What Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos Drama Really Means for Customer Experience Leaders

Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models were suspended by the US government export control directive on 12 June 2026, following national security concerns. This was a first for any major AI lab. The shutdown has immediate implications for...

PwC Report Suggests Users With AI Skills Are at a Premium for Employers: Key Takeaways for CX and Contact Centre Teams

UK hiring for AI-related roles surged 61% over the past year, rising from 112,000 positions in 2024 to 180,000 in 2025, indicating the evolving skillsets are at a premium for many industries and businesses. This transpired even as overall job...

Impressive AI Chatbot Examples Leaders Should Learn From in 2026

There are two kinds of AI chatbot case studies circulating right now. The first makes you wince; a bot that confidently answers the wrong question, or stonewalls at the moment it matters most. The second actually teaches you something. That...

New 8×8 Capability Lets Contact Center Agents, Customers Speak Different Languages on the Same Call

When a customer phones a contact centre in a language the agent doesn’t speak, the usual outcomes are a transfer, a callback, or an abandoned call. 8×8 is endeavouring to cut that short, introducing live simultaneous voice translation to its...

Fresh ServiceNow and Salesforce Layoffs Coincide With Growing Focus on AI Productivity

ServiceNow and Salesforce are both making workforce reductions, with executives at each company increasingly highlighting AI as a driver of productivity and organisational change. The developments come as both vendors continue to invest heavily in AI-powered products designed to automate workflows,...

Your Customer Experience Roundup: Verizon Says the Quiet Part Out Loud, The Pricing Model Is Changing, and Your AI Agent Now Has an Agent

This week in customer experience, a telecom CEO said what most of his industry peers are thinking but declining to put on record; the earnings season continued its quiet argument for outcome-based AI pricing, and the contact centre software market...

Microsoft Adds Conversation Orchestration to Dynamics 365, Elevating Live Queue Intelligence

Microsoft has unveiled Conversation Orchestration, a new capability within the Service Operations Agent in Dynamics 365 Contact Center. Now in public preview. It continuously monitors and adapts customer conversations in real time using natural-language playbooks, rather than treating routing as...

The Best Customer Service Automation Software in 2026

Automation hasn’t broken customer service. The way most companies are deploying it has. The instinct is understandable. You can close tickets faster, deflect more calls, and reduce headcount pressure. However, speed without resolution is just friction on a faster track....

What Is ChatGPT Saying About Your Brand? Sprinklr’s AI Visibility Tool Will Help You Find Out

Sprinklr has launched a tool that lets enterprises monitor how they appear in AI search results. It will also empower them, where necessary, to do something about elevating their brand visibility. LLM Insights, announced this week and now in limited preview,...

Oracle Earnings CX Analysis: AI, Cloud Ambitions Boom With Over 1,000 Agents Deployed Across App Suite

Oracle’s fourth quarter was, certainly, a busy one, as its investment in cloud and AI infrastructure continued to boom, underpinning its long-term CX strategy. Over 300 Fusion customers went live during the period, among them Westfield Insurance on Fusion ERP, Piraeus...

Microsoft AI Boss Dials Back Prediction that AI Will Displace White Collar Jobs

When Mustafa Suleyman told the Financial Times in February that AI would reach “human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks” within 12 to 18 months, it made uncomfortable reading for anyone running a contact centre workforce. The Microsoft...

Zoom Brings UK Data Hosting to Its Contact Centre and AI Tools — and Isn’t Charging Extra for It

Zoom’s UK data infrastructure is operational. The company has launched regional hosting across more than twenty of its platform services. These include Zoom Contact Center, Zoom Phone, Zoom Virtual Agent, and its Workplace AI features. As a result, UK-processed customer...