Customer Experience

PolyAI CEO: Deflection Rates Are the Wrong Metric for Contact Centre AI

Contact centre AI is often judged by how many customers it keeps away from a human agent. Deflection rate has become the metric that leaders use to justify automation investments, while vendors lean on it to demonstrate value, even as...

Cisco Reports Record Revenue, Fueled by Enterprise AI and Agentic Security Demand

Cisco reported record quarterly revenue of $15.8 billion in Q3 FY2026, a 12% year-over-year increase fuelled by enterprise AI infrastructure investment and a product portfolio that the company says has never been more relevant to its customers. The headline figures confirm...

Konecta Deploys NiCE Pre-Trained AI Agents for Telecoms, Banking, and Retail

Konecta, a global BPO and digital outsourcing provider, has signed a Global Platinum Partnership with NiCE that will embed the vendor’s CXone platform and Cognigy agentic AI technology directly into Konecta’s own open platform. The result is a set of...

Start Human, Support With AI: Where AI Strengthens CX — and Where It Breaks It

According to Gartner research, 81% of senior marketing leaders measure AI automation success by time saved, while only 36% evaluate it through a CX lens. Leaders have long faced a trade-off between productivity and CX, and the usual outcome is...

Preventing AI Workslop in CX: How to Stop Rework, Escalations, and Brand Damage

CX teams seem to love AI. Usage has doubled since 2023, and investment is showing absolutely no sign of slowing down. Despite that, a large number of companies aren’t seeing a positive return on their investment. In fact, AI might...

Are Enterprises Deploying AI Agents Faster Than Their Governance Can Handle?

A large majority of enterprises have rolled back or completely shut down an AI agent in customer communications after it went live, according to a new global study from Sinch. Most of the industry still treats deployment as the biggest challenge,...

Airbnb Claims “Best AI Self-Solve in All of Travel” After AI Resolves 40% of Customer Issues

Airbnb’s AI assistant now resolves over 40% of customer issues without a human agent, up from roughly a third in Q4 2025. During the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call, CEO Brian Chesky described the tool as “by far the best AI...

Cultural Intelligence at Work: What It Is and How It Drives Customer Outcomes 

If your customers are diverse, how confident are you that the people serving them have the tools to meet these customers where they are? For most organisations, the honest answer is: not very. The gap between what your customers are expecting...

Parloa Locks In SAP Partnership to Run AI Agents Inside Service Cloud

AI agents provider Parloa has expanded partnership with SAP to embed its AI agents into SAP Service Cloud, giving enterprises a way to handle customer interactions with more context, continuity, and automation than most standalone systems currently allow. The deal follows...

Preparing Data for Predictive CX and AI: Building the Infrastructure Behind Anticipatory Customer Experience

Most companies are making the same mistake these days by investing more money into AI, automation, and analytics, before they’re actually ready for any of it. As a result, most innovation experiments aren’t paying off like leaders had hoped they...

Vapi Raises $50M to Bring Human-Quality Voice AI to Enterprise Contact Centres

Voice AI platform Vapi has closed a $50 million Series B round after surpassing one billion calls on its platform. The funding round was led by Peak XV with participation from a number of investors, including M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund....

Most Service Leaders Are Expanding Agent Responsibilities, Not Cutting Jobs, Gartner Finds

Sky cut 2,000 contact centre roles last year as part of an AI-led restructuring. Salesforce has tied workforce attrition directly to automation gains. However, a new Gartner survey suggests these high-profile cuts do not represent the majority response. Of 321...