Insider

Insider Report June 2026

July 06, 2026 by Dave Michels

Curated Enterprise Communications News and Insights from June 2026

Subscription Improvements: Your TalkingPointz paid subscription is improving. We intend to post more content behind the paywall and significantly increase paid content, and we are considering breaking the monthly Insider Report newsletter into smaller newsletters. This week, paid subscribers will find our uncensored discussion about the Infocomm keynotes and a briefing on Infobip. Regardless of frequency, the Insider News reports will continue to be available to all paid subscribers. New additional content, such as briefs and videos, will require the full subscription.

June was a very busy month. We are publishing a little later into July this time due to travel last week, but remember, we already posted an additional June Insider three weeks ago. The June Insider Extra covered Cisco Live, Zoom news, 8x8 Analyst Event, NiCE World US, Q-SYS Activate, Infocomm Preview, and MS Build.

Featured

The AI debate is polarized: Bulls see a paradigm shift; bears see an overheated market. Both sides miss the primary truth: AI development is outpacing our ability to model its impact. We are moving from chatbots to autonomous, multifunctional operating systems, and everything will change.

While everyone was watching Hormuz, the AI model layer kept accelerating. There have been roughly two dozen notable model releases, model-family launches, previews, or major capability rollouts during the Iran skirmish. Anthropic alone shows the speed of the cycle: Claude Opus 4.7, then Opus 4.8, then Mythos Preview, and then Fable 5/Mythos 5. OpenAI released GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.5. DeepSeek released V4 Preview with a 1-million-token context window. Google, xAI, Mistral, Moonshot, MiniMax, Qwen, and NVIDIA all pushed forward as well. AI is not waiting for the Strait, inflation data, or anything else.

The rapid pace of AI advancement necessitates frequent reevaluation of the sector. Market analysis from earlier in the period may no longer reflect current capabilities. While significant increases in the market capitalization of AI infrastructure companies have led to discussions regarding a potential market bubble, the primary technical consideration remains the continued evolution of the intelligence stack.

The reality is that the AI models keep getting better – and we aren’t talking minor incremental improvements. The models have become more capable at coding, reasoning, tool use, computer use, long-horizon tasks, and workflow execution. Anthropic described Claude Opus 4.5 as setting a new standard across coding, agents, and computer use. Instead of looking at stock charts, see the technology curve. As the models become more useful, the systems using them become better.

People who had never coded before are building. AI is liberating. It is li

General News

Think Global, Compute Local: When the internet was new and idealistic, it was open and borderless. That’s slowly been changing, but the walls are being erected quickly. Chinese companies must assist their government when asked to do so. That’s the primary reason so many Western countries have abandoned Huawei for critical infrastructure. But the US Cloud Act requires the same of American companies.

That’s not particularly new, but it’s become a bigger concern. There’s been a lot of drama between the US and its allies this year, from tariffs to Greenland. The US stopped supporting Ukraine, and NATO is much weaker today than it was a year ago. The US has lost the war with Iran by most measures, raising more concerns about the power of its military. Both Russian and US military forces were built for a different era.

This month, the US government blocked Anthropic’s technology from non-US citizens – without warning or explanation. International customers are coming to the conclusion that they should build their own critical systems with domestic technologies. This comes on top of the general trend of data sovereignty.

It’s not just a matter of national security; it’s also becoming more important to build walls for the children. The UK government intends to restrict who can access social media (+16 years of age) and will impose restrictions on gaming and livestreaming. The measures would require social media platforms, including Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and X, to age-verify their users. The government is also considering curfews and required breaks in scrolling for under-18s. Regardless of whether you agree, the changes will require a significant lift to implement and enforce.

The Fourth and Fifth Hyperscaler: We all know there is a data center shortage, and the hyperscalers are rushing to build capacity – but SpaceX and Meta, which already built it, can’t seem to retain staff to make it work. Both firms have decided to rent their capacity to Anthropic and OpenAI.

The market has been positive on this for SpaceX. It has very quickly monetized its resources and created revenue overnight. Meta is more complex. Just recently, the company announced it didn’t have enough data center capacity. Mark is looking more and more like a one-hit-wonder. At least he didn’t rename Meta to something like HyperScale.

Infobip Analyst Event: Although Infobip is 20 years old, it’s the first time they've invited Michels to their analyst event. The meetings took place in Croatia. Overcoming the great odds for a Croatian company to be a Leader in any tech category contributes to the culture of this small but fierce CPaaS provider. Michels will soon post a separate brief for subscribers.

Zoom BrightHire: Zoom expanded its portfolio again: It now offers BrightHire to provide job interview insights. This isn’t just an interview bot that scores candidates. It also helps employees conduct better interviews, an area where few hiring managers have benefited from formal training. Knowing that hiring typically involves an interview, Zoom is extending its expertise in meetings to hiring. It offers assistance in identifying candidate fraud, such as real-time AI prompting, location misrepresentation, and deepfakes; provides hiring managers coaching and AI summarization; and pairs behavioral and device signals with automated interview planning and audit-ready records to protect talent pipelines.

AI News

Microsoft Copilot Cowork: Microsoft made Copilot Cowork GA worldwide. More than half of the Fortune 500 have tried Copilot Cowork during its preview, including companies like Accenture, Avanade, Advance Local, Capital Group, Koch, Ooredoo, and Zurich Insurance. Cowork is the fastest-growing feature in the history of Microsoft’s Frontier program and has among the highest user satisfaction of any Copilot or agent experience Microsoft has shipped.

Copilot Cowork requires the Microsoft 365 Copilot User Subscription License (USL), with usage billed on a consumption basis through Copilot Credits. Copilot Cowork runs on Anthropic models, including Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6. In Frontier, customers can also use GPT 5.5. Microsoft is pricing aggressively against Claude Cowork and promises better results due to its WorkIQ knowledge discovery.

This shift marks a notable evolution for Microsoft, which has been one of OpenAI’s most important partners and investors. The company has committed billions of dollars to OpenAI and last year signed a multibillion-dollar agreement with Anthropic. Microsoft does not view the market as a winner-take-all contest.

While Microsoft has developed its own AI systems, it has lagged behind some competitors in consumer adoption. Rather than competing solely to build the most advanced frontier models, Microsoft appears increasingly focused on making AI models interchangeable and widely available. Microsoft has hinted at supporting DeepSeek, which could provide a powerful cost advantage.

Meetings and AV

David Danto is the primary author of this section.

InfoComm 2026 – The Big Picture: After attending nearly four decades of InfoComm shows, I came away from this year’s event with the feeling that the industry has reached a genuine turning point. The exhibit floor was somewhat smaller than in its peak years, but the conversations were considerably larger. Rather than simply introducing faster cameras, better microphones, or larger displays, manufacturers were almost universally talking about workplace intelligence, AI-assisted operations, interoperability, management platforms, and business outcomes. The industry increasingly appears to agree on where it is headed. The remaining debate centers on who will get there first and whose approach customers will ultimately embrace.

Perhaps the biggest surprise was the tone set by the keynote presentations. Microsoft’s Ilya Bukshteyn and Cisco’s Espen Løberg delivered presentations that felt far more like Enterprise Connect than the traditional, inspirational InfoComm keynote. Both described remarkably similar futures centered on intelligent workplaces, AI, connected environments, and human-plus-agent collaboration. At the same time, the latest versions of interoperability finally moved from a theoretical discussion to practical implementation. Cisco’s native Zoom Rooms announcement, Airtame’s and Mago’s application-switching demonstrations, ClickShare’s continued platform flexibility, and Microsoft’s differing approach reignited a debate that continues to play out vigorously across social media, analyst circles, and the industry at large. It may ultimately be remembered as the year interoperability stopped being a marketing slogan and became a customer expectation.

Key manufacturer announcements included Cisco’s native Zoom Rooms support, Logitech’s Digital Cocoon, Q-SYS’ Windows-based Teams Rooms bar, Neat’s Thinking Rooms and Intelligent Framing, Airtame and Jabra's application-switching architecture, ClickShare’s expanded wireless BYOD capabilities, NetSpeek’s LENA AI management platform, Owl Labs’ enterprise services strategy, Insta360’s expansion into enterprise collaboration, Biamp’s workplace platform strategy, EPOS’ focus on lifecycle serviceability, Cleerline’s BendSafe fiber expansion, Matrox’s MVX platform, Nureva’s HDX progress update, Shokz’ OpenMeet 2, Mago’s cross-platform collaboration approach, Planar’s Mantis rental LED platform, Zoom’s renewed emphasis on meeting quality, and numerous additional announcements reflecting an industry moving steadily toward intelligent workplace platforms rather than standalone devices.

Watch all the InfoComm 26 TalkingPointz PickHitz Showcase firms via this playlist.

Leadership Brief InfoComm 2026

InfoComm 2026 Industry Analysis and Event Report

Pexip for Android: Pexip has extended its enhanced interoperability experience to Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android, closing a significant gap in its portfolio. Until now, its richer cross-platform meeting experience was available only on Teams Rooms for Windows, while Android systems were limited to Microsoft’s more basic Direct Guest Join capabilities. With Android now powering most new Teams Room deployments, this is less a story about Pexip adding Android support than it is about Microsoft’s platform finally enabling third-party vendors to deliver a more capable cross-platform meeting experience. That’s the real news.

Customer Experience (CX)

Artificial intelligence is increasingly serving as the core operating system for Customer Experience (CX) strategies. A significant series of announcements at Customer Contact Week (CCW) from providers including 8×8, Dialpad, RingCentral, Talkdesk, and Zoom indicates a unified industry trajectory: AI agents are being positioned to work alongside human counterparts, though characterized by distinct performance profiles and cost structures. The integration of these digital resources necessitates sophisticated orchestration, as the deployment and forecasting of one directly influence the operational requirements of the other.

Developments such as Salesforce’s Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) and Zoom’s Performance Suite highlight a fundamental strategic shift: AI is now being managed as a labor resource rather than mere infrastructure. Supervisors are increasingly monitoring AI utilization, quality scores, and adherence through the same lens as human metrics, allowing for integrated capacity planning and staffing forecasts across both human and digital pools.

This evolution redefines how information technology and operations leaders approach service-level management and optimization. By treating AI as a schedulable and coachable asset, organizations can achieve more precise control over their customer engagement capacity and efficiency.

8×8 AI Studio Release: 8×8’s latest AI routing and AI Studio releases add another dimension to agentic CX. AI Studio provides a native environment where teams can describe the agents they need in natural language and deploy them across voice and digital channels on 8×8’s existing infrastructure. These AI agents can deliver always-on inbound coverage – intake, identity verification, call routing, and multilocation reception – and can also drive proactive outbound engagement, sales qualification, and internal support use cases.

WEM Time: There has been a wave of CCaaS providers investing in WEM. This includes significant recent announcements from Cisco, Five9, NiCE, RingCentral, Td, and UJET. TalkingPointz sees three primary drivers for this sudden increase. First, AI is disrupting WEM, both the analytics side and (hybrid) scheduling. Second, WEM is moving from a third-party add-on to a native CCaaS service. Third, Thoma Bravo’s ill-timed acquisition of industry giant Verint has combined with the first two reasons to have competitors circling like vultures.

AI has obsoleted the PE playbook that Thoma Bravo is executing with Verint. Verint was the third acquisition (after Medallia and Calabrio) to make a WEM powerhouse. Within months, the moats disappeared. Thoma Bravo has already lost Medallia to its lenders; it acquired the customer feedback platform for $6.4B in 2021 but was forced to turn it over to creditors (Blackstone, KKR, and Apollo), wiping out $5.1B in equity. Cisco has had a WEM hole for a long time but opted to fill it as the cost of software development dropped. The question for TB: Did the Medallia collapse satisfy the sacrifice gods? Unlikely. Every CCaaS (every Verint partner) has its own native solution, especially for QM.

RingCX Updates: RingCentral rolled out several updates this month. It expanded AIR Pro to deliver agentic AI capabilities within RingCX so that when a conversation transfers to a live agent, that agent has a more complete picture. Native AI Agents embedded directly into RingCX workflows can help with inbound and outbound interactions across voice and digital channels. Autonomous Outreach can proactively initiate conversational outreach triggered by real-time events, such as a missed payment. AIR Pro calls the customer, confirms the outstanding balance, offers payment options, and processes the payment over the phone. Intelligent Handoffs agents in RingCX can transfer seamlessly to live agents without interruption, repetition, or lost context. AI-powered Workflow Builder supports building RingCX workflows on demand. AI-powered RingCX Analytics analyzes responses to automatically determine CSAT, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and overall customer experience without relying on manual surveys. RingWEM with Live Screen Monitoring gives supervisors visibility into how agents handle customer interactions, with the ability to whisper, coach, or step in. With WhatsApp Voice support, RingCX now supports more than 20 digital channels.

Zoom Agents: Production-ready virtual agents are a prompt away with Zoom’s new Agent Architect. It can integrate intent signals, data sources, and workflows. The accompanying Agent Performance Suite simulates interactions pre-launch and monitors live metrics. Zoom also introduced an enhanced customer context layer across its CX portfolio, outcome-based pricing, and multi-location deployment.

Salesforce WEM: Brings AI performance, human-agent metrics, and workforce management into a single view within the Service Command Center. Because WEM is built directly on the Salesforce stack, it runs on the same data and workflows as CRM and digital channels, reducing integration overhead with third-party CCaaS providers.

Talkdesk’s Agent Builder: Within its Customer Experience Automation (CXA) strategy, autonomous AI agents can orchestrate service experiences across channels and backend systems. CXA and its associated builder tools are positioned as a new category centered on multi-agent orchestration and low-code customization, extending agentic AI into channels like email and across business workflows. The goal is to enable enterprises to design AI agents and automation flows that span the full CX lifecycle rather than siloed bots at the edge.

Dialpad Gemini: Dialpad integrated Google’s Gemini Enterprise for Workspace. Users can ask Gemini to summarize recent interactions, surface risks, or prepare for a meeting using recent calls and emails, with Dialpad’s conversation data ingested natively into the Gemini environment to reduce latency and improve answer quality.

Content Guru Busted: Content Guru hosted a live online webinar aimed at the police: brain2050 – The Future of Police Public Contact. Designed for police leadership, this arresting event provided guidance for integrating AI and cloud technology into public safety operations. Content Guru is aiming to replace clunky, long-in-the-tooth systems with cloud-native tech. Good to see CG prioritizing Europe again. Its recent focus on NA expansion seemed out of place during a period when Europe is prioritizing European providers.

UJET Agentic Orchestration: UJET showcased its CX AI Accelerators – a suite of overlay tools including Virtual Agents and Agent Assist. Central to this strategy is the integration of Spiral by UJET (a late 2025 conversational analytics acquisition) designed to enable zero-friction, natural language querying across 100% of customer interactions. UJET also introduced a BYO-AI framework, launching with conversational AI platform Parloa as its inaugural partner, alongside a headless SDK.

Accelerators are a refreshing approach to multi-year rip-and-replace plays. Look, Ma, no procurement gauntlet. As for this transition to Agentic Experience Orchestration (AXO)? Yes, the industry is drowning in agentic hype right now, but UJET is targeting middleware integrations to back-end databases.

Google Cloud CCAI Update: Google Cloud rolled out a new version of its Contact Center AI (CCAI) Platform. New features include a “Return to Queue After Disconnection” capability for Interactive Voice Response (IVR) callers. Additionally, the update adds native HubSpot integration support to display “Do Not Call” (DNC) alerts directly within the agent call adapter interface. It’s a surprisingly empathetic design choice in a CCaaS world usually obsessed with squeezing every last penny out of “containment rates” (even when the bot is utterly failing to resolve the issue). Meanwhile, the HubSpot DNC integration is a quiet but crucial regulatory win. For outbound teams, flashing DNC warnings directly in the agent’s workspace is about as close to idiot-proofing compliance as you can get. It is nice to see Google focusing on actual contact center plumbing rather than just waving the GenAI magic wand.

Microsoft Dynamics CCaaS: Microsoft is attempting to pivot Dynamics into a CCaaS play with 2026 Release Wave 1, focusing heavily on expanding the capabilities of its autonomous AI agent portfolio. The update specifically targets four core agents: Case Management, Customer Intent, Quality Evaluation, and Customer Knowledge Management. Notably, the updated Quality Evaluation Agent (QEA) now automates contact center quality management by auditing, scoring, and summarizing bulk customer interactions simultaneously. The new “Equip voice agents with custom voice” feature enables enterprises to train and deploy custom neural voices for IVR systems using approved human speech samples. On the administration side, Microsoft retired its legacy Early Access mechanism, migrating all organizations to continuous (monthly or semi-annual) Release Channels. Microsoft wants to eliminate human supervisor overhead in service workflows by letting agentic AI do the heavy lifting. Custom neural voices are a nice twist. Killing off the legacy opt-in update model forces IT departments into continuous delivery.

Amazon Connect Experiences: AWS launched its Agentic CX designer in preview. It brings Connect users a no-code visual canvas courtesy of its NLX acquisition. The designer is pitched as a way for line-of-business and operations teams to build and deploy voice and digital self-service workflows without IT or Dev assistance. Additionally, AWS introduced Live Sync in preview, a patented NLX technology that synchronizes active voice or chat sessions with real-time, interactive mobile or web overlays. This allows users to execute complex, multistep transactions while talking to an AI agent.

NiCE Partners with AWS European Sovereign Cloud: NiCE expanded its partnership with AWS with the launch of CXone on its European Sovereign Cloud. Designed specifically for highly regulated markets, all deployments on this infrastructure will operate entirely within the EU to meet stringent digital sovereignty, data residency, and operational autonomy requirements. The emerging bottleneck in Europe is compliance. NiCE bypasses the regulatory red tape that is slowing conservative buyers (finance, healthcare, and the public sector), though its big public win in the UK demonstrates that GB remains comfortable with US providers.

Talkdesk Digital Engagement Inbox: Talkdesk updated its Digital Engagement Inbox with role-based permissions and bulk management capabilities. The update equips administrators with the authority to execute bulk transfer and bulk close actions on digital interactions across chat, email, and SMS channels. These granular controls are designed to restrict high-impact queue modifications to authorized personnel, ensuring that only designated users can manipulate conversational workflows at scale.

Digital queues frequently get clogged with garbage (read: spam, abandoned bot chats, and dead emails). By giving admins the power to sweep the queue with bulk actions, Talkdesk is tackling operational friction. Two points for practical plumbing in a sea of AI magic.

Webex Insights: Cisco rolled out a series of supervisor-focused updates for Webex Contact Center, specifically targeting its Analyzer reporting and AI Quality Management tools. Supervisors can now configure color-coded Thresholds – up to 10 conditional rules per custom report – alongside new Analyzer KPI Cards designed for real-time dashboard visualization. Also, Webex introduced “Auto-fail” thresholds for critical sections of evaluation forms to instantly flag compliance or operational misses.

Five9 Voice AI Agents: Five9 announced Voice AI Agents this month. This enterprise customer self-service solution is designed to replace traditional scripted bots and legacy IVR systems. These agents utilize agentic AI to deliver human-like voice interactions featuring low latency, noise management, and turn-taking capabilities. Key features include multi-agent orchestration, secure tool calling to authenticate and transact within enterprise systems, and context-rich warm handoffs to live human agents. The system is managed through AI Agent Studio, a unified environment used to build, test, deploy, and monitor the AI agents.

This technology is driving a transition toward AI-powered human workflows, where AI manages routine inquiries and live staff focus on governance and more complex issues. Currently, agents handle up to 40% of multichannel inquiries, a figure projected to reach 80% by 2029. Early real-world applications have already demonstrated tangible results, with organizations reporting reduced call handle times, exceeded containment rate targets, and reliable, context-aware conversations at scale. Ultimately, this shift positions customer satisfaction, rather than just efficiency metrics, as the primary measure of successful AI deployment.

NiCE World UK: Michels attended NiCE World London. This is the European version of NiCE World US, which took place in Orlando earlier in June. (See the June Extra Insider.) There were no new announcements for the Europeans, and in fact, one less keynoter (President of CX Product and Technology Jeff Comstock). Takeaways:

Cognigy acquired NiCE, not the other way around. The Cognigy team was fully present, though often with broader titles. The Cognigy technology and customers were everywhere, including throughout the keynotes. They featured a Cognigy/Genesys customer on stage. Agents and Conversational AI are all that matter in CX 26, and that’s all Cognigy. NiCE did make some other announcements, such as WEM updates, but all secondary to AI.
CEO Keynote was good: This is the second time Scott Russell has delivered a keynote at this event, but this time it was all his. The general theme was that making an AI Agent is the easy part. The hard part is scale, compliance, and reliability. Good presentation, effectively delivered.
Kristen Bell is a good spokesperson. Prior to Kristen was Eugene Levy, who is very funny but not a particularly effective brand ambassador. Prior to Eugene was Gordon Ramsay, who is known for his belligerence and rudeness #GoFigure. Kristen confessed she really isn’t that nice (neither is NiCE). #Trust.
NiCE is distancing itself from Genesys. The two dots have always been very close, but NiCE is breaking out. Genesys just can’t find a way to pop. It’s been a big fish in a small CCaaS pond, but everything is changing (requiring investment). NiCE doubled down with Cognigy. Genesys is going to find itself competing against Microsoft, Salesforce, and Google with a tired CEO and PE investors past their sell-by date.
CRM is obsolete.

Calling and UC

Zoom Spaces Expands: Zoom Spaces continued pushing Zoom beyond meetings and into intelligent office and workplace management. The platform connects room scheduling, workplace analytics, digital signage, reservations, and operational visibility into a broader office experience. This positions Zoom more directly against Microsoft, Cisco, and other workplace platform providers. Zoom is trying to remain a meetings leader while becoming more than a meetings company.

SIM-based Mobility: Check out this video that discusses how University Central Florida has extended its use of Teams with two solutions from AudioCodes. The Customer Interaction Center provides a Teams-based contact center. Mobile Connect extends Teams phone numbers (UC or CC) to mobile devices. The solutions together deliver a rich, Teams-centric use case. SIM-based mobility is likely the single most significant UCaaS development to date, and will result with the vast majority of UCaaS “seats” being smartphones.

Shokz OpenMeet 2: Shokz used InfoComm for the global debut of OpenMeet 2, continuing its push into enterprise communications. The company’s open-ear approach remains differentiated from traditional headset designs and may appeal to users who need awareness, comfort, and long wear times.

RingCentral Outage and SMS Meltdown: On July 2, 2026, RingCentral experienced a widespread service disruption that left users locked out of their accounts and unable to join video meetings. The issues, which began spiking on Downdetector around 9:36 a.m. Eastern Time, quickly cascaded into a technical glitch that delayed, failed, or duplicated outbound SMS deliveries. The outage also bled into RingCentral’s EMEA Contact Center environment. How does one trigger an outage notification when identity management, video meetings, carrier SMS, and CCaaS dialer functions all fall at once?

Alianza Connections to Conversations: Alianza has released a new framework aiming to help its CSP customers transition legacy, low-margin PSTN voice networks into AI-integrated conversational platforms. The blueprint details how telcos can launch native, AI-driven features – such as automated receptionists, missed-call capture, real-time transcription, and summarization – specifically targeted at SMB workflows. This delivers business outcomes (like capturing lost bookings) without requiring complex IT integration. CSPs hate selling dumb pipes, so Alianza’s strategy attempts to help telcos close the network monetization gap. By upselling AI directly from the network core, CSPs can embed conversational AI at the carrier level.

Webex Business Texting Update: Cisco has rolled out an invoicing overhaul for Webex Calling Business Texting, bundling subscriptions, metered usage, setup costs, and one-time fees into a unified bill via the Cisco Commerce Workspace (CCW). By introducing a dedicated SKU specifically for noncompliance penalties, Cisco is effectively handing channel partners and enterprise admins a tax on laziness. No one wants to navigate the carrier-dominated landscape of A2P 10DLC.

Zoom Adds Agentic AI to Spaces: Zoom has rolled out a suite of agentic AI capabilities for Zoom Spaces, aiming to inject proactive automation directly into physical office environments. Zoom Spaces is a suite of tools designed to help manage hybrid workspaces, including AI-powered Workspace Reservations and real-time suggestions for alternative rooms. Zoom Rooms is receiving upgraded voice commands for hands-free room management and task capture, alongside expanded ecosystem integrations that allow organizations to run Zoom Meetings on Cisco Rooms hardware and tap into professional production tools from Vizrt.

While Zoom frames this as a major leap from passive, reactive assistants to proactive office-space saviors, its definition of an agent is remarkably polite. Instead of autonomously rebooking rooms and fixing scheduling conflicts on its own, the AI Companion merely suggests remediations for human approval. Letting Zoom Meetings run on Cisco Rooms while bringing Vizrt into the fold proves Zoom is realistic about the multivendor reality of modern hybrid spaces.

Enreach UP 3.0: Enreach for Service Providers, a division of Enreach, announced the Enreach UP 3.0, a new communications platform designed for telecom operators and system integrators. Enreach UP calling services are designed for small and medium-sized businesses. The update offers benefits for enterprises and service providers. It equips employees with an AI assistant that replaces traditional voicemail by actively answering calls, resolving basic inquiries, scheduling appointments, and escalating issues to human staff. The system features an intelligent CRM feedback loop that retrieves customer profiles before calls and automatically logs summaries, action items, and sentiment analysis after conversations. Enreach has also introduced an AI Terminal to securely route third-party AI services as participants in the communication flow, ensuring the platform maintains ultimate control over the call.

What stands out is how it caters to a mobile-first workforce. The platform supports a SIM-based mobile client and allows users to seamlessly hand off live mobile calls to their AI assistant. It offers BYO AI to accommodate flexibility as well as ensure complete data sovereignty. The platform will be distributed exclusively as a white-label solution and features a third-party apps marketplace. More on this coming from TalkingPointz.

Separately, Enreach announced it will acquire Numintec from Telavox in Spain and sell its business operations in Finland to Telavox. The move aligns with the company’s broader strategic goal of sharpening its organizational focus. The company maintains a strong footprint across Europe, operating in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and the Baltic States.

Wilma Gone Wildix: Has anyone heard from Wildix? The company has gone quiet, possibly hiding behind its AI bot, Wilma. Wildix did announce the completion of its rollout of Wilma AI for level 1 technical support. Early results reveal nearly half of requests are resolved without human intervention (that’s not quite true, as the caller screaming at the bot is likely human).

Evolving Jabra: Jabra announced three new Evolve3 headsets: the Evolve3 65 Flex, the Evolve3 65, and the Evolve3 45. These three new headsets will replace the Evolve2 line. All three models feature Jabra’s proprietary ClearVoice technology with in-call Active Noise Cancellation. Jabra has long been one of the industry’s strongest headset brands — even stronger due to HP’s fumbling of the Plantronics brand. Jabra recently divested its hearing aid business, allowing it to focus squarely on business communications.

Business

Genesys Acquires Pinkfish: Genesys acquired Pinkfish, an agentic orchestration workflow startup, to expand the capabilities of its Cloud AI suite. The acquisition brings +500 prebuilt enterprise connectors, including Salesforce, Workday, and SAP, alongside 25,000 Model Context Protocol (MCP) server tools. Pinkfish’s capabilities are scheduled to debut on the Genesys AppFoundry marketplace by late July 2026. There’s also an acquihire angle, as Pinkfish was founded by former Talkdesk CPO Charanya “CK” Kannan. Genesys is positioning its virtual agents to discover and execute actions across disparate legacy software silos with a plain-language workflow designer.

Crexendo Short Interest Spikes: Crexendo (CXDO) experienced a massive 59.33% surge in short interest, signaling a sudden spike in bearish bets against the cloud communications provider. Total short interest now sits at roughly 683,400 shares, representing 3.99% of the company’s public float. This sudden market skepticism arrives even as Crexendo continues to expand its NetSapiens platform, which it claims to support +7 million end-users globally.

A total short float of under 4% is still absolute peanuts. I suspect this is less about deteriorating business fundamentals and more about tactical hedging by investors who are locking in gains after Crexendo’s recent run-up. With 11 consecutive profitable quarters in the bag and a comfortable $100M ARR run rate, the NetSapiens engine has plenty of fundamental horsepower to run over these speculative bears.

Zoom to Acquire Common Room: Zoom has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Common Room, an AI-native GTM intelligence platform. The transaction, financial details of which were kept under wraps, is expected to close in the coming weeks. Once finalized, Zoom plans to integrate Common Room’s identity-resolution technology and its RoomieAI agents directly into the Zoom Revenue Accelerator platform. [No, this is not about Zoom Rooms, nor did Zoom brand its RoomieAI.] The goal is to unify first-party data from CRMs, product usage, and marketing databases with external buyer signals, effectively automating the pre-call research process for sales reps before they even hop on a call.

Zoom is working to rapidly shed its meeting-centric brand, and this acquisition accelerates its pivot toward becoming an AI-powered system of action for enterprise workflows. Zoom is marching straight onto the debris of CRM and sales enablement giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot, and ZoomInfo (and yes, the SEO confusion between Zoom and ZoomInfo is about to get even worse). The race is on. Zoom is building its brand/positioning for CX workflows, and CRM vendors are looking for CCaaS lifeboats.

LeapXpert $180M: LeapXpert announced a $180 million growth investment led by Riverwood Capital. Informal conversations on channels like WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, and WeChat are becoming more critical to enterprises but can create operational, regulatory, and security challenges.

Leadership Changes

In the aftermath of a CEO change in February, Five9 announced several E-Suite leadership changes in June. Let’s review: CEO Amit Mathradas was named in February. Jay Lee was named CMO in April. In June, Niranjan Vijayaragavan was named as CTO, Rob Hornish was named CSO/CRO, and Sven Linsmaier joined as EVP of Transformation and Strategy. Jason Baruch was named VP Global Customer Assurance at Five9. Departures include Matt Tuckness, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Panos Kozanian. Clearly, a significant reset, as evidence of the Burkland and Trollope administrations is erased. None of them have strong CX backgrounds. Some of them worked together at Avalara in 2021. No one seems surprised Rosenberg is departing.

Jared Dennison was named AVP AI Ecosystem and Marketplace at Dialpad. Ross Mayfield started as Head of Product, AI Platform at Zoom. Ben Macdonald was named VP, Global Channel GTM at Mitel. Steve Seger is no longer the CRO at Verint.

Olivier Jouve retired as Chief Product Officer at Genesys this month. Glenn Nethercutt was named EVP and Chief Technology Officer, and Mike Szilagyi was named SVP, GM, Head of Product.

Ericsson (parent of Vonage) has appointed Per Narvinger to succeed Börje Ekholm as President and CEO, effective October 1, 2026.

Meet Us

Dave Michels is the founder and chief protagonist of TalkingPointz and the editor-in-chief of the Insider Report. [email protected]. David Danto is AV Aficionado at TalkingPointz. [email protected].

Goodreads

Meta Moves to Curb Employee AI Usage as AI Costs Reach Billions – We’ve seen an exponential increase in AI usage, and we are tracking to spend billions on internal use alone in 2026.
70% of companies deploying customer service AI agents see ROI in 60 days – Outcome-based resolution pricing means companies pay only when the AI agent resolves an issue autonomously, without human intervention.
Teardown Confirms the Trump Phone Is a Gold-Painted HTC U24 Pro – The Trump MVNO promised a gold device made in America. Well, it’s gold.
‘Tell Him He’s a Piece of Shit’: Meta’s New AI Unit Is a Total Mess – Not long ago, Meta was leading open-source AI. Llama is a distant memory.
The Leaked Tape that Shattered Silicon Valley’s AI Illusion – Maybe firing everyone to spend it all on AI wasn’t the best idea after all.
AI evangelists chill out on worker-bloodbath rhetoric – Putting lipstick on the doom-and-gloom-for-white-collar-workers pig.

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Insider Reports offer timely, curated, and opinionated news. The Insider Report is published in the first week of every month. Enterprise subscriptions also include TalkingPointz research notes. These reports are geared toward the industry itself, though some enterprises subscribe, too. Core subscribers are vendors, providers, consultants, and (financial and industry) analysts. TalkingPointz offers enterprise vendor, channel, consultant, and personal subscriptions. Insider Lite is a free Substack newsletter.

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By Dave Michels

Dave is an independent analyst and founder of TalkingPointz which is focused on enterprise communications. In addition to this (free and paid) content on TalkingPointz, he contributes to industry sites, can be found at major industry events, and provides advisory services to vendors and financial analysts.