Artificial Intelligence

Sanas Opens Its Speech AI to Developers and Small Businesses

Sanas has expanded its real-time speech platform and opened it to developers and small businesses for the first time. The Palo Alto firm built its name on Universal Accent Translation, which transforms a speaker’s accent in real time without altering their...

New York Mets Tap Cresta to Run Ticketing With Conversational AI

Cresta has announced a partnership with the New York Mets that brings conversational AI into the baseball franchise’s ticketing operations and fan service. The deal gives one of the most followed teams in Major League Baseball a set of AI...

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...

Your Employee Experience Roundup: Gen Z’s Pay Surge, Gallup’s AI Layoff Gap and the Entry-Level Squeeze

It has been a quieter week on the employee experience news front, which felt fitting for one spent largely trying to stay cool. What did surface kept returning to younger workers: their financial reality, their shrinking access to entry-level work,...

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...

How to Analyse Customer Feedback with AI

Most companies genuinely believe they’re listening, and to be fair, they’re putting in the effort. CSAT scores get reviewed obsessively. Surveys go out on schedule. Social comments, Reddit threads, and reviews get monitored. The problem is that all of this...

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...

AI Promised Faster Marketing. Now Campaigns Requires More People Than Ever

AI was sold to marketers as a way to do more with less. Yet most marketing leaders now say a single campaign pulls in 10 or more people, and for many that figure runs past 20, according to research from...

What the Gallup AI Layoff Gap Means for the Employees Who Stay

New research from Gallup cuts against the dominant narrative about AI and jobs. Among US technology workers, those who used AI less than monthly were three times as likely to have been laid off as colleagues who used it at least monthly. The...

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...

New Voice AI Agents From Five9 Aim to Retire the Scripted Phone Bot

Voice has long been the hardest and most costly customer service channel to automate. Calls are full of interruptions, background noise and questions that change halfway through, which is why many companies still rely on scripted bots and old Interactive...

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,...