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Articles by Charlie Mitchell
Automation Anywhere Steps Toward the Autonomous Enterprise with Boost.ai Acquisition
In early October 2026, Automation Anywhere signed a definitive agreement to acquire Boost.ai. Boost.ai is a conversational AI solution widely deployed in regulated industries, typically to autonomously resolve contact center queries. Its financial services customers include Santander, Nordea, and Metro Bank, while it also has a deep roster across insurance, telecoms, and the public sector. Automation Anywhere has a strong presence in those very same industries, among others.
7 Best Practices for Dealing with Personal Agents In the Contact Center
In September 2026, Meta launched Muse, a personal AI agent that can carry out tasks on a user’s behalf. Within six weeks, it had reached ten million users. Such personal agents aren’t new. Since Google Duplex first teased their potential in 2018, a number of them have emerged, with some, like Instinct, demonstrating just how far the technology can go. But Meta’s reach and distribution could push them from the periphery to the mainstream.
Sprinklr Launches an AI Agent Suite for Marketing Teams
Sprinklr has announced Sprinklr Marketing AI Agents in beta. The offering includes a connected system of six specialized agents that form a new “orchestration layer” for running marketing campaigns. Traditionally, moving from concept to launch for such campaigns can take several weeks as work passes through a fragmented marketing environment.
11 Revenue Intelligence Solutions
Revenue intelligence is evolving from a concept into an execution engine for growth. Right now, that shift matters as enterprises scramble to grow, as evidenced by the sharp rise in enterprises hiring Chief Growth Officers and Chief Revenue Officers. Yet, these leaders aren't looking at growth in isolation. They want profitable growth that increases customer lifetime value (CLV).
The Economic Risks of AI in Customer Support
For years, buying customer support software was simple. Vendors charged per seat, per month, and that was that. That era is slowly fading. Vendors are changing tactics, launching new pricing models, and protecting themselves in a world where AI could shrink seat counts (and their revenues). The trouble? Many organizations liked per-seat pricing because it was predictable. Now, a bill can depend on how much AI they consume and what outcomes they achieve.
Microsoft Announces an AI Agent Suite to Modernize Legacy Contact Centers
Microsoft has launched Contact Center Intelligence (CCI) in public preview. Essentially, Microsoft CCI is a standalone AI agent suite that businesses can layer on top of their existing contact center platforms. The suite adds AI agents for self-service, quality assurance, and analytics, all initially launched as part of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center.
Zoom Debuts a Unified Context Layer to Transform Customer and Employee Experiences
Zoom has launched a unified context layer spanning its portfolio as its headline announcement from Zoomtopia 2026. The premise is that most valuable information within a business never makes it into a document, knowledge base, or CRM field. Instead, it lives in the conversations between employees, customers, and partners. Consider decisions made in meetings, customer insights shared on calls, and details buried in chat threads. All too often, these never make it into a system of record.
Centrical Debuts a Workforce Orchestration System, Reimagines Contact Center Performance Management
Centrical has launched a Workforce Orchestration System to reimagine contact center performance management. Today, performance management is mostly a manual endeavor. Yes, many contact centers have automated quality scoring. However, few have automated the most important part: what comes next. Typically, leaders must still manually translate quality scores into recognition and improvement opportunities, develop tailored coaching plans, and reinforce learnings to drive sustained performance change.
IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Conversational Intelligence and Analytics Software 2026: Top Takeaways
Conversational intelligence solutions represent the next evolution of speech analytics software. For over a decade, contact centers have used the technology to deeply understand customer conversations, track CX metrics, monitor the service team’s performance, and more. Still, these use cases exist. But conversational intelligence has expanded with the advent of generative AI and, more recently, agentic AI.
The Top Contact Center Challenges by Industry and How to Solve Them
High attrition, siloed knowledge, ever-increasing customer expectations... contact centers face many of the same challenges they have for decades. Yet, they are also tussling with emerging issues, including increased pressure to build relationships with IT and adjacent departments, support new employee needs, and implement AI.
Where Does Customer Journey Mapping Go Wrong? (And How to Fix It)
By Charlie Mitchell To dig into the challenges and opportunities of customer journey mapping, Charlie is joined by: Katie Stabler, Founder of CULTIVATE Customer Experience by Design Paul Hughes, Head of CX Sales for the UK, Ireland & South Africa at Mitel Early in the discussion, Stabler emphasizes why journey mapping often falls short, and how bias, poor data application, and siloed thinking can derail CX efforts.
IT Now Calls the Contact Center AI Buying Shots: So What?
By Charlie Mitchell Joining Charlie for this conversation are two leading experts: Wayne Butterfield, Partner for AI, Automation & Contact Center Transformation at ISG Christoph Börner, VP of Engineering at Cyara Together, they unpack how AI is transforming not only customer service, but also how contact centers buy, test, and trust technologies. Why Is IT Taking Over Contact Center Procurement?
Contact Center Economics in the Age of Voice AI: An Inside Look
Voice systems that sound too robotic, IVR structures that are too rigid, doom loops that offer no way out... almost every consumer can relate. Yet, the needle is starting to move. Soon, talking to AI will feel just like having a normal conversation, and success rates will continue to grow. Gartner even predicts that by year-end 2027, conversational AI applications will automate approximately 70 percent of customer support interactions within enterprises.
A Game Plan to Improve Contact Center Agent Empowerment
In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2027, half of all businesses will abandon plans to shrink their customer service teams. Cavell goes even further, forecasting that global human contact center roles will grow from 15.3 million in 2025 to 16.8 million by 2029. Such statistics underscore how live agents remain a contact center's most valuable asset. Yet, they're also a contact center's most costly asset. Indeed, people typically account for up to 80 percent of their expenses.
Should I Let AI Run My Outbound Contact Center Strategy?
When most leaders think about contact center AI, they picture virtual agents handling inbound inquiries, agent-assist tools accelerating resolution times, or analytics platforms surfacing insights. But that's just the beginning. One of the most powerful - and often overlooked - applications of AI lies on the outbound side.
The Latest on ServiceNow AI Experience, Qualtrics' $6.75MN PG Forsta Acquisition, & More
By Charlie Mitchell Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research Liz Miller VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research Rebecca Wettemann CEO & Principal Analyst at Valoir Shelly Kramer, resident & CEO at Kramer & Company Michael Fauscette, Founder, CEO & Chief Analyst at Arion Research Derek Top, Senior Analyst at Opus Research During the discussion, the panel dives into three major CX stories: ServiceNow Unveils "AI Experience" ServiceNow has launched a unified AI platform designed...
Sprinklr Takes on CCaaS Giants with a Broader Platform Strategy
Of course, some can offer a better voice platform, data strategy, and integration portfolio than others. Still, since the dawn of cloud-native solutions, the scope for differentiation has narrowed. As this trend accelerates, hyperscalers - including AWS, Google, and Microsoft - have crowded the space, sensing an opportunity. Meanwhile, tech providers in adjacent markets - such as CRM, UCaaS, and even CPaaS - have thrown their hats into the ring.
The Latest on ServiceNow AI Experience, Qualtrics' $6.75MN PG Forsta Acquisition, & More
This month’s lineup includes: Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research Rebecca Wettemann, CEO & Principal Analyst at Valoir Shelly Kramer, resident & CEO at Kramer & Company Michael Fauscette, Founder, CEO & Chief Analyst at Arion Research Derek Top, Senior Analyst at Opus Research During the discussion, the panel dives into three major CX stories: ServiceNow Unveils “AI Experience” ServiceNow has launched a unified AI...
The Big ServiceNow AI Experience Announcement: A Closer Look
"There's always a moment when the line is drawn between yesterday and tomorrow. This is that moment." Those are the words of Bill McDermott, CEO of ServiceNow, as he celebrated the recent launch of the AI Experience by ServiceNow. Essentially, AI Experience by ServiceNow is a multi-modal interface that stretches across the ServiceNow AI Platform. From the interface, employees may tap AI agents, which can access ServiceNow apps, workflows, and data.
The Top Announcements, ft. Agentforce 360, The New Slack, & Apromore Acquisition
50,000 people are descending on San Francisco for one of the biggest events in the enterprise technology calendar: Dreamforce. The 23 rd annual conference is Salesforce's chance to showcase its latest innovations, share success stories, and enable customers to network. In the run-up to the event, the CRM leader has made several massive announcements. For starters, it pushed into the ITSM space, converging IT, customer, and HR service on one platform.
The Most Valuable AI in the Contact Center Is a Copilot, Not a Replacement
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has made several quips around the future of customer service. First, he predicted human customer support will be "totally, totally gone". Next, Altman suggested that he is "confident" contact center jobs will be the first to be replaced by AI. With leading AI voices making such predictions, AI experiments are ramping up, CIOs are paying more attention to the contact center, and leaders are honing in on deflection and containment rates.
Salesforce Makes Its Big ITSM Launch, Talks Differentiators Over ServiceNow
Salesforce has launched its new IT service management (ITSM) product: Agentforce IT Service. ITSM solutions help IT teams manage the services they offer across the enterprise. That includes troubleshooting, configuring devices, running applications, granting access to them, and more. As teased last month, Agentforce IT Service will become a key fixture of Service Cloud, as Agentforce for HR Service did in May earlier this year.
Why Are So Many Contact Center Auto-QA Projects Failing?
Earlier this year, Neil Smith, VP of Technical Support at Iterable, discussed his company's underwhelming pilot of a contact center automated quality assurance (Auto-QA) with CX Today. "The AI gave inaccurate or irrelevant insights," he noted. "Managers still had to manually check tickets, and the feedback wasn't useful to agents. "After four weeks, we concluded the tool didn't provide the expected value," and Iterable shut the pilot down.
The Top 10 Announcements (So Far!)
SAP's push into AI agents with Joule and its fast-tracked cloud migrations mean that one major conference a year no longer suffices. In addition to the annual SAP Sapphire, it has rebranded and expanded its SuccessConnect event, so practitioners, partners, and execs can keep their finger on the pulse. At this year's event, that pulse raced, with many massive announcements including AI agent advancements, a new engagement platform, and much more.
Analyzing the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS 2025
By Charlie Mitchell CX Today's Charlie Mitchell hosts a deep-dive discussion into the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS 2025. Joining him for this conversation are two respected industry analysts: Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research Together, the analysts unpack the biggest takeaways from this year's Magic Quadrant and what they mean for enterprise buyers: How Should Buyers Really Use the Magic Quadrant?
Analyzing the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS 2025
Watch on YouTube. CX Today’s Charlie Mitchell hosts a deep-dive discussion into the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS 2025.
Analyzing the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS 2025
By Charlie Mitchell Watch on YouTube. Together, the analysts unpack the biggest takeaways from this year's Magic Quadrant and what they mean for enterprise buyers: How Should Buyers Really Use the Magic Quadrant? Kerravala and Miller highlight the strengths and pitfalls of using the quadrant as a buying guide, and why context and organizational needs matter more than dot placements. What Does the Lack of Visionaries Mean?
Customers Shouldn't Have to Fight for Help. Here's a Better Approach
A friend or family member may even feel they need to offer coaching beforehand. "Make sure you mention this, this, and this, because they won't ask," they might say. Why? Because the friend-turned-CX life coach feels like they know more than the actual employees. That's a problem. After all, customers should never feel they have to be experts on a company's products, policies, or processes. If they do, trust is already broken.
The New Considerations for Contact Center Security & Compliance
So, contact center and IT leaders do their due diligence, and when they implement new AI solutions are typically confident in meeting those standards and securing their deployments. However, the world moves on, and these AI solutions evolve. Consider an AI agent. As it grows, it leverages more data to generate better responses. Without proper oversight, the development can drift away from what's acceptable for the business.
Why Omni-Data Is More Than Just the Next Contact Center Buzzword
Sean Taylor, CEO of Content Guru, was a judge and, as part of the evaluation, sat down with one of the finalists' agents to watch how they worked. "They were taking a customer's payment and had a stack of yellow Post-it notes on their desk," said Taylor during a recent CX Today interview . "They typed the credit card details into one system, then quickly wrote them on a note.
Faster Innovation Demands Smarter Contact Centers
Many have invested heavily in AI or secured funding to do so, but have stumbled as they plot out the best path forward. As such, some are still stuck preparing data projects, spotting process improvement opportunities, and mapping use cases. Unable to move beyond, they're facing a lot of fear, ambiguity, and confusion. After all, solution providers are proving out their models for the first time, and universally trusted case studies are few and far between. This uncertainty creates internal tension.
Deflection Is NOT a Contact Center AI Strategy. This Is
By Charlie Mitchell CX Today's Charlie Mitchell hosts Matt Clare, VP of Product Marketing at UJET. The duo explores changing contact center metrics, AI, and orchestration, discussing: Is It Time to Rethink Deflection & Containment? Clare explains why these metrics, while useful, aren't a strategy, and how contact centers may wish to shift their thinking. When Should Humans Take the Lead?
The ISG Contact Center Buyers Guide 2025: 7 Top Takeaways
The contact center technology market is crowded, with more players from a CRM, UCaaS, and even CPaaS heritage sensing an opportunity to win business in the space. Most, if not all, are banging the AI drum. In 2024, some thudded much harder than others. Yet, in 2025, AI integration is much deeper in the tech stack and more consistent across vendors. The use cases aren't surprising, including self-service, AI assistance, conversational intelligence...
Where Should My Contact Center Invest In AI? This Test Will Tell You
By Charlie Mitchell CX Today's Charlie Mitchell welcomes Wajih Kazmi, Senior Product Marketing Manager at RingCentral, to discuss the company's new AI Maturity Assessment. The pair explore how the free, 10-minute assessment helps organizations understand their readiness for contact center AI and create a clear roadmap. In doing so, they break down: What Is the AI Maturity Assessment, and What Problems Does It Solve?
The Latest BIG News from Zoom, Genesys, ServiceNow, and Zendesk
From more big event coverage to the sunsetting of a widely-deployed CRM solution, here are extracts from some of this week's most popular news stories. Zoom is spreading a clear message at Zoomtopia 2025: it's a platform built for people. Employees, entrepreneurs, creators, educators... they're the ones driving progress every day. For Zoom, that makes it different. It believes that Microsoft builds for IT and procurement, while Google bundles collaboration into its suite.
The Top 10 Announcements
Zoom is spreading a clear message at Zoomtopia 2025: it's a platform built for people. Employees, entrepreneurs, creators, educators... they're the ones driving progress every day. For Zoom, that makes it different. It believes that Microsoft builds for IT and procurement, while Google bundles collaboration into its suite. Yet, it aims to deliver for the user. For that reason, Zoomtopia's theme is all about connecting people to progress.
Is My Contact Center AI Investment Futureproof?
In AI, 12 months is a lifetime. While laptops and smartphones may last a few years, today's AI models go stale much sooner. That's a big problem for brands building contact centers around them. Unfortunately, many are doing so, slapping generative AI (GenAI) on top of their contact center stack, using basic API integrations and point solutions. But without more intelligent design, these plans will fail fast. A better approach is building a smarter foundation.
3 Times Customer Chatbots Went Rogue (and the Lessons We Need to Learn)
By 2027, conversational AI is expected to handle 70 percent of customer service interactions, up from about 50 percent today, according to Gartner. The driver? Generative and agentic AI. The catch? We've already seen two years' worth of high-profile AI misfires, and they are a warning shot of what's to come. Some bot blunders made headlines for laughs, like Virgin Money's getting flustered over the word "virgin" or DPD dubbing itself the "worst delivery company in the world," but others cut deeper.
ServiceNow Teams Up with Five9 to Drop Another Unified CRM-CCaaS Offering
ServiceNow and Five9 announced that their unified CCaaS-CRM offering is now generally available. As teased in November, the "Five9 Fusion for ServiceNow" solution embeds some of Five9's CCaaS tooling directly into ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM). In doing so, both vendors hope to deliver a unified agent experience, consolidate support data, and lower management burden. Five9 also has a similar offering with Salesforce.
The Top 5 Announcements
Enterprise tech solutions don't fit neatly into silos anymore. With system convergence and AI agents, that's all changed. Indeed, workflows are expanding beyond departments, and solutions are knitting together As such, parts of the business that may never have worked with a platform like Workday, like CX functions, may consider becoming more familiar with such leading technologies. Here's an example. Consider a customer service rep raising a query regarding their job benefits.
Genesys and Zoom Quietly Push Customer Service and ITSM Closer Together
Over the past year, Genesys and Zoom have launched tight integrations with ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM), the widely utilized customer support CRM. Unlike other integrations, these embed several of the CCaaS vendors' tools, including voice and digital channels, call management, and routing, natively inside ServiceNow CSM. The integrations go by the name: Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow Unified Engagement from Zoom CX and ServiceNow Both releases received plaudits.
The Latest BIG News from Salesforce, Genesys, ServiceNow, & RingCentral
From prominent customer experience providers entering new markets to more agentic AI advancements, here are extracts from some of this week's most popular news stories. Salesforce has officially entered the ITSM space with the launch of Agentic IT Service. Last week, CEO Marc Benioff announced the company's plan to showcase a new ITSM product at Dreamforce 2025.
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) 2025: The Rundown
The Magic Quadrant for CCaaS is back, and once again, NiCE and Genesys lead the way. AWS, Five9, and Talkdesk join them in the Leader square, with the latter bouncing back after placing as a Visionary last year. Content Guru also rises up the pile. It has shifted from the Niche Player quadrant and is now a Challenger. Meanwhile, Cisco moves in the opposite direction. 8×8 has dropped out of the evaluation, yet Zoom enters and takes its place as a Niche Player.
ServiceNow Debuts Agentic Playbooks to "Set a New Standard" for Workflow Automation
ServiceNow has rolled out its Zurich release, expanding its platform with several "breakthrough" innovations. Agentic Playbooks is one of those innovations. It allows teams to break down complex, cross-enterprise processes into step-by-step guides. Indeed, it offers an interface for teams to map out workflows across enterprise systems, like whiteboard sketches. To further boost this capability, ServiceNow announced it's combining Process and Task Mining insights on one platform.
SoundHound AI Acquires Interactions for $60MN, Converges the Conversational AI Space
;SoundHound AI has swooped for Interactions, a rival developing conversational AI solutions for customer support. The $60MN deal follows its $80MN acquisition of Amelia last year, as SoundHound grows its footprint across the contact center space. Like Amelia, Interactions has a long history in the market, developing two decades' worth of innovation and IP. It also offers a deep portfolio of enterprise integrations and large amounts of production data.
Why Legacy CCaaS Pricing Is Broken and What's Next
Seat-based pricing has long been the standard for contact centers, and before the rise of AI, it worked well. Service teams had a fixed number of agents, and costs were simply tied to those seats. Meanwhile, it suited vendors, too. After all, it's neat, tidy, and predictable. However, the traditional seat-based licensing model is fundamentally misaligned with the value proposition of AI. Vendors promise efficiency and seat reduction, but their pricing model incentivizes the opposite.
Genesys Deepens Its ServiceNow Partnership, Releases New Agentic AI & Orchestration Capabilities
Genesys has announced an expanded partnership with ServiceNow at its Xperience 2025 event. The event set the stage for the release of new agentic AI capabilities, journey orchestration tools, and a program to help establish, connect, and automate end-to-end resolution flows. Yet, the ServiceNow partnership is the headline-clincher ,with those end-to-end resolution flows also a key part of the announcement. Indeed, the two vendors pledged to deliver Agent2Agent (A2A) orchestration.
Why Legacy CCaaS Pricing Is Broken and What's Next
Seat-based pricing has long been the standard for contact centers, and before the rise of AI, it worked well. Service teams had a fixed number of agents and costs were simply tied to those seats. Meanwhile, it suited vendors, too - after all, it's neat, tidy, and predictable. However, the traditional seat-based licensing model is fundamentally misaligned with the value proposition of AI. Vendors promise efficiency and seat reduction, but their pricing model incentivizes the opposite.
Krisp Asks Court to Toss Sanas Claims, Launches Countersuit
Krisp Technologies has asked a court to throw out "key claims" in a lawsuit filed by rival Sanas. Sanas filed the lawsuit in July 2025, claiming "theft of intellectual property", which it alleges led to the development of the Krisp AI Accent Conversion solution, released in April 2025. The technology converts the accent of a speaker in real-time. It is widely deployed by contact center outsourcing companies, and Sanas had a monopoly on the market until Krisp's entrance.
Over 2 Million People Are Using HubSpot's Unofficial AI Agent Platform
Among them, 26,000 users built their own agents, and 1,800 of those agents are available for the community to use for free. Shah shared the news at the company's INBOUND 2025 event last week. The Agent.ai platform is a network of autonomous AI agents for service, sales, marketing, and operations teams. Anyone can use the platform, even if they are not currently a HubSpot customer.
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