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...

BT Taps Anthropic’s Powerful Project Glasswing to Harden UK Network Security and Secure Customer Engagement

BT has confirmed it is joining Anthropic’s Project Glasswing, becoming the first UK enterprise to publicly declare membership of the initiative. The announcement came at the UK Government’s AI Adoption Summit, where BT Chief Executive Allison Kirkby committed the company...

Meet Your New CX Editor

Every time you chase a missing parcel, extensively argue with an automated phone menu, or receive a follow-up email so perfectly timed it’s uncanny, you are living and breathing inside someone’s customer experience strategy. CX is not a vertical. It...

Half a Million NHS Staff Are Getting Microsoft Copilot — How Might it Empower Their CX Teams?

NHS England announced this week that it will roll out Microsoft 365 Copilot to 505,000 clinicians and support staff. This follows what it describes as the largest AI trial of its kind in healthcare. A pilot involving 30,000 staff across 90...

Verizon CEO Just Said What the Contact Centre Industry Already Suspected About AI and the Workforce

Executives rarely admit in public what they might say in private about artificial intelligence and the workforce, especially contact centre roles. Dan Schulman, chief executive of Verizon, broke that convention at the Bloomberg Tech Conference in San Francisco on 4...