Your Customer Experience News Roundup: Oracle’s SEC Filing Names AI in 21,000 Cuts and the Contact Centre Gets a Platform War

This week in customer experience news, Oracle became the first major tech company to attribute workforce reductions to AI in a regulatory filing, a quiet arms race over contact centre workforce management tools broke into the open with launches from...

8×8 Thinks Call Routing Has Been Broken for Decades. Its New AI Intelligent Routing Service Aims to Fix It

Skills-based call routing has been the backbone of contact centre operations for the better part of thirty years. An admin assigns skills to agents; those skills are periodically updated; incoming interactions are matched to the best available fit from the...

Salesforce Unveils Help Agent With Outcome-Based Pricing, Only Gets Paid When Its New AI Works

Salesforce has launched Agentforce Help Agent, a pre-packaged autonomous customer service agent that organisations can deploy across voice, web, portal, and messaging from a single setup screen. Interestingly, customers will only pay, under a new pricing model, when it resolves...

The Bill You Can’t Budget: How AI Is Rewriting the Rules of CX Procurement

The seat-based SaaS model was, whatever its limitations, legible. A contact centre bought licences, counted users, and planned around headcount. Procurement teams knew the unit. Finance could model it. Vendors and buyers, however unequal their footing, at least shared a...

Pegasystems CEO: Vendors Releasing Unpredictable AI Agents Shows a ‘Philosophy of Madness’

The CX and enterprise tech space more broadly is currently gripped by an obsession with scale. Major vendors are envisioning a future populated by tens of thousands of autonomous digital workers. Yet behind the promotional push for independent AI agents,...

Why Customer Satisfaction with Brand Communications Is Falling and How to Fix the Strategy, With Scott Draeger

A strong customer communications strategy requires three things: consistency across channels, clean data governance, and a governance model that treats regulation as a floor rather than a ceiling. Smart Communications’ Scott Draeger argues that most organisations are failing on all...

Oracle Cut 21,000 Jobs Last Year. Its Own Filing Says AI Is a Big Part of Why

On the morning of 31 March 2026, thousands of Oracle employees opened their email to find a message from “Oracle Leadership” confirming their role had been cut, effective immediately. For the vast majority, there was no prior conversation and no...

Microsoft Folds Workforce Management Into Dynamics 365, Gifting One Less Tool for Contact Centre Leaders to Juggle

Workforce engagement management (WEM) is now embedded directly in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Contact Center. It will reach general availability on 30 June 2026. The announcement brings demand forecasting, shift scheduling, quality monitoring, and real-time coaching into the same...

Salesforce Wants to Run Your Entire Contact Centre From One Screen With New Workforce Engagement Management Offering

Contact centre workforce engagement management has a new competitor. Three months after launching Agentforce Contact Center at Enterprise Connect, Salesforce has returned to the stage, this time at Customer Contact Week in Las Vegas, to fill in what was feasibly...

Zoom Elevates Its Virtual Agent Contact Centre AI Platform With a Proper Feedback Loop

Zoom has updated Zoom Virtual Agent with tools for generating, testing, and optimising AI-powered customer service agents. This adds measurement and performance capabilities to its AI contact centre platform that, until now, was arguably stronger on deployment than on what...

CX Voices: Why the NHS Must Rethink How It Talks to Patients with Tom Boyle

For the first time in history, four generations share the same workforce. They are also sharing the same waiting rooms. Yet the NHS still defaults to the letter and the phone call. In the latest episode of CX Voices, Katie...

SAP CEO Says His Developers May Have Four Years Left Before AI Displaces Them. Here’s Why CX Leaders Should Pay Attention

Christian Klein has a prediction about his own workforce, and it is not a comfortable one. The chief executive of SAP, Europe’s largest software company, with a market capitalisation of around $195 billion and more than 110,000 employees globally, told...