Study: Literally Zero Organisations Report Enterprise-Wide AI Impact in CX, Yet 62% Are Investing More

Not a single organisation in a new industry survey says AI has delivered enterprise-wide commercial impact on its customer experience operations. Despite that, 62% of CX leaders plan to increase AI investment over the next 12 months. That’s the central...

Infobip Buys SocketLabs to Elevate Email Deliverability

Infobip has acquired SocketLabs, a Pennsylvania-based specialist in email infrastructure. SocketLabs has spent 16 years building the unglamorous but essential parts of email deliverability routing across multiple providers. It has also built observability into whether messages actually land in an...

Your Customer Experience News Roundup: HubSpot U-Turns on Data Sharing Plan and Microsoft Resets Copilot

This week in customer experience news, Microsoft simultaneously shipped new AI agents to general availability and told its 11,000 Copilot staff the product needs to justify its existence, Ofcom issued its largest ever consumer protection fine against a company that...

Vonage to Boost SIM Swap Fraud Protection With New Okta Protection Suite

Vonage has launched a new fraud protection connector for Okta, aiming to secure SIM swap processes. The Vonage Protection Suite for Okta is a pre-built, self-service tool that plugs into Okta’s multi-factor authentication setup. It handles one-time password delivery over SMS...

You Can Now Deploy Zoom’s AI Virtual Receptionist Across Your Telephony Stack

Zoom has announced a standalone version of its Virtual Agent (ZVA) Receptionist, its AI tool that answers, greets and routes inbound calls. The collaboration and contact centre titan has detached ZVA Receptionist from Zoom Phone entirely. Where it once only worked...

Voice Deepfakes Have Broken the Contact Centre’s Oldest Trust Test: Here’s How You Can Safeguard Against Them

For as long as contact centres have existed, agents have made one sure bet. Namely, that a voice is a fingerprint. Sound right, and you are who you say you are. According to the people who build and test today’s...

Slackbot Can Now Run Your CRM Thanks to New Salesforce MCP Servers

Salesforce has switched on a set of dedicated Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that connect Slackbot, its AI agent built into every Slack workspace, directly to CRM records, Tableau analytics, Data 360 customer profiles and Agentforce agents. Users can now ask...

Microsoft’s AI Sales and Service Agents Leave the Lab and Clock In With General Availability

Microsoft has taken the wraps off its new Sales Agent and Service Agent solutions, confirming general availability across Microsoft 365 Copilot and Dynamics 365. Both tools have been circling in preview for months. The pitch, in Corporate Vice President of Dynamics...

Vercel’s CEO Just Declared the Single AI Vendor Model Dead

Single-vendor AI contracts are falling out of favour, according to the lead of one of the infrastructure companies best placed to witness it. Guillermo Rauch, CEO of cloud platform Vercel, told TechCrunch this week that businesses have largely stopped picking...

SAP Confirms Dremio Acquisition, Powering AI Agents With Its Data Lakehouse Platform

SAP confirmed this week that it has closed its acquisition of Dremio, the data lakehouse specialist it first agreed to buy back in May. Terms weren’t disclosed, and the transaction had been sitting through regulatory review since. The logic behind...

Conversational AI ROI: Why the Numbers Keep Lying to You

Ask ten vendors about conversational AI ROI, and you will get ten different answers, most of them suspiciously generous. Ask ten CX leaders who actually run these deployments, and the picture gets much murkier. PwC’s 2026 Global CEO Survey found...

The Invisible Consumer: How Washington’s New AI Bill Would Rewrite the Rules of CX

Tech departments have spent a generation polishing the digital glass. Millions of pounds have been funnelled into web portals, mobile apps, and conversational deflection channels to guide human hands through transactional funnels. This human-exclusive focus now faces an unexpected structural...