today — what's actually deployed on SIP trunks and Teams Direct Routing. Useful reference if you're evaluating platforms or trying to understand where the market has landed.
Weird experiment, worth five minutes. The question it raises — who controls the context window when ads are in the mix — is directly relevant to any voice AI platform where conversation data has commercial value.