March 12, 2026
Voice is Back, AI is Getting Real – Sinch on IHG, and the State of the Industry
At this year’s Enterprise Connect the conversation on the floor kept returning to two themes: voice technology and artificial intelligence. I sat down with Julia Fraser of Cinch to get her take on both, fresh off a keynote session with IHG and contact center platform Genesis.
The IHG Story: A 5,000-Property Voice Overhaul in Two Months
IHG — with more than 5,000 hotel properties worldwide — is not the kind of organisation that makes technology changes lightly. When their contact center was struggling with poor call response rates, low first-call resolution, and degraded voice quality, they needed a solution that could be deployed at scale without disrupting millions of guest interactions.
Sinch, which owns and operates one of the largest voice networks in North America, came in alongside Genesys to replace the telephony layer. The full cutover was completed in two months — a remarkably short window for an organisation of IHG’s scale.
“One of the big risks in a call centre is actually switching out the telephony,” Fraser noted. The session featured IHG’s head of contact centre environment speaking candidly about the personal and professional stakes of making that call — and the results that followed.
The IHG case illustrates a significant dynamic Fraser emphasised, the importance of tight partner alignment. When Sinch and Genesys both treat brand reputation as a shared responsibility, the end customer — in this case, IHG — gets a more cohesive, accountable experience.
Voice Relay – Giving AI a Voice
The bigger announcement came the day before our conversation. Sinch has launched Voice Relay — currently in closed beta — a product designed to close one of the more frustrating gaps in enterprise AI deployment.
The problem it solves is deceptively simple. Most AI in contact centres today communicates through text. Chatbots, LLM-powered assistants, automated workflows — they’re built on text. But for many customer engagements, voice is simply the better medium. Until now, organisations wanting to use voice with their AI systems regularly had to compromise — either abandon their existing LLM environment or bolt on an inflexible voice layer that dictated the underlying AI.
Voice Relay takes a different approach. It’s a bring-your-own-LLM product. Sinch enables the voice capability while leaving the customer’s existing AI infrastructure completely intact. Organisations can switch fluidly between text and voice interactions whilst maintaining their own models, fine-tuning, and workflows.
“We don’t mandate which AI or LLM you want to use,” Fraser explained. “We use what you will, and we enable that whole creating-the-voice experience.”
It’s a strategically smart position. As organisations grow more attached to their proprietary AI environments, the ability to add capability without replacing infrastructure becomes increasingly valuable. Voice Relay bets that the future isn’t one AI platform to rule them all — it’s composable, interoperable pieces that organisations can assemble to fit their needs.
Is This the Year AI Got Real?
Fraser’s observations from the show floor were among the most grounded I’ve heard this week. While AI has dominated every conference agenda for the past two years, there’s often been a gap between the vibe in the room and the substance in the deployments.
That gap, she suggested, is starting to close.
To view the conversation, click on the video below.
