Welcome to this week’s No Jitter Roll, our regular roundup of product news in the communication and collaboration spaces. Leading off this week, we highlight: Zoom’s introduction of new enterprise features, Google Workspace's inclusion of the formerly standalone Gemini app, Google's new Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI, Talkdesk's Healthcare Experience Cloud for Payers, two new Verint bots, ServiceNow's HR solutions, and Integrail's no-code Agentic AI platform.
In partnerships/acquisitions, we note HP's purchase of UC&C player Vyopta, Verint and Five9's deepened partnership, F5 and NetApp's collaboration on multi-cloud RAG, and Intermedia's acquisition of NEC's UCaaS and CCaaS business.
In reports and surveys, we note a study by Intradiem and Metrigy that highlights the link between contact center agent satisfaction and CX, a forecasted rise in Gen AI spending among enterprises from researcher ISG, a strongly growing cloud ecosystem market analysis from Synergy Research, a Fellows Fund trend report that highlights the increasing prominence of Agentic AI and, finally, a report from Cornerstone that underscores the need for human skills even in this AI age.
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Zoom announced several new add-on products and functionalities to help organizations meet their compliance, security, privacy, survivability, and manageability requirements. These include:
Google announced that the formerly standalone Gemini AI app can now be included as part of Workspace Business, Enterprise, and Frontline plans. This change gives customers choice and control (via the admin console) over how the Gemini app handles user prompt and generated response retention. Google also stated that Gemini does not use an organization’s data, user prompts, or generated responses to train or improve Gemini models.
Google also announced a new security advisor toolkit which will offer business-tailored insights, actionable guidance, and additional threat prevention and data protection controls. These insights are delivered to an IT administrator’s inbox, along with recommendations to enhance the organization’s security posture. Gemini for Workspace is now certified according to industry security and privacy standards such as SOC 1/2/3, ISO 27001, and ISO 27701.
Lastly, according to an internal Google analysis of survey data from completed Gemini for Google Workspace pilots, users save an average of 105 minutes per week thanks to the built-in AI. Data was aggregated in July 2024, across 18 enterprise customers globally, spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific. Google looked at more than 3,200 responses from employees across a broad range of industries.
Google also announced Customer Engagement Suite with Google AI. It is an end-to-end application CCaaS product that includes Conversational Agents, Agent Assist and Conversational Insights. The Suite uses the company’s Gemini 1.5 Flash model.
The new Customer Engagement Suite is omnichannel and multimodal. This means that the Suite orchestrates customer experiences across web, mobile, voice, email, and apps. And, the underlying model (Gemini 1.5 Flash) supports multimodal information, including text, voice, and images, so the model itself can interact across those modalities.
Conversational Insights is the renamed version of Google’s ‘Contact Center AI Insights.’ The features within Insights use AI to auto-score all customer conversations and provides data regarding KPIs, topic categories to prioritize, and areas of improvement.
The Conversational Agents product allows the creation of virtual agents which can provide personalized, self-service to customers. The virtual agent creation process enables an organization to create ‘bots’ that will offer responses to predetermined questions along with the Gemini model’s ability to address a broader range of topics. combines controls configured via natural language instructions alongside generative AI.
Agent Assist features include generative AI-powered knowledge assist, a coaching model (which can provide real-time, context guidance to agents), summarization after calls, smart reply (suggested response), and live translation (auto-detects languages and provides bi-directional translation for more than 100 languages).
The Gemini models used by the Conversational Agents and Agent Assist products can be grounded in information from an organization's own resources.
The provider of AI-powered CX technology solutions, launched the Talkdesk Healthcare Experience Cloud for Payers solution which combines contact center technology with healthcare payer-specific AI capabilities and dedicated agent views and tools. It also supports integrations with systems of record, such as claims, customer relationship management (CRM), and electronic health record (EHR) software. Some of the contact center functionality includes real-time guidance for agents, a single view of member interaction history, context, and configurable data (from the integrations) and Talkdesk Automatic Summary which leverages Gen AI to support post-call administrative work.
The provider of AI and CX solutions provider expanded its contact center suite of business analytics with Verint Data Hub which unifies behavioral data across all customer touchpoints across the enterprise. The Verint suite of business analytics includes the Verint Data Insight Bot, and leverages Verint’s Speech Analytics, which uses Gen AI to ‘mine’ unstructured data, such as phone conversations.
Verint also launched aKnowledge Automation Bot for contact center agents. This bot uses AI to automatically search across multiple enterprise content sources. It then leverages Gen AI to summarize these search results into a response to the customer question.
ServiceNow made several announcements related to its HR solutions. For Employee Center, ServiceNow launched ‘guided self-service,’ which provides a way for employees to get help across departments, including IT and HR, via a visual, interactive Q&A experience.
For its Talent Development solution, ServiceNow added new AI-powered capabilities for:
Lastly, ServiceNow introduced new capabilities within its Employee Journey Management product. These new features include expanded access to data that allows HR leaders to understand where employees are at on their career journeys, and a ‘guided decision tree’ feature that allows HR leaders and admins to build flow charts with ‘if this, then that’ scenarios for milestones in employees’ careers that can then be implemented by managers.
These new capabilities are generally available to all customers today.
The start-up Integrail launched AI Studio a no-code Agentic AI platform. Integrail AI Studio features a visual editor that is used to design agentic AI applications. The company stated that any AI model or large language model (LLM) can be used. The AI Studio includes a Benchmark Tool that lets users compare models and evaluate how the agents perform. The AI agents can be integrated with other applications (CRM, marketing automation, customer support, ERP). The agents can also incorporate vector memory and leverage retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The AI Agents can be made accessible to users through a chatbot, custom UI, or other interface options.
HP Inc. acquired Vyopta, provider of collaboration management solutions, offering analytics and monitoring for large, unified communications and collaboration (UC) networks. Vyopta will be integrated into HP’s Workforce Experience Platform.
Verint and Five9deepened their partnership through a new cloud-to-cloud platform integration. This will make it easier for customers to integrate the Five9 Intelligent CX Platform with Verint Cloud Solutions.
F5 provides secure multicloud networking solutions; NetApp provides a suite of data management solutions. RAG has become one way to ‘ground’ the responses of Gen AI solutions in enterprise data. But, enterprise data can be siloed, which complicates integration with LLMs.
F5 and NetApp address this problem by providing secure access to private data from any location and facilitating data transfers for migrations and mobility. By using F5 Distributed Cloud Services and NetApp BlueXP, customers can unify the operational models for data management, security, and networking, and thus enable multicloud RAG.
Intermedia Cloud Communications will purchase NEC's unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact center as a service (CCaaS) business in North America and NEC's partner relationships in Europe. For more, check out Dave Michel’s analysis of the deal.
Intradiem provides contact center automation solutions; Metrigy is a research and advisory firm. The companies announced a study which found that:
Information Services Group (ISG), a technology research and advisory firm, projects that enterprise spending on generative AI will rise by 50 percent in 2025, as companies shift their focus from efficiency to augmenting human expertise. The study shows efficiency, in the form of saving time and driving faster resolutions, is the primary enterprise motivation for implementing Gen AI, followed by business growth, cost savings, customer service and innovation.
To achieve those efficiencies, 28 percent of companies say they are applying GenAI to customer service chatbots, with other top uses being business process workflow management (21 percent), customer service support (19 percent) and contact center management and monitoring (15 percent).
According to the report, 17 percent of organizations expect to capture efficiency ROI in 2024, while 54 percent expect efficiency ROI in 2025. Similarly, 18 percent expect customer service ROI in 2024, rising to 58 percent in 2025. The research results showed similar jumps in expected ROI for innovation, cost savings and business growth.
See here for more information on the ISG State of Applied Generative AI Market report.
According to Synergy Research Group, across cloud service and infrastructure markets, operator and vendor revenues for the first half of 2024 reached $427 billion, having grown by 23% from the first half of 2023. In the first half, growth in IaaS, PaaS and SaaS averaged 21%, while spending on public and private cloud data centers grew by an average of 30%.
“Cloud markets were already growing strongly and AI has now supercharged some of that growth. We see this particularly in the rollout of new and expanded hyperscale data centers,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group.
The Fellows Fund, an AI-focused venture capital firm, released its research report, The AI-Native Paradigm: Trends and Opportunities in Enterprise AI. Among its findings, the report noted several trends:
The report is the culmination of insights gained from speaking with more than 1,000 AI startups over the past two years and conducting in-depth interviews with industry AI experts.
Cornerstone OnDemand Inc., a workforce agility solutions provider announced its SkyHive By Cornerstone Global State of the Skills Economy Report. Among other findings, the report showed that human skills, or soft skills, continue to outpace digital skills, by 2.4X more in North America and by 2.9X more in Europe. Top human skills related job postings are communication, interpersonal collaboration, and problem-solving.
Demand for Gen AI skills is concentrated in industries like software development and IT consulting, but there is a rising demand in financial services, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and banking.
For this report, SkyHive by Cornerstone leveraged its Knowledge Graph of more than 40 TB of data covering more than 200 countries and territories, including job postings, resumes, government data, and other data points in 11 languages.
In case you missed them, here are some of our top stories:
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