Insider Report February 2024

Curated Enterprise Communications News and Insights from February 2024

 

Guest Contributor: The February Insider report proudly presents Laurent Philonenko as a guest contributor this month. Laurent has a long history in enterprise communications, especially contact center. He has held the CTO, COO, and CEO roles at Genesys, led Cisco’s contact center as VP/GM, and also held CTO of Collaboration there before moving to Avaya as CTO and head of M&A and products. He just ended a five-year term as CEO of Servion Global Solutions, a systems integrator and reseller of CCaaS solutions. Laurent also advised companies such as Brand Embassy (bought by NICE) and Koopid (bought by Dialpad). In February 2024, Laurent co-founded the DeepTech Group, an advisory agency specializing in AI solutions for customer experience.

Dave and Laurent wrote this issue collaboratively, but text in blue font should be attributed to Laurent. 

Feature

Bots are on everyone’s mind. How else could Air Canada’s small claims loss over its bereavement policy get so much attention? Despite all the coverage, I’d like to add one more critical point to the conversation. 

Recap: If you were still in winter hibernation, here’s a brief summary of what occurred. A customer took Air Canada to small claims court and won. He wanted the refund he was expecting after following instructions from Air Canada’s chatbot. Air Canada said the chatbot was in error and argued that it was reasonable to deny the refund because the bot provided a link to the correct policy. The court said it’s not up to customers to evaluate which of Air Canada’s sources are accurate.  

There’s very little new here. The bot technology wasn’t new. The fact that a bot (or agent) provided bad information is not new, and the fact that an airline would behave so inappropriately is not new. That’s why this should not be newsworthy. But lying chatbots are newsworthy. Most of the conversations I’ve heard are vehement agreement that brands are responsible for what their chatbots say. 

This particular case involved an old-school chatbot that had bad information. Today’s modern chatbots are much more dangerous to a brand due to hallucinations. What modern chatbots can make up has Nazi-fearing brands and providers terrified. The assumption is that we will solve this soon, but it’s not an easy problem to solve. 

Generative AI is one problem; the outsourcing of operations is another. Open AI had some serious issues this month. Consider this response about mattresses from ChatGPT-4. Generative AI is the only tech in enterprise comms that requires “guardrails.” It’s a clever metaphor about keeping large language model (LLM) bots on course — except guardrails work.  

What this story really highlights is the importance of the transcript. That’s what is (sorta) new. Agents have provided erroneous answers for years, but court cases are rare because it’s a he-said she-said thing. 

Most digital interactions conclude with a written transcript sent to the customer. Suddenly, customers have a transcript in hand, which leaves room for a summons in the other. See how valuable contact center data has become? (The transcript also provided Air Canada’s defense that the bot provided the correct website link.) Most importantly, the transcript, along with sentiment analysis and other tools, provides a feedback improvement loop. 

This was a trivial case, at least in terms of cash. The real damage was in brand reputation (priceless). The stakes are higher now with generative AI, and bigger blunders will soon occur. That’s great news for Air Canada, as its 15 minutes will soon be up. 

General

House AI: The House announced Tuesday that it will launch a bipartisan task force centered on artificial intelligence (AI) to be chaired by Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) and Ted Lieu (D-Calif.). The group will produce a report that will include recommendations for the future and bipartisan policy proposals related to AI. The task force announcement comes just a month after a bipartisan group of lawmakers said they would create a “Working Group” on AI. The group intends to examine how AI impacts the financial services, housing and business markets and operations.

From a global perspective, AI could potentially pull the US further away from the pack. Europe, with its “regulate first, maybe innovate later” mindset, will be left in the dust. China is trailing far behind from an investment point of view. Having so much innovation to regulate is a good problem to have, much better than the alternative.

FCC Robovoice: File this one under unintended consequences. The FCC announced a ruling that makes robocalls using artificial intelligence-generated voices illegal. It’s surprising how fast the FCC can operate. Weeks before, New Hampshire voters received calls from fake Joe Biden. Meanwhile, it took two years to name the new chair of the FCC. 

“Bad actors are using AI-generated voices in unsolicited robocalls to extort vulnerable family members, imitate celebrities, and misinform voters,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement. 

The real problem they are trying to solve is deep fakes. I am sure Taylor Swift is wondering why the rule doesn’t include social media or YouTube (FCC jurisdiction, doh!). Unfortunately, the rule is bad. 

AI-generated voices are fine for robocalls. For example, let’s say there’s a tornado, and you need to robocall thousands of people to evacuate. We need something to warn and inform: choice one is prerecorded messages (for every time of calamity), choice 2 is choppy, slow text-to-speech, and choice 3 is human-like, AI-generated, natural-sounding speech. Obviously, AI-generated robocalls would be preferable. 

There’s a lot of interest in AI-generated voices for brands. I still remember how disturbing it was when Ronald McDonald’s voice changed. AI-generated voices can give brands a consistent voice for centuries. Then there’s the issue of consensual fakes. Is a robocall with a licensed, AI-generated Elvis voice illegal? 

Bluesky: It’s remarkable how hard it is to replace Twitter. I was a Twitter addict but have since made LinkedIn my primary social network. I stopped using Twitter when Tweetdeck became a paid service. However, LinkedIn is not Twitter. LinkedIn is better for people you know, and Twitter is better for people you don’t know. 

I hear from the peanut gallery that X is a dark, hostile place. Twitter has two potential successors, but neither is fully baked yet. Meta’s Threads still lacks functionality, and I haven’t found the enterprise comms audience there. Bluesky (an odd name for a cloud service) has been plodding along slowly and recently popped. It announced it has 4.5M users and is now open to the public (invitations be gone). Best of all, Bluesky created a free Tweetdeck clone! In attempting to create a decentralized social network, Bluesky joins several other intriguing decentralized products inspired by and unrelated to Bitcoin. 

Cisco MS Sub-Collaborate: Cisco Webex’s pivot to Microsoft-friendly is still awkward but appears to have been a brilliant move. When this occurred last year, I theorized that Microsoft is voting for Cisco Webex to be #2 after Teams instead of Zoom or Google. 

Microsoft and Cisco already share a lot of enterprises on their customer lists. The companies know how to work together — including this new cable. This month, Cisco and Microsoft collaborated to successfully execute a cutting-edge 800Gbps transmission trial on the Amitié transatlantic cable. The subsea cable runs 6,234 kilometers from Boston, Massachusetts, to Bordeaux, France. 

RingCentral Health: RingCentral for Healthcare includes medical-specific APIs, improved security and privacy, and HIPAA and HITRUST certifications. Over the past 18 months, RingCentral claims it added 500 new healthcare customers.

AI 

Open AI Video: OpenAI stunned the world again, this time with videos. OpenAI can now turn text into full-motion short videos, and it’s impressive. It appears to be based on at least some open-source papers. It has its challenges, but it appears AI-based video generation is not far behind text and pictures. Here’s a link to the magic.

Google Gemini: Finally, it appears Google is closing the gap with OpenAI. Things that took years are now occurring in months — rebranding, for example. Google rebranded Bard as Gemini in just months. Because Gemini is multimodal, it can manage text, images, and audio (plus video soon?) in the same session, plus input of up to 1M tokens (e.g., an hour of video or 70k words). And just like that, the modern office suite now includes office productivity, email, chat, and AI. 

AI and Marketing: We are still in the early innings of generative AI. The technology has many use cases across enterprise communications, especially the contact center. The biggest wins so far are outside of enterprise communications, especially coding and marketing. 

Every company codes, and Generative AI is making it easier. Many organizations are finding that generative AI enables them to write applications faster with fewer resources. What I didn’t fully appreciate was the disruption occurring in marketing. We learned more from recent investor days at WPP, one of the world’s largest advertising companies. WPP demoed its internal AI workspace optimized for AI-powered text and image creation. The AI gets trained on particular brands’ tone or voice, target demographics, and other details. Coca-Cola intends to use Generative ML to create thousands of marketing assets automatically.

AI Voice: Meta is quietly doing superb work on codecs. If you wonder why this still matters, it is time to look at neural audio compression. High-quality voice at lower bandwidth is happening, opening the door to new applications and cost reductions. Not to be undone, Cisco announced an AI-based codec last fall. Specifics on where exactly this codec is used are unavailable; it would be logical that it starts in Webex Meetings before applications in Webex Calling and Contact Center emerge. Google has also released ultra-low-bandwidth codecs. Watch the space.

In the same vein, a new emerging category is real-time accent neutralization — a tantalizing prospect for business process outsourcers (BPOs). (Offline voice processing has been around for a while and is much less interesting.) It’s still cutting-edge, but technology has progressed fast and is now credible, thanks to companies like Meaning. Many use cases exist beyond contact centers, and we will see this technology percolating in several voice applications.

Small Language Models (SLMs) are delivering noteworthy performance, with several implications. One is that LLMs are not a panacea, and in many situations, SLMs are sufficient. They offer developers a tempting alternative with their lower training and runtime costs. It’s a new battleground: Microsoft, Google, Meta, and others provide SLMs in an open-source fashion. There is a bit of DIY involved, but beyond cost, they have two other advantages: You can run these models without a huge NVIDIA investment, and it is easier to achieve low response latency with an SLM. To make your bot faster and more responsive, it matters. Between the public LLMs and the open-source SLMs, companies like symbl.ai occupy a middle ground: accurate and fast via specifically trained models, and developer-friendly via simple APIs. As enterprises continue to invest in automated customer experience, the AI infrastructure strategy becomes a matter of choice based on the available skills, the need for control and data privacy, cost optimization, and the enterprise’s general IT environment.

Chips: The stunning growth of NVIDIA — now a $2 trillion company — is spawning new startups that want to participate in the gold rush. Contenders to watch include Cerebras, Groq (everybody is talking about it at the moment, and while their language processing unit (LPU) seems quite interesting, they haven’t killed NVIDIA yet), and others. It’s not a game for the faint of heart — ask the UK’s Graphcore, which apparently is not doing so well, or even Intel, which is now doing the unthinkable: helping others build chips. If you do the math, even Sam Altman’s $7 trillion plan is not ridiculous, assuming that AI can generate a few percent of global GDP growth over the next five to 10 years. Think of it: global GDP is around $100 trillion, growing at 3-4% annually. In this light, $7 trillion doesn’t look like that much; 1% supplemental growth over seven years will do. Of course, it is not as simple as that, but the point is that Sam Altman is not delirious (we knew that). According to Jensen Huang, the installed data center base is $1 trillion, and $2 trillion will be added in the next four to five years. A large chunk of the workload in these AI data centers will revolve around customer experience and foster the next generation of contact centers. We will also see a massive expansion of data center builders — somebody has to do it, and for most enterprises, the talent pool is insufficient today. This is an incredible opportunity for the Accentures and Deloittes of this world.

The Newest Nazi Saga in AI: What is it with AI and Nazis? Google did not want Gemini to fall into the AI/Nazi abyss, so it built lots of “guardrails” to ensure Gemini would not generate offensive, biased, or stereotyped content. What can possibly go wrong? When Gemini was asked to create images of SS soldiers, it generated politically safe photos with a range of genders and ethnicities — black stormtroopers. 

Asked “Who negatively impacted society more, Hitler or Elon Musk?” Gemini responded, “Not possible to say definitively.” History is not politically correct, but AI is? Gemini might just be what Florida needs to write its textbooks. 

Meetings and Messaging

Chat in Outlook: Microsoft is bringing Teams chats to Outlook! Ironic? There was a time when (some) people thought Teams chat would kill email. Not me — email is way too useful and interoperable. Ironically, interoperability is email’s key asset AND liability. It enables us to easily communicate across domains, companies, countries, etc., but all those conversations, distractions, and spam make Teams messaging appear more efficient. 

I have never understood why the Teams client exists. I thought it should have been built into Outlook from the beginning. Instead, we have two heavy, fat clients for communications. Meanwhile, Google has email and Chat (and Calendar) without any clients (web pages), and Teams now prefers nonsubscribers use a browser. 

Slack AI: Slack added generative AI features that can summarize threads and channels and support prompts about work content. This is a paid add-on available to Slack Enterprise users. There are some interesting use cases, such as requesting a summary in chat after being tagged. Another is to query Slack with a question about a project. 

Two takeaways to consider: Generative AI has or will kill all hope for E2EE on enterprise communications. Also, every text box, in every application, is going to get an LLM-powered assistant. 

Apple Message Encryption: While the enterprise will be running from E2EE (to accommodate AI), consumer apps will likely run toward E2EE (partly to get away from AI). Apple announced a new encryption model for iMessage that is secure against quantum computing. 

Logi Sustainability: Logi video is going all-in on next-life plastics (known as PCR — post-consumer resin). The Rally Bar, Rally Bar Mini, Tap IP, Tap Scheduler, and RoomMate are being refreshed to have a lower carbon impact. Many of Logi’s newer products, including the Sight, already use PCR plastics. The upgrade is not affecting prices. Logi also claims to use “low-carbon aluminum,” made with renewable energy, and low-impact packaging from FSC-certified forests. Also, CollabOS Power Management offers energy monitoring. 

Cisco, too, has turned up carbon and energy tracking in the Webex suite. A new Carbon Emissions Insights widget in Control Hub allows companies to see Cisco devices’ estimated carbon emissions and energy use. The goal is to monitor emissions, track trends, and provide enterprises more control over their emissions. 

These developments make sense to me. Most of Europe is actively trying to reduce carbon emissions, but it’s a difficult topic in the US. A recent Pew study found climate concern is consistent with political affiliation: 78% of Democrats consider climate change a major threat, compared to 23% of Republicans. As a result, most corporations publicly avoid the topic. 

Meanwhile, the planet continues to get warmer, and extreme weather events continue to increase. Teleworking is one of the most powerful things most of us can do to reduce carbon and emissions. I am pleased to see Logi and Cisco promoting reduced carbon as part of their brand promises. 

Cisco Webex Updates: Cisco has released some features announced last October at WebexOne, including AI summaries for meetings, Vidcast, and chats (beta). Cisco also announced Webex support on Apple TV 4K systems. Cisco released a meetings client for Apple Vision Pro that goes deep with the spatial capabilities of the device. 

Workvivo Retention Insights: Zoom’s Workvivo joined forces with Adoreboard for improved insights into employee emotional health. The Workvivo Boost Program analyzes the emotional intensity in employee interactions within Workvivo. The goal is to help employers tap into nuances of employee sentiment, enabling proactive measures to rebuild trust and foster a more cohesive and supportive workplace culture. 

This is an interesting twist. There’s so much focus now on using AI to improve CX and CSAT, but the tools can also be used internally. 

Customer Engagement

Cisco and Journey: Cisco Contact Center has a new partnership with Journey, which is becoming a member of the SolutionsPlus program. Journey will assist Cisco across all three of its contact center pillars: never wait, never repeat, and [be a] personal concierge. Webex Contact Center customers can now use Journey’s technology to streamline the customer experience and bolster security by harnessing the capabilities of smartphones during contact center interactions. Journey’s products and services will be available directly from Cisco. 

8x8 Proactive Outreach: 8x8 CCaaS customers can now natively message over SMS and WhatsApp. The new service offers inbound routing and personalized, outbound messaging. Proactive notifications can increase customer satisfaction and reduce time-consuming inquiries. Many use cases include targeted campaigns, appointment reminders, emergency weather updates, and more. 

8x8 Engage: This is a new productized offering of the informal contact center, or CC for nonagents. 8x8 has been talking about this for a while under the XCaaS banner. XCaaS acknowledged that meaningful customer interactions happen outside the contact center, and Engage fills those gaps. It gives nonagents more CX tools, such as recording and logging. CX is often incorrectly used interchangeably with CCaaS. More commonly, it refers to an expansion of contact center services. 8x8 improves CX by expanding UCaaS. 

8x8 CIDP: The new Customer Interaction Data Platform (CIDP) consolidates fragmented views of the customer from multiple internal systems. Solving this problem is tricky, and attempting to do so may have been fatal for Twilio. However, it has become far more urgent as we need more data to train AI. 

CIDP ingests data from various sources, analyzes it using AI/ML, and then provides insights from the data via APIs but does not actually consolidate the data. While there is a tremendous amount of focus on AI right now, it’s the data that determines its effectiveness. 

Playvox and Five9: Playvox's full Workforce Management Solution is now available on the Five9 CX Marketplace.

Carriers and CPaaS

VVA: Vonage announced that both Verizon and AT&T plan to enable developers to build advanced, secure, and reliable applications with access to networking and 5G API capabilities. Bringing CPaaS expertise and APIs to the modern wireless network was the stated purpose of Ericsson’s acquisition of Vonage. APIs will be available to detect behaviors, deliver insights into network performance, and drive converged programmable network solutions. Standardized CAMARA APIs are also expected, such as the Number Verification API, Device Status API, and SIM Swap API, all of which will help developers integrate fraud detection and device management functionality into their applications. The wireless carriers believe opening APIs to developers will generate more applications for their wireless and fiber networks.

Vonage and AWS: Vonage and AWS announced a vague API partnership and said AWS will offer Vonage’s Fraud Protection Suite. It also appears that Vonage will be hosting parts of its CPaaS business on AWS. Coopetition? These providers are competitors (AWS has a private 5G service and the Chime SDK CPaaS). 

The emerging role of the hypervisors appears to include announcements of implied partnerships in exchange for IaaS commitments. 

CPaaS + Gen AI: [CPaaS (or other provider)] integrates generative AI via [LLM stack provider] into its [core products]. This month: Infobip, OpenAI via Azure, AI Hub, and Advanced AI Assistant. 

Infobip RCS: Infobip upgraded its Business Messaging Solution to support RCS. Aimed at MNOs, it gives them branded and verified sender, clickable button replies, messages, and more. Enterprises can get RCS from its Messaging-as-a-Platform (MaaP) service. With Apple intending to support RCS, I expect RCS messages to quickly become the standard for B2C asynchronous interactions.

The Business Section

Notion and Skiff: More news from Notion! This time, it acquired Skiff, a platform that offers E2EE file storage, docs, calendars, events, and email. Skiff was started in 2020 and had raised $14.2M. It has built out an alternative to O365 and Google Workspace (docs, email, and calendar). The Skiff product will shut down after six months, and Skiff users will become Notion users automatically. Other acquisitions that Notion has made include Flowdash and Cron in 2022 and Automate.io in 2021. Last month, Notion launched a calendar. 

Speaking of calendars, somebody has to find a better way. I haven’t found a simple way to consolidate several calendars into a unique view. This is more than a passing annoyance and likely an area where AI can contribute. 

Sierra AI: Former Salesforce co-president, Quip founder, and instigator of acquiring Slack Bret Taylor left Salesforce to start a new company with Clay Bavor. What company, you ask? Sierra, with a new conversational AI-powered customer service bot. The company made a dramatic appearance with some impressive customers, though I still find it odd. Bret and Stewart at Salesforce seemed like a good formula. 

Sierra is working to establish itself in a very crowded sector. In a blog post, Sierra claims its virtual agents will be able to reason, solve, and make decisions. Exciting! Take a number. There are several hundred firms (or is it all firms?) working that angle, including behemoths (Microsoft) and startups (Forethought and Ada). I’m sure this venture will be successful, but I was hoping for something better. 

There are bots, and then there are bots. The market is confused, with so many companies boasting identical claims. Where will differentiation come from? 

Let’s start with a superior go-to-market: buy your initial customers, develop crucial partnerships with large systems integrators, and create a flywheel effect — that takes capital, and unless your product is meeting expectations, it’s highly risky. There will be a big shakeout. Successful providers will have superior tech and/or M&A engines. 

To mention one example, it is possible to innovate with LLMs, as Mistral has demonstrated with the sliding context window. For example, accuracy, latency, safety, security, explainability, and dialog analytics are dimensions that not all companies will excel at. Or, wait for things to shake out a little bit and start buying good stuff at bargain prices. Opportunities will abound, and soon.

Five9 Refi: Five9 announced it is raising $650M in convertible notes that will mature on March 15, 2029. The notes are expected to settle on March 1, 2024. The company secured favorable terms due to strong growth and financial results. Initial purchasers have been granted a 13-day option to purchase up to an additional $97.5M of the notes. Net proceeds are estimated to be approximately $633.5M-$728.8M. This refinanced some overhang and allows for potential acquisitions. 

Earnings

Without boring you with a detailed analysis of the numbers, it’s fair to say that growth has slowed down, and the guidance doesn’t point to a spectacular recovery in 2024, to say the least.

I won’t enter into the GAAP/non-GAAP obfuscation. Instead, I will just make a few observations on the critical financial elements: revenue growth, gross margin, net income, cash, and debt. Of course, this applies only to public pure-play companies, such as AUDC, EGHT, FIVN, NICE, RNG, and TWLO, in alphabetical order.

One of these companies has the group’s highest growth rate, gross margin, and net income while having significant cash and little debt. Another has seen its growth slow down sharply but still has a pile of cash. Others have debt obligations to consider and will focus even more on profitability in the next quarters — and might not be able to fund the moves they need to make in AI.

Let’s look at the rule of 40 (revenue growth percentage + EBITDA percentage, based on the last quarterly result, EBITDA percentage per Google Finance) and how the UCaaS/CCaaS public companies and the hyperscalers stack up on this metric, which combines revenue growth and profitability. Above 40, shareholder value creation expands much faster than below.

On this metric, NICE is punching in a higher weight class than everybody else.

NICE is doing well, and Barak Eilam is not shy about it. ICYMI, his recent LinkedIn post about sales compensation at NICE is an in-your-face way of signaling success and destabilizing the good salespeople of his competitors. It is also a great tribute from Barak to his sales team, which is refreshing. NICE’s executives recurringly talk about its strong balance sheet, and they are right; it matters, now and in the long term. Expect them to continue to fund above-average growth.

How Genesys is really doing is a question mark, given its private nature and the heavy financial engineering that is ongoing. We do know that the ARR of Genesys Cloud is growing fast and that legacy products still account for about 60% of revenue, per the last published numbers. It’s difficult to force a base to migrate, especially when customers have spent so much effort on customization over the years and somehow expect Genesys Cloud to be a like-for-like migration. For the nostalgic reader, we must admit that the T-Server, which was the brilliant foundation of Genesys, has run its course, and it’s now time to embrace cloud and AI, not CTI protocol conversions.

Cisco’s collaboration business is growing at 3% annually, driven by Webex Calling and Devices, while Meetings revenue is decreasing. There was no mention of Webex Contact Center in the last earnings call, but there is evidence that the business is picking up steam — Cisco is really good at account management, and they have a lot of accounts with contact centers. The progress of WebexCC seems reminiscent of when I joined Cisco and tripled the contact center business in a short time.

Zoom’s November earnings presentation was more interesting in what it didn’t talk about than what it did show: Zoom Meetings was absent. Maybe, like Cisco, Zoom One (meetings) is under pressure, while Zoom Phone and Contact Center are doing well (the latter is still a relatively new offer; 700 customers is not Zoom-scale yet, but it demonstrates progress). The real question is what Eric will do about his pile of cash. I would love to see something more ambitious than stock buybacks and dividends, perhaps with Zoom making a market-changing big bet that would keep Microsoft guessing. The new CTO coming from Azure AI might want to expand the Zoom AI Companion — which just passed the 500,000-user mark — to a much broader scope than meeting summaries. Indeed, one could spend a few billion on that.

A common theme between Cisco, Zoom, and everybody else is the infusion of AI into every segment of their portfolios. It would be enlightening to understand how much R&D is invested there as opposed to “traditional” capabilities.

As AI disrupts and hyperscalers increasingly encroach on the CX space, the margin for error in the race to stay relevant or acquire leadership is shrinking. If you believe that you need to be good at AI to succeed in the CX space, then the ability to invest in the next 24 months is paramount. 

This is why financial analysts focus on AI in the earnings call. It seems overindexed, but they might be right. AI is sucking all the oxygen in the deal room.

GoTo Cash: The GoTo Group announced a debt exchange offer after raising $100M in capital (no impact on GoTo’s equity ownership). All revolving lenders unanimously agreed to extend the timeframe on GoTo’s $250M revolving credit facility for over two years. GoTo said that all participants in the exchange would receive new term loans or notes with enhanced security and stricter covenants. The debt exchange offer is available to all lenders and noteholders. GoTo expects the transition will cause a substantial reduction in its debt balance and interest expenses. 

Twilio: Last month, Twilio’s founder left the company, and the stock price rose to $73. As of the last part of February, the stock has been stuck around $57, and everyone is guessing which assets it sells next. I hate to see this dismembering, but many CPaaS providers are benefiting. Twilio is sacrificing itself to give the CPaaS sector (that it created) a needed boost. 

Leadership Changes

EvolveIP changed up its leadership suite: Jeff Coursen became its new CEO, replacing Pete Stevenson; Peter Eisengrein was named the new Chief Product Officer, Martin Call was named COO, and Bryan VanderGast was named Chief Accounting Officer. Coursen joined Evolve IP in 2017 and held the roles of Chief Financial Officer and Strategic Adviser. Eisengrein co-founded Evolve IP in 2007. Call was formerly SVP Client Success. VanderGast was previously EVP Finance & Corporate Controller.

Nextiva named Jim Nystrom CRO. Nystrom held leadership roles at Dialpad, Five9, and Verizon Business. With the acquisition of Thrio, expect Nextiva to broaden its reach to a broader set of use cases with its base and prospects. Talkdesk named Albert Caravelli as its SVP of Strategic Alliances and Partners. He intends to grow channel sales from 60% to 90% of revenue. Mitel named Eric Hanson as CMO. Hanson was the CMO at Fuze before its acquisition by 8x8. Also, Simon Skellon was named SVP and Head of International. Kevin Jones is no longer the CEO of Calabrio. Calabrio has had three CEOs in 13 months. My guess is that all three failed to sell the business to Cisco. 

Lumen named Ryan Asdourian as its CMO and Dave Ward as CTO. Ward replaces Andrew Dugan, the only executive CEO Kate Johnson had not replaced since she arrived in November 2022. Asdourian was previously with Microsoft, and Ward was previously the chairman and CEO of PacketFabric. 

Steve McGovern is no longer the Managing Director of Dubber. The conversational recording company is trying to find $26.6M discovered to be missing during its audit and suspended McGovern during the investigation. Executive Director Peter Pawlowitsch has been named Acting CEO. The company does not believe these developments will affect its previously reported top-line revenue or operations. 

Goodreads

1. Denmark orders schools to stop sending student data to Google The agency is concerned about the personal data that is transferred to Google. 
2. Generative AI is increasingly being used to defraud businesses of big money and no one is prepared The threat of AI-generated deepfakes went from a near concern to a real and present danger, playing out faster than many predicted.
3. AI Is Starting to Threaten White-Collar Jobs. Few Industries Are Immune Leaders say the fast-evolving technology means many jobs might never return.
4. AI at Work In a short span of time, artificial intelligence has gone from a pipe dream to a ubiquitous feature. What does that mean for industries, workers, and consumers?
5. Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot “Air Canada does not explain why the webpage titled ‘bereavement travel’ was inherently more trustworthy than its chatbot.”
6. Satellites Are Becoming the New Cellphone Towers Larger antennas and better beamforming are routing calls through orbit. 
7. The Problem With Digital Is That It’s Contextualized As “More Shit To Manage” Work isn’t about info flowing smoothly. It’s about protecting your perch.
8. Early Adopters of Microsoft’s AI Bot Wonder if It’s Worth the Money Artificial-intelligence aide handles email, meetings, and other things, but its price and limited use have some skeptical.
9. Companies’ hard-line stance on returning to the office is backfiring More than three years in, the battle over offices is as bitter and entrenched as ever. 
10. OpenAI Isn’t Open Enough for Elon Musk is suing for breach of contract. One problem with this claim is that the contract doesn’t quite exist.

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2023 Insider Reports (only new Insider Reports are behind the paywall) 

1. Insider August 2023
2. Insider September 2023
3. Insider October 2023
4. Insider November 2023
5. Insider December 2023
6. Insider Lite Jan 2024 (Twilio)
7. Insider Lite Jan 2024 (Key Trends)
8. Insider Jan 2024
9. Insider Lite Feb 2024

 

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