Digital transformation

OpenAI’s Landmark New AI Agent Platform, Presence, Bets On Guardrails and Compliance, Not Bravado

OpenAI has released Presence, a managed platform for running voice and chat AI agents inside customer and employee workflows. These include billing queries, insurance claims, and IT service requests. In OpenAI’s own framing, it’s built for organisations that need governed...

Ericsson Tasks New Vonage CEO to ‘Deliver Superior Customer Engagement’

Ericsson has a new Chief Executive for Vonage, and this time it’s an internal promotion with a track record already on the board rather than an outside bet. The Swedish telecoms giant confirmed on 21 July that Christophe Van de...

The UK Just Gave AI a Seat in Parliament. Here’s What It Means for CX Leaders

Britain’s new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, used his first full day in office to hand AI a Cabinet position in the UK government. Kanishka Narayan, previously a Junior Minister for AI and Online Safety, has been promoted to Minister of...

Microsoft’s Sales Team Reportedly Gets a New Target: Its Own AI Partners in OpenAI and Anthropic

Microsoft’s sales team reportedly has a new pitch for the financial year ahead, one that takes direct aim at Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Naturally, these are the same companies whose models have, until recently, powered parts of Microsoft’s own AI...

The Day AWS Accidentally Billed the World Trillions

At 3:38am UK time on 17 July, a major glitch impacted Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) billing system. For a few anxious hours, some of its customers thought they might have accidentally bankrupted a small country. A Hampshire charity that normally pays...

Voting Opens Today! Decide Your Top 50 TechStars of 2026

Here they are — the list of the Top 50 TechStars for 2026! In our first year, we’ve received a number of great nominations, so thank you very much, everybody! Our list is 50 strong and contains enterprise IT teams,...

Avaya and C1 Renew Their Twenty-Year CX Bet on Each Other

Avaya and C1 have extended the strategic partnership that’s kept them tied together for more than two decades. Nothing about a renewal is necessarily a headline on its own, naturally. However, the timing says something instructive about where contact centre...

The Carbon Cost of Cleverness: How the AI Boom is Busting Your Green Balance Sheet

Why Did Microsoft’s Carbon Emissions Blowout by 25%?   The physical cost of AI is now strikingly apparent. According to Microsoft’s newly published 2026 Environmental Sustainability Report, the tech giant’s total greenhouse gas emissions surged by 25% in its 2025 fiscal year....

Toilet Paper, a Typo, and a Customer Service AI Agent That Wouldn’t Back Down

Who Gives A Crap sells toilet paper by subscription and gives away half its profits to sanitation charities. This has been the Australian company’s remit for some time, but it found itself at the centre of controversy last week. One...

Study: Literally Zero Organisations Report Enterprise-Wide AI Impact in CX, Yet 62% Are Investing More

Not a single organisation in a new industry survey says AI has delivered enterprise-wide commercial impact on its customer experience operations. Despite that, 62% of CX leaders plan to increase AI investment over the next 12 months. That’s the central...

Infobip Buys SocketLabs to Elevate Email Deliverability

Infobip has acquired SocketLabs, a Pennsylvania-based specialist in email infrastructure. SocketLabs has spent 16 years building the unglamorous but essential parts of email deliverability routing across multiple providers. It has also built observability into whether messages actually land in an...

Slackbot Can Now Run Your CRM Thanks to New Salesforce MCP Servers

Salesforce has switched on a set of dedicated Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that connect Slackbot, its AI agent built into every Slack workspace, directly to CRM records, Tableau analytics, Data 360 customer profiles and Agentforce agents. Users can now ask...