At Enterprise Connect 2025, it was clear that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has officially moved from buzzword to battleground. Every major player including AWS, Cisco, Microsoft, RingCentral and Zoom used the event to show off their latest AI-powered innovations in customer and employee experience. And some of it is genuinely impressive.
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After my early Tuesday morning breakout session on How to Evaluate CX Solutions Based on AI-Powered Benefit Ambitions, multiple attendees asked me about a new problem. If my contact center solution comes with AI benefits and my CRM does the same, (or cite an array of different apps now toting AI CX benefits), should I be building AI models that orchestrate capabilities between them? It’s a question most vendors are making really hard to answer.
Like the “system of record” overused phrase there’s a real-world AI-powered multi-CX market opportunity of becoming the single source of AI intelligence within businesses. But what comes with that is the risk of getting pushed into the role of just another supporting AI app which will be tough to come back from.
AI has become a common language. Across every category — CCaaS, CRM/CEC, UCaaS, ERP, VoC, and Digital CX — the same or very similar core AI capabilities are being marketed. And all vendors are positioning themselves as the core of your future CX stack. Walking around the showcase floor at Enterprise Connect, you could almost take the vendor logos off of most of the stands and the messaging would be pretty much the same — “We provide the CX enabled capabilities you need powered by AI”. It’s clear how important it is to win this race.
The problem is, when every vendor is vying for the same spot, to be “the brain” that powers experiences for staff and customers, the poor buyers are left asking a myriad of hard to answer questions such as, “Which platform’s AI do I trust to be our foundational solution? And how do I not end up buying the same thing twice?”
We need to take a look back at how we used to buy to start to help.
Why Buying from Specialist Shops Never Sticks
We used to buy contact center from the contact center shop and CRM software from the CRM shop with a clear and understood difference in purpose and benefits. I’d add Workforce Management and other apps all neatly fit inside a “market”. Same for Speech Analytics, Knowledge Management and so forth.
But the universal truth that differentiation often comes from overlap with different markets persists. And always will. So, CRM vendors started offering things typically found in a contact center product. Everything except voice capabilities, basically — the hard part. It’s easy to build browser-based apps, but building a voice network is entirely different. CCaaS vendors started to offer more in terms of capturing data about customers. Then both CC and CRM vendors started to build in or buy Workforce Management capabilities amongst other things. We already thought buying had become complicated before any mention of AI.
And yet just as we haven’t really scraped the surface of AI, vendors are now talking about Agentic AI as a differentiator. The lesson is likely around how more capabilities and more benefit will continue to increase complication. Buyers are forced to become smarter. Actionary’s clients are asking more and more involved and deeper AI-related questions as evidence of that.
What Does Overlap Look Like in An AI-Powered World
If we start talking a bit more tactically, there’s some very clear common capabilities being talked about:
- CCaaS vendors offer intent detection, real-time summarization, sentiment analysis, agent assist, predictive routing, and AI-driven quality scoring, which now mirror features found in CRM, WEM, and VoC offerings.
- CRM and CEC platforms are embedding conversational AI bots, next-best-action logic, real-time agent assist, and automated case summarization. These directly overlap with what CCaaS and UCaaS vendors are offering in live service interactions.
- UCaaS vendors provide meeting summarization, real-time transcription, suggested responses, and customer chat routing, which were once the domain of contact center platforms. Some are now layering in virtual agents and AI coaching tools for frontline staff.
- VoC platforms have evolved from passive feedback collectors into active AI engines. They now deliver real-time sentiment analysis, interaction summaries, agent performance scoring, and AI coaching, making them almost indistinguishable from WEM or CCaaS functionality.
Without a clear multi-app plan, enterprises risk building a patchwork of AI features that don’t talk to each other, or worse, conflict. And as companies adopt more AI tools, control, policy enforcement, and cross-system coordination is becoming more complicated, too. It feels odd saying this, but not using AI in the right ways could introduce as many problems as it solves.
So How Do Buyers Figure This Out and What Can Vendors Do To Help?
If you’re going to use AI you kind of have to go all-in on it or not really bother. I don’t mean some dramatic and huge switch over from manual to AI-fueled automation over a weekend, of course, rollout should be in controlled stages. But as a company you have to decide, we’re going to be an AI-enabled company.
That first step agreed, the next step is to consider how CX engagement applications like contact center and CRM are implemented as part of operational workflows. The systems by themselves are pretty useless if not part of a well thought out information and process architecture to get things done. And any number of AI benefits won’t fix customer experiences built on flawed processes, (see Key Takeaways from Zendesk’s AI Summit).
CX technology buyers should target AI-powered solutions that support process improvement first, then offer the ability to layer in improvements in customer and employee experiences. That typed, vendors who don’t lead with how their technology is the savior of CX and instead talk about how it solves the bigger operational improvement problem first using AI, will start to make things a little easier for buyers.
The Agentic AI Vision Is Worth Pursuing, But Let’s Keep It Real
One of the biggest themes at EC25 was Agentic AI, the idea that AI agents can go beyond task assistance and act autonomously on behalf of humans. The term was everywhere. And it reflects where the industry is wanting to head. It does feel a bit like running before we can walk but we can never knock vendors for wanting to pull the industry forward. It’s how the world gets better.
The reality is we’re not quite there yet. The tools on display — Zoom’s upgraded AI Companion, Microsoft’s Facilitator Agent, Cisco’s AI Assistants — are evolving fast. They can summarize meetings, interpret sentiment, suggest responses, even automate follow-ups. It’s all valuable. But these systems are still largely reactive, rule-driven, and siloed.
True agentic AI solution would:
- Coordinate goals across systems
- Adapt dynamically to context
- Learn continuously without retraining.
Vendors are on the journey, but buyers should understand that what’s being marketed as “agentic” is still early-stage automation plus smart orchestration. That doesn’t make it bad. It just means expectations should be aligned.
Where Vendors Are Delivering Clear AI-Powered Value
Despite the noise and however you feel about the reality of AI-Powered benefits, many vendors are making real progress. A few examples stood out at the show — these well-integrated tools solve real business problems:
- NICE launched CXone Mpower Orchestrator, an impressive attempt at true end-to-end workflow automation across the customer journey, from bot to back office. It earned the “Best of Enterprise Connect” award for good reason.
- Zoom expanded AI Companion across its suite, showing clear use cases that enhance productivity and agent performance. Their vision of workplace AI that’s proactive, contextual, and consistent is resonating.
- RingCentral’s AIR receptionist was a practical, low-friction solution that caught attention. Businesses are already using it to deflect routine calls and save time, exactly what AI should be doing right now.
- Five9’s new Spotlight for AI Insights turns everyday customer interactions into actionable metrics, democratizing customer intelligence for non-technical leaders.
Where We Go from Here
Enterprise Connect 2025 showed that we’re entering a new phase of CX transformation. AI is becoming embedded in everything, and every vendor wants to be the hero of your customer journey. The opportunity is massive. The tools are improving. And in many places, real value is being delivered.
