Insider

Insider Report March 2026

April 02, 2026 by Dave Michels

Curated Enterprise Communications News and Insights from March 2026

Basically, one question currently dwarfs everything in enterprise communications: When will the Strait of Hormuz substantially reopen? The size of the disruption is impossible to estimate, but a Covid-like economic shock is within the realm of possibility. The closure is driving energy costs higher, and this will hamper the AI boom. Several countries have already begun rationing fuel. Oil rationing alone will result in increased inflation. Additional shortage risk extends to fertilizers, chemicals, plastics, sulfur, feedstocks, and other raw components.

Featured

The pace of technological change has always been fast in enterprise communications. At least I thought so. AI has injected an unprecedented velocity into the equation. It’s no longer just about new products; it’s about a fundamental acceleration of everything. From boardroom strategy to the chip in your phone, the world is moving faster than most of us can track.

The Insider Reports have been published for 10 years now. It’s a familiar drill: recap and opine about the month’s biggest industry news. But the month’s biggest industry news is now more than double what it was. The result is a sensation of historical whiplash. We are living through not only a period of fast change, but one where the recent past feels antiquated almost instantly. Was Enterprise Connect this month?

This speed is reshaping markets, creating entirely new product categories (like autonomous agents), and simultaneously applying existential pressure to old ones. Of course, it’s not just enterprise news. There was a time when a plane crash at an NYC airport would consume the news for weeks. Today, that type of news is lost in the barrage: Trump’s signature will soon appear on legal tender, the NBA will add expansion teams in Las Vegas and Seattle, oil hit $113/barrel, and industry has developed the first quantum battery, which charges faster as it gets larger.

The confluence of breakneck technological advancement and global instability makes the current moment fragile. The rate of change and new information is unprecedented, even within enterprise communications. David and I take great pride in our ability to track the market. We believe every report contains important content that otherwise would have been missed.

The Insider Report has never been more difficult to write, and, by necessity, more important to read.

General News

EC26: Enterprise Connect (EC26) took place in Las Vegas this month, and it received mixed reviews. The event attracted most of the usual suspects. There were some big announcements and illustrious keynotes. The new venue was indeed interesting, but seemed to mostly make people realize the Gaylord Palms wasn’t so bad. The biggest criticism of the show was that it was light on prospects. Do prospects still go to shows? Yes. The HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) event at the Venetian (across the canal) was packed and energized.

The difference wasn’t due to the show’s organizers (Informa owns both events), nor was it due to the vendors – both events featured many of the same marquee brands, including AWS, Cisco, Mitel, RingCentral, Salesforce, and Zoom. Both were also dominated by the topic of AI. The key differentiating factor was that EC is a horizontal event, while HIMSS is a vertical event.

This will pass. Enterprise comms are inherently horizontal. But at this time, the rage is AI, and the vertical use cases pop. Healthcare-optimized AI comms were omnipresent at both events. The newness of AI will settle, and horizontal events will once again rule for enterprise comms. Healthcare, retail, and a few other verticals are fine, but the industry can’t afford to go to market for every vertical.

While communications technology remains as critical as ever, it is struggling through an identity crisis. EC can’t decide if it’s a CX conference or not. Although there was one keynote from a Gartner MQ CCaaS leader, the other two CC keynotes were from UC MQ leaders.

Obviously, finding new prospects is important, but there’s also tremendous unrealized value in a conference that brings together the largest concentration of industry vendors, providers, resellers, distributors, analysts, media, and consultants. More details to come in our FULL EC26 Report in April – look for keynote summaries, all the announcements, key themes, and our observations. TalkingPointz uses the annual event as an opportune time to snap an image of the constantly changing industry.

Warning! Social Media News: A recent federal bellwether case saw a jury order Meta and YouTube to pay $6 million ($3M compensatory, $3M punitive) to a 20-year-old plaintiff in California, arguing that the social media companies harmed users through defective product design. Meta is responsible for 70% of the punitive damages. This novel legal theory, drawing parallels to arguments against big tobacco, alleges that features like infinite scroll and video autoplay are addictive. Social media providers are compared to tobacco because the companies denied their products’ addictive and harmful qualities, despite knowledge of their harms.

This is a great victory, as social media is clearly dangerous, but this is going to be a mess. For starters, how does one not get sued? There is a thin line between a business promoting repeat business and a business promoting addiction. Is Netflix’s “next episode” button OK? Tobacco is a seductive metaphor, but tobacco had a clearly addictive chemical and statistical and biochemical evidence that it killed people. The verdict, which follows a separate $375M judgment against Meta in New Mexico, could set a precedent for other cases against social media companies, as well as AI chatbot makers. Snap and TikTok settled ahead of this trial, but both face other lawsuits. Both Meta and Google/YouTube plan to appeal.

The case was the first of thousands of claims brought by families who say the companies built products designed to be addictive and harmful to young people’s mental health. The legal action comes as countries like Australia ban social media use for those under 16 and several other countries consider similar rules, following a call by the US surgeon general for mental health warning labels on social media.

Apple and many others have fought age-gating applications, but they are inevitable. Another concern is AI companions, which seem appropriate for seniors and dangerous for kids. The flat internet will be radically transformed into mini-nets over the next few years due to age-gating and sovereignty concerns.

SpaceX: 1M Satellites: Currently, StarLink has over 10K satellites orbiting Earth, visible even in remote locations and often appearing in astronomical images. Dr. Evil at SpaceX now intends to launch a million more to serve as orbital data centers for AI. The human eye sees fewer than 4,500 stars in an unpolluted night sky. A million more birds means there will be more visible satellites than stars for most of the world.

SpaceX’s FCC proposal provides minimal information and fails to address concerns like atmospheric pollution, collision risk, and waste heat dispersal. The FCC did accept the filing and opened the comment period. SpaceX’s “move fast and break things” approach risks damaging the atmosphere, polluting the night sky, and risking potential collisions. Allowing one corporation to potentially ruin the night sky for all humans is unacceptable.

Bandwidth Connect: Bandwidth has partnered with the newly announced Agentforce Contact Center by Salesforce. This collaboration marks the first step for Salesforce’s Agentforce in establishing a reliable network. Salesforce can now leverage BW’s owned-and-operated global network and Maestro orchestration software while it struggles to develop its real-time offering. As Bandwidth is a core supplier to the hypervisors and CCaaS and UCaaS leaders, it would be a bigger news story if it wasn’t tapped by Salesforce.

AI News

AI Revolution: Are We There Yet? We tend to measure progress by how fast models gain intelligence, but the true timeline of AI adoption isn’t set only by the technology; there’s also real-world friction to consider. The tech is ready, but … it’s complicated. AI is a jet engine strapped to the horse-drawn carriages of pre-AI technologies. It can certainly go faster, but the wood, wheels, and driver aren’t built for AI velocity. Real-world friction comes from:

Organizational Inertia: Large companies don’t pivot; they drift. Deep-seated habits and “the way we’ve always done it” act as natural brakes.
The Compliance Wall: In high-stakes fields like healthcare and finance, regulation moves at the speed of law, not code.
The Hardware Bottleneck: You can’t download a data center. Physical constraints – chips, energy, and infrastructure – create a hard ceiling on how fast we can scale.
The Trust Factor: Humans don’t just adopt tech because it’s better; they adopt it when they trust it. Soft skills and institutional knowledge are notoriously hard to codify into software.

We need to find that sweet spot where we can make some assumptions and build. If technology outruns our ability to adapt, we will see violent repricing and market chaos. But if these frictions hold firm, the transition becomes a slow burn.

Zoom AI: Zoom announced AI Companion 3.0, a major update that transitions the assistant from a generative tool into an agentic work surface. Now integrated across the full Zoom Workplace app, Phone, and CX portfolio, the 3.0 release includes a Custom AI Companion add-on ($20/user/month) that allows users to build no-code AI agents. These agents can reason across and execute tasks in third-party platforms, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, Jira, and Google Drive. Alongside this development, Zoom debuted AI-first productivity canvases: AI Docs, AI Sheets, and AI Slides, which leverage meeting context. Other notable features include lifelike digital avatars for asynchronous video, real-time multilingual voice translation, and Zoomie, a group assistant that tracks action items across Zoom Rooms and Team Chat.

Zoom is pivoting to a workflow company. By enabling users to build agents that act on third-party data (Salesforce records, ServiceNow tickets, etc.), Zoom is challenging Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and Salesforce Agentforce. The 3.0 update’s memory layer is particularly strategic; by learning a user’s role and preferences over time, Zoom is attempting to create switching costs through personalization. For the enterprise, the Zoomie assistant and deepfake risk detection address the two biggest hurdles of the hybrid era: meeting-to-action friction and the rising security threat of synthetic media.

Zoom AI Services and Intelligent Spaces: Zoom launched Zoom AI Services, a suite of enterprise-grade APIs that expose the company’s proprietary transcription, translation, and reasoning models to external developers. Simultaneously, Zoom Spaces received AI-driven upgrades for hybrid offices, including a room recommendation engine. New voice-activated controls in Zoom Rooms allow for hands-free management of lighting, temperature, and digital whiteboarding sessions.

Some enterprises will never fully migrate to a single meetings solution, and Zoom is ready. By decoupling the intelligence from the interface, it opens a new recurring revenue stream that isn’t tied to seat counts. Meanwhile, the AI-driven Intelligent Spaces update is a defensive play for the physical office.

AI Ordering: Google’s Gemini app on the latest Pixel and Samsung phones now features task automations, allowing users to order an Uber or a meal/groceries via DoorDash directly through the AI. While the new UI does work, it’s clunky and slow (one step forward and two steps back). Eventually, Gemini will open the appropriate app to allow the user to complete the order. Will it open comms apps? The feature quietly appeared in the latest update.

OpenAI Shudders Sora: OpenAI continues to focus (on Anthropic’s growing revenue). It is reeling in some of its size projects, such as its partnership with PayPal for Instant Checkout. More recently, it shut down its Sora video-generation tool despite its high-profile partnership with Disney that involved licensing characters and a $1B investment commitment.

That’s OK; Sora wasn’t that interesting, and the company does need to focus. Everything will be fine as long as it delivers on its hardware initiative that stemmed from its $6.5B acquisition of Jony Ive’s mysterious startup. Hmm, it’s been a while since we heard about the “invisible computing experience beyond smartphones.” Oh, well – at least OpenAI and Microsoft are strong.

Actually, OpenAI seems to be falling as fast as it rose. ChatGPT changed the world, but it wasn’t built on unique tech. It has a big user base, but with limited engagement and revenue. Google and Anthropic have caught up with and passed it. Of course, we are still in early innings, and the game will continue to change.

A New Copilot Pilots: Microsoft Overhauls Copilot Leadership to Accelerate Agentic AI. Microsoft has announced a significant leadership reorg across its AI and M365 divisions to accelerate the deployment of Agentic AI. This move consolidates the Copilot development teams under a unified Enterprise AI Automation group. The goal is to prioritize autonomous agents that can execute multistep workflows across M365 apps without constant human prompting. This leadership shift coincides with a broader push to integrate these capabilities into core tenant management tools for IT administrators. It appears Microsoft is attempting to justify its massive R&D spend by making AI an invisible background worker. This may signal a shift from teaching users how to prompt to teaching agents how to work.

More MS AI Pricing Changes: A new high-end licensing tier creates a premium path for organizations struggling with Copilot management and costs. Microsoft announced the $99 M365 E7 Tier and Agent Management Suite. M365 E7 suite bundles Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Entra Suite, and Agent 365, while also shifting some formerly premium Teams event capabilities into broader Teams Enterprise licensing. The new Agent 365 provides centralized governance for autonomous agents, cost-capping mechanisms per department, and security protocols for agent-to-agent communication. This signals that autonomous AI is a premium capability, distinct from standard productivity tools. Agent 365 is intended to address the growing fear of Agent Sprawl. More details in this Chat.

The Strait Facts on an AI Bubble: Michels and Danto have disagreed on the likelihood of an AI bubble. In short, Michels felt that AI companies were experiencing real, explosive revenue growth and adoption. Danto felt investments were far higher than near-term revenue can justify. However, the “war” in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz change the game board. The risk of a major (and global) AI burst has increased.

The closure of the Strait dramatically increases the risk of an AI recession by disrupting the core supply chain and driving up operational costs. The production of advanced AI chips is physically dependent on the Persian Gulf. Manufacturers rely on the Strait for the vast majority of their crude oil and liquified natural gas, as well as critical raw materials such as helium, sulfur, and bromine.

The recent destruction of the Ras Laffan Industrial City facility in Qatar, due to Iranian attacks, took out a critical point in the global AI supply chain. Ras Laffan produced up to 38% of the world’s helium as a byproduct of gas processing. This helium is non-substitutable and essential in the AI supply chain. Experts suggest the loss of the plant makes current AI valuations increasingly unsustainable. The fundamental components of the AI industry have suddenly become prohibitively expensive.

Simultaneously, the resulting increases in energy costs could initiate a data center death spiral. Data centers, which already struggle with profitability, face nearly impossible operating conditions with soaring energy prices. This cost pressure coincides with rapid asset depreciation as AI chips quickly become obsolete, compounded by deflationary pricing for AI services.

The crisis also triggers systemic financial contagion. The war is damaging the economic health of petrostates that have been critically funding AI expansion. Tech giants have taken on colossal debt to fund AI infrastructure. If the Strait’s closure cripples their cash flows, the shockwave will hit private equity firms that financed data centers, ultimately transmitting the risk to global pensions, endowments, and banks that backed those firms, turning a tech-specific problem into a broad financial crisis.

Contagion may be an understatement, given the circular financial arrangements among the AI haymakers. Like a ring of mountaineers roped together on an icy cliff, the fall of one may pull all the others down. Oil touches everything, so 2026 may be a year of high inflation.

Oracle RIF: Oracle announced a major restructuring involving thousands of job cuts to redirect resources toward its AI buildout. By dropping $2.1B (restructuring cost FY26), they’ve essentially turned severance packages into a high-stakes down payment on GPUs. Naturally, Wall Street reacted with its usual clinical warmth: the shares rallied, confirming the grim market math that a smaller payroll is the ultimate investor aphrodisiac. It’s the kind of corporate pivot that could work as a Netflix techno-thriller.

Meetings and AV

David Danto is the primary author of this section.

Potential Storm for Videobars: This month, the warning signs are getting harder to ignore. Android videobars may be heading toward a pricing squeeze, not because of cameras or microphones, but because the AI boom is driving up the cost of memory and related components across the semiconductor market. That matters for collaboration devices, too, especially the Qualcomm-based Android platforms many vendors rely on.

If those component costs keep rising, the low-cost appeal of Android room bars may become harder to maintain. Vendors can absorb some of the pressure for a while, but not forever, and once higher costs start showing up in product pricing, buyers may begin taking a fresh look at BYOD and other alternatives. What once looked like a background supply-chain issue is starting to feel more like an unavoidable market shift. Subscribe to the Insider Lite for more details in an upcoming post.

No Router For You: The FCC has decided that new consumer routers made outside the US will no longer be eligible for FCC authorization without special approval. Because so much (all?) of the router business depends on overseas manufacturing, the decision extends beyond any single company, creating uncertainty for brands such as TP-Link, Netgear, Asus, eero, Google Nest WiFi, Linksys, Synology, Ubiquiti, and many others. The ruling casts a pall over the entire consumer networking sector. The ruling could shift AV integrators toward firms with deeper networking expertise (like Cisco). It seems like this is about bringing the entire space under a regulatory umbrella. It’s bizarre, and some are wondering if Trump intended to lash out at Reuters.

Crestron Joins the Room Builder Club: Crestron has launched a collaboration room configuration tool, joining multiple other manufacturers that have decided that if the client uses its tool, the client will deploy more of its products. The tool builds bundles leveraging much of the new gear Crestron released as of ISE in February. You can check it out here.

Barco’s Next Bundle: As we publish this March Insider Report, the Barco ClickShare team has received Microsoft Teams Certification on their latest bundle, the ClickShare Hub with the Huddly C1. This joins the Sennheiser TC-M bundle as Barco’s two new Teams-certified solutions.

Audinate Moves Up the Management Stack: Audinate introduced Dante Director Professional, a web-based management platform for distributed AV networks that can scale from modest deployments to very large estates. The pitch is centralized monitoring, management, and security authentication for increasingly complex environments, which is exactly where the market has been heading for years. AV systems are no longer confined to one room, one rack, or one administrator, and the old approach of managing everything locally has been wearing thin for a long time. Audinate already owns a large part of the transport conversation through Dante, and now it wants more of the operational control layer as well. This is less about flashy AV than about AV finally behaving like enterprise infrastructure.

Scala and Stratacache Show Strain: Stratacache has confirmed layoffs tied to tariff pressure, supply chain disruption, and rising memory costs. Reports suggest the impact extends beyond the parent company into Scala as well. Scala, while hardly a new option, remains one of the industry’s better-known digital signage software brands. The concern here is not just one round of cuts, but what the cuts may signal about broader pressure on signage and adjacent AV sectors. When a company behind brands people actually know starts trimming because component economics and project timing are turning ugly, it is usually a sign that the pain is not isolated. Digital signage still depends on hardware, global sourcing, and customer confidence, and all three are under pressure.

A New Touch: DTEN has introduced the DTEN Mate Gen 2 as a refreshed touch controller for Zoom Rooms. DTEN’s certification update had previously pointed to the product as an extended touch display targeted for availability by late 2025. The current product page shows it as a live offering rather than a roadmap item. This is less a market-changing launch than a sensible refresh for DTEN’s installed base and for Zoom-centric rooms that still value dedicated in-room control hardware.

HP Updates: Some updates from HP include the introduction of HP IQ, a workplace software layer meant to tie together HP PCs, meeting devices, and other hardware through local AI and proximity-based connectivity. A key part of that is HP “NearSense,” which is essentially HP’s name for spatial awareness features such as file sharing between nearby PCs, single-click room join, faster conference room device discovery, simpler peripheral pairing, casting to nearby displays, and, eventually, tighter integration with select Poly Studio video bars. Separately, HP said the Poly Studio V12 video bar and Thunderbolt 4 180W G6 Dock are now generally available for BYOD rooms.

CX

Salesforce Blinked: The former CEO of Pepsi, Roger Enrico, famously summarized one of the most famous marketing blunders in history as “the other guy blinked.” Pepsi was smaller than Coke in every way but sweetness. It leveraged blind taste tests to reveal that people prefer sweet in short samples. The Pepsi Challenge was eating into Coke’s leadership in share. Responding to pressure, Coca-Cola did the unthinkable: It changed its original formula.

The Venn diagram’s overlap between CCaaS and CRM is expanding, so SFDC likely sees CCaaS as a logical adjacency for portfolio expansion. But this move into CCaaS is not a remedy to the CRM industry’s real priority: obsolescence. Meanwhile, CCaaS providers that have already nailed the real-time, global, omnichannel engagement part have realized it’s not two circles overlapping, it’s one circle getting better and the other dying. A CRM-free reality is feasible.

Salesforce’s blink is a gift to the CCaaS sector. By declaring war on CCaaS, more clearly than the US did on Iran, it has liberated the CCaaS community from touting the declining value of CCaaS+CRM. Now, CCaaS providers are more incentivized to provide a compelling, AI-enabled, no-CRM ROI vision. One wonders just what percentage of the valuable data in the CRM came from customer interactions. It will take Salesforce years to build out a viable real-time solution (global, reliable, scalable, available, compliant, trusted, etc.), yet it has already declared war on its partners and investees. And no, the Salesforce agent desktop is not a moat. It can be vibe-coded in an afternoon, and only impacts humans, who make up a declining percentage of agents.

Short CRM, long CCaaS. That’s not investment advice – and remember, Pepsi won the Cola Wars of the 1980s – but Coke is once again bigger than Pepsi in every way. In the meantime, keep an eye on ServiceNow.

NiCE Self Corrects: NiCE unveiled its Agentic AI platform at its Cognigy Nexus 2026 event. The platform utilizes automation discovery to analyze engagement data to generate ready-to-deploy AI agents. Key features include embedded testing for side-by-side performance engineering and a closed-loop architecture that identifies high-impact ROI opportunities before deployment. The system unifies voice and digital journeys into a single context, allowing AI agents to initiate proactive interactions and manage complex back-end workflows natively.

NiCE is moving beyond copilots toward full-cycle agentic orchestration. By automating the discovery and creation of bots from a firm’s own interaction data, NiCE is attempting to remove the professional services bottleneck. The focus on a self-correcting system suggests a long-term play where the CCaaS platform manages its own performance, reducing the need for manual supervisor intervention.

Amazon Connect News: AWS announced Amazon Connect Health, a purpose-built agentic AI solution for healthcare that uses AI to reason, plan, and take autonomous actions to manage high-volume administrative tasks. It handles patient scheduling, clinical documentation (including ambient transcription and pre-visit summaries), and automated medical coding. Building on the Amazon Connect platform, it features intelligent call handoff with guardrails and seamless escalation to human staff. It is built on HIPAA-eligible infrastructure with enterprise security and compliance.

Additionally, Amazon Connect launched Predictive Insights 2.0, featuring an 8X increase in product catalog support (up to 40M items) and 14% improved model accuracy. The update moves beyond simple deflection metrics to focus on proactive resolution goals. The tool allows for automated, targeted outreach to specific customer cohorts using recommendations derived from real-time customer profiles and historical data. By shifting the goalpost from preventing a call to generating a resolution before the customer asks, Amazon is blurring the lines between marketing automation and customer service.

Zoom Customer Experience (CX): Zoom made a lot of announcements in March. It’s a suite story, but this report scatters the details in different sections.

At Enterprise Connect 2026, Zoom unveiled a major overhaul of its CX suite, headlined by Zoom Virtual Agent (ZVA) 3.0 and AI Expert Assist 3.0. These tools shift from passive guidance to agentic execution, capable of reasoning through multi-step workflows across CRM, billing, and order management systems. For supervisors, the new CX Insights layer enables natural-language querying of operational data, while Self-Healing Intraday capabilities automatically rebalance staffing schedules in response to real-time volume spikes. Additionally, Zoom announced deep native integrations with the Epic electronic health record (EHR) system, embedding the Zoom Contact Center call bar and AI-generated Clinical Notes directly into Epic Hyperspace and Haiku to unify patient communications.

Traditional metrics like average handle time (AHT) are being replaced by “conversation-to-completion” rates. By allowing AI agents to actually execute backend tasks rather than just suggest a response, Zoom is moving up the value chain to compete with specialist CCaaS incumbents. With its Epic integration, Zoom intends to eliminate the app fatigue that has historically limited the adoption of third-party CX tools in healthcare systems.

Zoom Customer Workflow Orchestration: Zoom introduced Customer Workflow Orchestration, a no-code builder that allows administrators to design end-to-end customer journeys across disparate enterprise systems. To manage the risks associated with autonomous AI, the platform now includes Advanced Quality Management (AQM) for ZVA, providing full transparency into the data sources and logic paths used by AI agents during an interaction. This allows CX leaders to audit AI decisions for accuracy and compliance. Zoom also launched Zoom AI Services, a suite of enterprise-grade APIs that enable developers to integrate Zoom’s proprietary transcription, translation, and reasoning models into custom applications.

The launch of orchestration and governance tools is a direct response to AI anxiety in the C-suite. By providing a traceability layer, Zoom is giving IT leaders the confidence to authorize AI agents to perform sensitive tasks like refund processing or record updates. Furthermore, the move to offer AI Services APIs suggests Zoom is prepared to act as an infrastructure provider (CPaaS) for organizations that want Zoom’s intelligence but prefer to build their own bespoke front-end experiences.

Content Guru Sov: Content Guru unveiled upgrades to its Storm AI platform, specifically focused on sovereign data requirements in the EMEA region. The enhancements include localized LLM processing and data residency controls that align with the EU AI Act. The platform focuses on agentic AI capable of handling routine requests autonomously while maintaining audit trails for compliance. The upgrade also integrates with IoT signals to provide proactive CX for autonomous entities and smart devices. It makes sense for CG to double down on its native European status while US-based competitors face increasing scrutiny. Data sovereignty provides a defensive moat in the UK and EU public sector and financial markets.

UJET AXO: UJET launched Agentic Experience Orchestration (AXO), a framework designed to eliminate back-end system complexity. AXO uses Computer-Using Agents to execute workflows across disparate applications (e.g., filing claims, processing refunds) even when APIs are not available. This persistent AI layer maintains context from the initial virtual agent interaction through to the human escalation, effectively reducing the four to 10 applications typically used by a human agent during a single call. In an interesting twist, UJET is focusing on the back-office bot and using AI to navigate legacy UIs and automate swivel-chair tasks. This agent-first AI strategy is a pragmatic way to deliver ROI without requiring a total overhaul of legacy back-end systems.

Puzzel Empathy: Germany-based Puzzel announced new Empathy AI modules specifically for the European retail sector. These modules use advanced sentiment and tonal analysis to guide AI agents and human staff in de-escalating conflicts and providing personalized, emotionally aware responses. The tool is localized for European languages and cultural nuances, aiming to support gold-standard service in complex or stressful retail scenarios. Puzzel is differentiating on soft skills in a market obsessed with hard automation. In the competitive European retail space, where brand loyalty is fragile, an AI that can simulate or support empathy is an enticing proposition.

Five9 Fusion: Five9’s Fusion Evolution is the next generation of its partner ecosystem, which is evolving to a more open model. This expansion enables the orchestration of third-party AI agents, including those from major platforms such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Epic, within the Five9 Intelligent CX engine via new AI Agent Connect integration APIs. Enterprises can use their preferred CRM or specialized AI tools while relying on Five9 for core telephony, voice streaming, and cross-platform orchestration, as well as Five9’s AI routing, insights, and quality management. By acknowledging that large enterprises might use AI agents from Salesforce, ServiceNow, or Google, Five9 positions its platform as the traffic controller for CX AI.

Amazon Connect AI Observability: Amazon Connect launched a suite of AI Observability Tools designed to provide granular visibility into the performance of generative AI agents. These tools allow CCaaS managers to track cost per interaction, resolution accuracy, and customer sentiment in real-time. By providing traceability for AI-driven decisions, Amazon aims to help organizations justify the shift from per-seat to consumption-based pricing models. For CCaaS executives, the primary hurdle isn’t tech capability; it’s proving that a $2 AI interaction is cheaper than a $10 human one when accounting for accuracy and follow-up. Observability is the receipt that makes agentic AI a defensible line item.

VonageNow: Vonage launched a native integration with ServiceNow Voice, built on the ServiceNow AI Platform, embedding enterprise-grade voice and real-time AI capabilities directly into ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) and IT Service Management (ITSM) workflows for Vonage Contact Center (VCC) customers. This integration allows phone calls to act as direct triggers for ServiceNow workflows without requiring separate CTI middleware. When a call is received via Vonage, ServiceNow can automatically initiate incident tickets, pull customer records, and trigger automated playbooks based on real-time transcription and sentiment analysis.

This partnership is a significant win for Vonage. By embedding telephony directly into ServiceNow’s workflow engine, the phone becomes an input rather than just a communication tool. For enterprises heavily invested in ServiceNow, the question becomes: why pay for a separate UCaaS license when the telephony can live inside the ITSM? The bigger question is SN’s strategy to scale.

Verint Bots Attack Calabrio: Three months after its $2B take-private acquisition by Thoma Bravo and subsequent merger with Calabrio, Verint announced that Calabrio customers now get access to Verint’s Bots – including its greatest hits, the Genie Bot, TimeFlex Bot, and Agent Copilot Bots – via the Verint CX Automation Platform. The move was likely low-hanging-fruit that benefits Calabrio, but Verint customers are still waiting to see innovation.

Just before the bot news, the combined company implemented a significant global reduction-in-force (RIF). A post-acquisition RIF was inevitable, as there were certainly redundancies between Calabrio and Verint. PE ownership could mean the cuts were deeper than they otherwise would have been. Media posts claimed “hundreds” and “thousands,” but the company did not reveal any figures. The restructuring followed the company’s transition to a new, single Verint that includes Calabrio (people and products) within it.

The immediate access to bots is a positive sign of technical synergy, but the RIF raises questions about TB’s unproven intentions regarding long-term R&D. The PE playbook is well established, but the timing with the SaaS-pocalypse is particularly unfortunate.

Talkdesk Unites Agents: Talkdesk’s new CXA Operations Center is a platform to manage human and AI agents as a single, coordinated hybrid workforce. Talkdesk also enhanced its Interaction and Quality Analytics suite with CX Insights, linking conversational intelligence to business outcomes, and Automation Mining, for identifying and quantifying impactful automation opportunities. Concurrently, Talkdesk added new Agentic AI capabilities to its Industry Experience Clouds, automating complex specialty scheduling for healthcare and integrating with EHR systems.

Td’s unified approach to managing human and AI agents treats AI as core employees. It enables dynamic resource allocation and provides contextualized KPIs to measure agent performance. The enhancements address common observability challenges and position Talkdesk as an enterprise-grade orchestrator with an eye on accountability and AI governance.

A Private Journey: Journey.ai announced the availability of its Payments, Authentication, Identity, and Signature tools within the Zoom Virtual Agent (ZVA) Flow Builder. This allows Zoom to process PCI DSS-compliant payments, HIPAA-sensitive form completion, and legally binding signatures without exposing sensitive data to AI. This positions ZVA to move upmarket into financial services and healthcare.

Avaya Nexus: This month, Avaya launched Nexus, an updated version of its Aura PBX solution. Nexus is fully buzzword-compliant and designed for always-on reliability, high-fidelity voice clarity, and hardened security in private, single-tenant UC or CC implementations.

Channels to Channel Orchestration: Infobip is moving up the stack from a CPaaS provider to an AI orchestration platform with the announcement of AgentOS for Global Channel Orchestration. It’s a managed platform that orchestrates AI agents across SMS, WhatsApp, and Voice channels, allowing developers to build a single AI logic across communication APIs. Infobip is attempting to pivot from low-margin SMS to higher-margin AI orchestration. If successful, AgentOS will position Infobip as a necessary connective tissue for the global, multi-channel AI bot.

Spearfish Arrives: Spearfish launched as a new contextual intelligence platform designed to unify disparate CX data silos. The platform sits above existing CCaaS and CRM systems to provide a real-time context layer that allows AI agents to understand a customer’s history across channels. The approach aims to solve the Franken-stack problem by layering over solutions instead of replacing them.

LeapXpert 3.0: LeapXpert launched version 3.0 of its platform alongside LeapXpert Signals, an AI-driven productivity suite for regulated messaging. The update enables financial and legal firms to capture and analyze communications across WhatsApp, iMessage, and Telegram. Signals provides automated summaries and compliance monitoring, ensuring that all client interactions are logged and searchable within the enterprise’s existing record-keeping systems. LeapXpert is positioning itself as the middleware against increased fines for off-channel communications. The shift from simple logging to signals suggests that compliance data is now being repurposed for business intelligence.

8x8 Engage: 8x8 announced the general availability of 8x8 Engage, a solution designed to bring advanced customer engagement capabilities to frontline and expert teams outside the traditional contact center. Built natively on the 8x8 Platform for CX, the tool offers CRM integration, AI-generated summaries, sentiment analysis, and intelligent routing for roles in retail, healthcare, and field services. Engage also offers automated multimodal interaction scoring and AI-generated sentiment analysis. The platform aims to eliminate communication silos by providing unified governance and real-time workload visibility across the entire organization.

8x8’s strategy validates the Everywhere CX trend by uncoupling sophisticated queuing and analytics from the high-cost contact center seat. This looks like a good solution for informal agents and the deskless workforce that have historically lacked professional communications tools. By embedding multimodal scoring across the entire organization, 8x8 promotes accountability to a core UCaaS feature and sneaks a system-of-record role into customer touchpoints.

8x8 RCS: 8x8 released an update to its CPaaS and Developer guidance that addresses RCS vs. OTT. The guidance highlights RCS for scenarios that require high visibility, trust, and native, no-app-download reach (e.g., alerts, authentication). Conversely, it positions OTT channels for markets where app-centric behavior is dominant. 8x8 emphasized RCS’s fallback-to-SMS capability as a critical reliability feature for transactional messaging that OTT apps cannot match.

RCS should be killing the OTT apps, but the mobile providers smell a revenue stream. Meta announced that ads are coming to WhatsApp. Eventually, the dam will break, and 8x8 is well-positioned. Green and blue bubbles are behind us.

Crescendo Influence: Crescendo announced the launch of Crescendo Influence, an autonomous reasoning layer designed to guide customer conversations toward specific outcomes, such as conversion, increased Average Order Value (AOV), and churn reduction. Influence weighs customer intent against business goals in real-time. The platform leverages deep integrations with Shopify, Salesforce, and Zendesk to provide a persistent memory layer across voice and chat without repetitive qualification. It enables a single AI assistant to transition between service and sales roles.

Crescendo is betting that specialized, guarded persuasive AI is what retail and B2C brands require. Crescendo is positioning its assistant as a digital version of a top-tier retail associate. The focus on direct integration with order management systems for concrete attribution suggests that Crescendo intends to compete on measurable ROI and performance-based CX rather than just seat licenses.

Calling and UC

Mitel WX: Mitel announced a new UC platform called WX (Workforce Experience). It is a mobile-first application designed to unify frontline and office-based workers. EX features push-to-talk, shift management, and secure messaging within a single interface. It is designed to integrate with Mitel’s core call control platforms, allowing frontline workers in retail, hospitality, and healthcare to access the same directory and communication tools as corporate staff. Mitel WX attempts to bridge the gap between the corporate UC and the mobile reality of the frontline.

Mitel also unveiled Mitel Edge to allow enterprises in regulated industries to run AI workloads locally on-premises or within a private cloud environment. Mitel Edge ensures that sensitive data, such as patient records or financial information, never leaves the organization’s secure perimeter, while still providing modern generative AI capabilities for employees.

Snom DECT-Fi: Snom launched M253 and M256 single-cell DECT systems featuring enhanced security protocols, including TLS and SRTP encryption, tailored for the EMEA finance sector. The M253 bundle pairs the M250 base station with the M53 office handset, while the M256 is designed for more demanding environments with the IP67-rated M56 handset. Hardware-level encryption ensures that internal voice communications remain secure. Snom is positioning itself as the high-security alternative to lower-cost commodity DECT providers.

Teams Vishing: Microsoft issued an urgent security warning regarding a sophisticated vishing campaign targeting Teams users via the Quick Assist feature. Attackers use spoofed identities to gain remote access to employee workstations. Microsoft recommends administrators disable Quick Assist. While standard phishing usually happens over email, vishing exploits the human element of a live conversation to create a sense of urgency or trust. This incident underscores the risk of built-in support tools.

Enreach Agents: Enreach integrated native AI agents into its SME-focused communications stack. These agents are designed for rapid deployment by smaller businesses, offering automated call handling and customer service routing without the complexity of traditional enterprise bots. The integration is localized for multiple European languages and regulatory environments.

Intermedia Verticals: Intermedia announced new vertical-specific AI Spark capabilities tailored for the healthcare and legal sectors. The healthcare module includes HIPAA-compliant transcription and clinical documentation automation, while the legal module focuses on case-file indexing and billable hour tracking derived from communication logs. These capabilities are integrated across Intermedia’s Unite and Contact Center suites. Comms are inherently horizontal, but AI is creating new vertical opportunities for UCaaS and CCaaS providers – at least for the big verticals.

Cisco Calling: Cisco has pushed out PhoneOS 4.0.1 and MPP 12.0.7. One of the more notable additions is CTI control for Cisco Wi-Fi 840 phones through Jabber or the Webex app. Cisco’s own device announcement page calls out that capability specifically for CUCM deployments.

RingCentral AIR: RingCentral unveiled AIR Pro, an expanded AI portfolio featuring autonomous voice agents that act as an agent builder and orchestration layer. The system includes brand guardrails, seamless handoffs to human agents, and on-the-fly translation in eight languages. RingCentral is specifically targeting vertical markets, launching AIR Pro for Healthcare with over 100 integrations into EHR systems.

RingCentral is also unbundling its AI capabilities with AIR Everywhere, a standalone version compatible with any legacy or competing phone system. It crawls a company’s website to build its knowledge base. This solution is part of a broader ecosystem: AIR (AI Receptionist), AVA (AI Virtual Assistant for notes and assistance), and ACE (AI Conversational Expert for analysis and action items).

AIR Pro shifts from a supportive co-pilot to an autonomous, primary agent. For RingCentral, this represents a move to capture a larger share of the interaction economy, directly disrupting and potentially replacing traditional seat-based licensing models in the contact center. By offering AIR Everywhere as a standalone product, RingCentral is targeting legacy, on-premise customers not yet ready to undergo a rip-and-replace effort.

Amazon Transformer: Evidently, Amazon is going to make another attempt at a smartphone. The project, internally code-named Transformer, is tied to AI and Alexa. The likely theory is that Amazon believes the industry will shift from an app-centric model to an AI-agent model. Instead of turning to individual apps, Amazon expects users will prefer to execute complex tasks through natural language. By building a device around agentic AI, Amazon inserts itself as the primary interface for “Prime life,” which includes shopping, entertainment, and home automation. It has retained hardware veterans to spearhead the effort. It’s an interesting strategy. Certainly, the existing smartphone sector is losing its luster thanks to rising component costs and closed app stores.

Dialpad Agent Studio: Dialpad announced the launch of Agent Studio, a no-code conversational interface designed for the rapid deployment of autonomous AI agents. Debuting at EC26, the tool allows non-developers to create voice and digital agents that integrate with CRMs and back-office systems via an ecosystem of pre-built connectors. The platform expansion includes Guardian, a real-time governance layer that monitors agentic interactions for PII exposure and compliance. Additionally, a new Proving Ground testing suite allows administrators to simulate scenarios and validate ROI metrics pre-production. By bundling a no-code builder with a real-time Guardian supervisor, Dialpad is addressing the fear of unmonitored agents hallucinating or leaking data. The emphasis on ROI validation before launch suggests a market pivot away from AI experimentation and toward measurable operational efficiency.

Zoom UC: Zoom announced a major expansion of its System of Action vision with the launch of Agentic AI workflows for Zoom Phone and Zoom Workplace. These capabilities allow the platform to move beyond transcription to active task execution, such as automatically drafting follow-up emails, assigning Jira tickets, and updating CRM records post-call.

Zoom also introduced the Zoom Virtual Agent (ZVA) AI Receptionist, an always-on solution for voice and SMS that handles 24/7 triaging, FAQ resolution, and appointment booking. The company also debuted Zoom Phone Mobile, allowing users to access these AI-first enterprise calling features, including real-time summaries and task extraction, directly from a smartphone’s native mobile dialer. The shift to a native-dialer experience with Zoom Phone Mobile removes the friction of a separate app while maintaining corporate oversight and data capture.

By enabling agentic workflows that bridge the gap between phone calls and third-party apps (such as Salesforce or ServiceNow), Zoom is positioning its phone system as a workflow automation hub, or what Zoom describes as moving from conversations to outcomes.

Zoom Frontline: Zoom Workplace for Frontline is targeted at healthcare and clinical teams. The suite includes shift-based communication tools such as 24/7 urgent notifications, QR code-based alerts, and AI-powered shift summaries that catch up incoming staff on status and tasks from the previous rotation.

For sales organizations, Zoom released AI Sales Assist within the Revenue Accelerator (ZRA), providing real-time contextual coaching and competitive battlecards during live calls. Additionally, the new Ask ZRA feature offers a natural language interface for sales leaders to query account health and deal risks across their entire pipeline.

While the basic AI Companion remains a free retention play, Frontline for Healthcare and ZRA for Sales are the primary engines for Zoom’s double-digit CX revenue growth. By embedding AI coaching directly into the live call (Sales Assist) and automating the handoff in high-stress clinical environments, Zoom is blurring the lines between UC and CC with operational efficiency.

GoTo Verticals: GoTo expanded its vertical portfolio with the launch of GoTo Connect CX for Healthcare, a communications and patient engagement platform tailored for midsized clinics and multi-location practices. The solution features deep, native integrations with major EHR and practice management (PM) systems, including Epic, athenahealth, Oracle Health, and ModMed. Key capabilities include a 24/7 AI Receptionist for automated triaging and appointment management, AI-powered analytics for staff coaching, and built-in HIPAA compliance controls designed to protect PHI. This release follows GoTo’s existing vertical playbooks for the Automotive and Education sectors, aiming to provide enterprise-grade CX tools to organizations with 25 to 500 employees.

GoTo is aggressively pursuing a democratization strategy by removing the technical and financial barriers that typically prevent SMEs from deploying sophisticated AI. By embedding EHR workflows directly into the UCaaS interface, GoTo is moving from a utility dialtone provider to a critical operational partner. The 24/7 AI Receptionist is particularly significant for lean medical offices, as it shifts the ROI conversation from cost savings to revenue capture by ensuring no patient inquiry or billing opportunity is missed after hours. This vertical push signals that the general-purpose UCaaS market is maturing, forcing vendors to win on specialized workflow depth rather than horizontal feature parity.

Headsets Galore: Mitel unveiled the H60 AI DECT Headset, offering one-touch integration with Mitel Workflow Studio to allow frontline workers to interact with CRM, inventory, and AI agents without a screen. It includes AI-driven noise cancellation and supports secure, encrypted voice transmission. Designed for frontline roles, it lets users access AI without taking a hand off a tool or a patient. Yealink introduced the WH64 and WH68 series, which integrates both DECT and Bluetooth chipsets into a single chassis. This design allows users to utilize DECT for extended range (up to 150m) and high-density office environments while maintaining a simultaneous Bluetooth link for mobile device transitions. The flagship WH68 model includes 4-mic Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) and a dedicated touch-screen base station for call switching and device management. This hybrid concept from Yealink simplifies handoffs that have historically forced a choice between DECT and Bluetooth. Jabra (Evolve3 85 and 75) and Poly (Mission 400 and 600) updated their headsets last month.

Business

Intermedia Acquired: PE firm 26North Partners has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Intermedia. Few details are known at this time. CEO Michael Gold says the plan is to continue investing in AI, expand vertical solutions, and further enhance how partners can deliver value. Presumably, this marks the exit for Madison Dearborn Partners, which had been the primary equity owner since 2017.

Crexendo/Estech: Crexendo completed the $35M acquisition of Estech Systems, a long-term NetSapiens licensee. The purchase price consisted of $27.3M in cash and $7.7M in common stock, representing a 1.35x multiple. The deal added 75K seats and over 6,200 retail accounts to Crexendo’s footprint. Synergy efforts will focus on migrating ESI’s workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and consolidating duplicative expenses over the next 12–24 months.

Crexendo likely wants to own licensees to capture the full retail margin of seats already sitting on its platform. Aa All customers are on NetSapiens, Crexendo avoids integration purgatory and technical debt typical of UCaaS mergers. The move favors a shift toward mid-market consolidation and extreme operational efficiency.

Barco/VerVent: Barco has reached an agreement to acquire VerVent AudioHolding, the parent company of premium audio brands Focal and Naim. The acquisition gives Barco a much stronger audio story and suggests it wants more control over the full-room experience, rather than relying on third parties to complement its strengths in display and projection. This is not just another behind-the-scenes technology buy, because Focal and Naim are brands with real identity and recognition in premium audio. If Barco integrates them well, this could strengthen its position in high-end experiential environments.

Zendesk Agentic: Not to be left out of the agentic wave, Zendesk acquired Forethought to integrate SupportGPT. Zendesk plans to integrate Forethought’s generative AI capabilities directly into its Agentic Service offering. This move is intended to move Zendesk customers toward resolution-based pricing. Zendesk acquired advanced reasoning capabilities and reinforces the trend that CX is no longer about managing agents, but about managing logic.

IBM/Confluent: IBM has finalized its $11B acquisition of Confluent, aiming to integrate real-time data streaming into its enterprise AI offerings. The move is designed to provide the underlying data fabric necessary for Agentic AI to reason and act on live data streams rather than static databases. This appears to be a pivot from an AI tool builder to an AI infrastructure provider.

NSCA Adds Navigate: NSCA has acquired Navigate Management Consulting and is bringing it in-house as part of a broader business resources push. That may sound less exciting than a new camera or collaboration appliance, but it may ultimately matter more to the channel. A lot of integrators do not have a product problem right now so much as operations, profitability, and business-discipline problems, and Navigate has long focused on improving exactly those issues. If NSCA can turn that expertise into a practical member benefit rather than just another repository of good intentions, this could be a smart move that helps the industry mature in ways product launches rarely do.

Manifold $8B: Manifold secured $8B in a massive funding round to develop security and governance layers for AI agents. As enterprises deploy agents with high-level permissions, Manifold provides a centralized audit trail and kill switch for autonomous communications. The sheer size of this round reflects the industry’s Agent Anxiety. As agents move from summarizing meetings to moving money and accessing PII, the governance layer becomes more valuable than the agent itself.

CTI/Streamline Solutions (read to the Queen song, “Another One Bites The Dust”): CTI has acquired Seattle-based Streamline Solutions, folding in a 17-year-old low-voltage AV design and integration firm to deepen its presence in the Pacific Northwest. The deal strengthens CTI’s Seattle operation and continues a very active acquisition run that has already included Vistacom, ASI, Digital Technology Solutions, Delta AV, LightWerks, and Candeo Vision. More broadly, this is another example of the ongoing consolidation of the AV industry, with larger national players buying smaller regional firms to expand geography, add talent, and concentrate market power. On its face, this looks like a straightforward geography-and-talent play rather than a dramatic strategy shift, but it fits the larger pattern of major integrators steadily getting bigger through acquisition.

Obin AI Emerges: Obin AI has emerged from stealth with $7M in seed funding to automate financial communication workflows. The platform uses specialized agents to handle complex financial inquiries, manage regulatory compliance checks, and secure document exchange. Unlike general-purpose AI, Obin agents are pre-trained on financial regulations to ensure all autonomous communications meet strict industry standards. Verticalization is in the air. Obin expects generalist AI agents to struggle in sectors like finance.

TransUnion/KONTXT: TransUnion has acquired KONTXT to enhance its Branded Call Display (BCD) and anti-fraud capabilities. KONTXT specializes in using AI to detect deepfake voices and automated robocalls in real-time. The voice channel is facing an existential trust crisis. Many businesses are going to need to address this form of fraud.

Leadership Changes

Neat announced a familiar name as its new CEO. Javed Khan, known for his work as the leader of Cisco Collaboration, returns to enterprise collaboration. Javed succeeds Janine Pelosi, who stepped down a few weeks ago. We see the appointment as more than a routine executive shuffle, speculating that the move could mean changes for Neat’s product direction, partnerships, and market posture. Khan’s background naturally raises questions about whether Neat leans further into software, broader platform ambitions, and more aggressive enterprise expansion rather than staying defined only by sleek room hardware. This is one of those CEO changes that could reshape not just one company’s roadmap, but expectations across the collaboration market, which we discussed with both Javed and Roopam Jain from Frost on a recent UC Weekly News video.

Jason Chiang, previously the leader of the ODM BU at AVer, has departed the company.

Jedd Williams was promoted to Chief Commercial Officer at Logitech for Business.

Wildix named Jeff Winnett as GM for the Americas. Winnett previously ran Global Channel Sales at Fusion Connect.

Zoom named Russell Dicker its Chief Product Officer. Dicker was CVP Product Management at Microsoft for the past four years and served more than six years at Google.

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 reportedly plans sweeping layoffs as AI costs increase – Sources tell Reuters that layoffs could affect 20% or more of the company as plans reflect broader tensions within big tech.
AI Power Users Are Rapidly Outpacing Their Peers. Here’s What They’re Doing Differently – The people using AI the right way are gaining a day and a half of productivity each week.
When People Never See Your App: Designing Brands for the Agentic Economy – How brands can thrive – and grow – in the age of AI agents.
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It – People work more and harder if they have AI tools.
Trump Administration Set to Receive $10 Billion Fee for Brokering TikTok Deal – Investors in social-media platform’s US business, including Oracle and Silver Lake, agreed to give the government several multibillion-dollar payments.
AI Needs Management Consultants After All – OpenAI and Anthropic strike deals with consulting firms to spread artificial intelligence through the business world.
People in This Mississippi City Faced Off With Elon Musk. They Lost – Despite locals’ concerns about noise and possible pollution, Mississippi is allowing Mr. Musk’s company to operate gas turbines there that will help power its chatbot.
Rethinking AV System Design in a USB-C World – It’s more than a peripheral connector.
Caltech sues Zoom over videoconferencing patent – The California Institute of Technology is accusing Zoom of infringing ‌one of the university’s patents covering videoconferencing technology.
Fannie Mae to Accept Crypto-Backed Mortgages for the First Time – Coinbase allows home buyers to pledge bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies when making a down payment.
SpaceX To Start Small With 1 Million Satellite Plan, Pushes Back On Critics – The company’s rebuttal to the FCC mentions launching its orbital data center constellation in phases and studying potential atmospheric impacts. SpaceX also threw plenty of shade at Amazon.
Welcome to a Multidimensional Economic Disaster – The AI boom wasn’t built for the polycrisis.
Seeking a Sounding Board? Beware the Eager-to-Please Chatbot – A new study of popular AI models shows that their feedback on social situations is far from impartial.
The Rollerball Economy – We’re living the worst of the Soylent Green, Rollerball, and Demolition Man movies.
The Tech Bubble Might Finally Be Popping OpenAI’s abrupt shutdown of Sora reveals the A.I. boom might be a lot more fragile than it looks.

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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.