Blogs

I’ve been listening to the presentations at Cisco Live this week. The headline this week is that Cisco aims to become “the infrastructure layer for the agentic enterprise.” Cisco has been building this quietly, with some incredible partnerships. The centerpiece is Cisco Cloud Control. This is a unified platform built for humans and AI agents to manage, monitor, and defend critical IT infrastructure and is the foundation for Cisco’s AgenticOps operating model.

I highlighted in a few blogs recently on the importance of a solid infrastructure for Voice AI and CX workloads. Agentic workloads are real-time. Voice AI deployments are latency-sensitive. Managing that will be a challenge without the investment in a strong infrastructure. Imagine managing speech-to-speech translations or autonomous AI agents resolving issues at scale. All of this depends on the underlying network, compute, and observability behaving predictably.

For a CX or collaboration buyer, Cisco’s investments at the “infrastructure layer” signal to its customers and prospects that the reliability, reduced latency, security, and data governance it provides is an important consideration for Voice AI deployments. Cisco’s bet is that as multiple agents become embedded co-workers handling live customer interactions, the vendor that controls the network, compute, security, and observability as one fabric can deliver solid and reliable agentic experiences.

It was also good to hear about Cisco’s announcement on Webex Workforce Management. The workforce of the future will span AI Agents, Humans in the loop, Voice AI agents. The algorithms to manage these new dynamics will be important.

I had the opportunity to attend the Salesforce Agentforce World Tour Summit in Singapore last week. Salesforce announced a record annual revenue of $41.5 billion for fiscal year 2026, marking a 10% year-over-year increase. The company projects continued strong growth, fueled by its Agentforce AI platform, with long-term goals of surpassing $63 billion in organic revenue by FY30—a remarkable milestone.

A few things that stood out for me at the event:

• Salesforce is reaffirming its commitment to Singapore following its US$1 billion investment in Singapore last year. They will launch the AI Innovation Hub in June this year, which is expected to provide businesses and partners in Singapore with most of the tools they need for their agentic enterprise AI journey.

• Hearing from various customers on stage was insightful, but Grab’s story stood out in particular. Grab, a platform nearly ubiquitous across Asia where Uber does not operate, relies heavily on Salesforce. For Grab, data is a critical asset that enables them to scale their business across the region. They feed this data into AI systems to optimize platform efficiency—from matching riders and drivers faster to improving delivery routes, guiding drivers during heavy traffic, and dynamically adjusting prices based on demand.

• Gavin Barfield, Salesforce CTO for ASEAN, outlined the Salesforce Agentic Enterprise Architecture. This approach is powerful because it integrates human and AI agents with CRM workflows, flow automation, case management, service operations, approvals, and escalations.

As an analyst in the Contact Centre and CX space, I see Salesforce disrupting the market through its strength in data and workflow orchestration. The company is advancing toward multi-agent orchestration, which is highly significant for contact centers. In this new paradigm, service agents, operations agents, back-office agents, marketing agents, sales agents, and others will seamlessly share context, collaborate, monitor, and coordinate workflows across the contact center.

Historically, Salesforce has operated on the periphery of the CX space with Service Cloud. Now, it is firmly in the contact center arena—a vendor to watch given its scale and reach. They are also well entrenched with the large global SI’s and have a good partner footprint across the APAC region.

The contact center market is becoming increasingly competitive, with buyers able to choose from Traditional CCaaS vendors, Hyperscalers, AI-native CX vendors, and CRM/ITSM vendors.

Thanks, Tim Shepheard and the Salesforce team, for having me at the Agentforce summit.

For years, Salesforce wanted to reach deeper into the contact centre market, and it has done well through its Service Cloud offering.

The competition over the past 12 months has intensified, with more CRM and ITSM vendors becoming more aggressive with their CX strategies. Today marks a historic milestone in the Contact Centre industry as Salesforce, a major tech player, enters a market traditionally led by a few specialised contact center vendors.

Salesforce has now launched its own native contact centre solution. Here are some observations about the announcement:

• The move today is a smart one because voice is now the most important channel in CX. Salesforce understood that to compete, owning and building this channel from the ground up was essential. Although voice could be integrated as part of the Service Cloud offering, significant integration efforts were still needed. Currently, phone numbers are available only for the US and Canada. International expansion, including the Asia-Pacific region for Voice, WFM, and Quality Management, BYOC, will be announced in the coming months.

• For Salesforce-heavy enterprises, Agentforce Contact Centre is effectively their answer to “AI-first CCaaS.” This means one platform using existing CRM, case, and data investments instead of bolting voice and stitching together other applications.  For enterprises running Service Cloud with multiple vendor partnerships, this could be a trigger to work with ONE vendor and simplify integration across multiple partnerships.

• Data has always been a challenge, as unifying data marts across multiple channels requires significant integration effort. Salesforce is building a solid data foundation for every customer interaction across service, sales, and marketing, all in a single layer. This could resonate well with some customers during their evaluation process.

• While there may be slight friction or co-opetition among its contact center partners, Salesforce has stated that investments in partnerships will keep growing and that they will continue collaborating with their 17 existing contact center partners.

• Convincing an enterprise to switch away from Genesys, NiCE, Cisco, Amazon Connect or others immediately will be difficult; these are significant decisions involving multiple teams, extensive planning, and substantial investments. There will be many opportunities with companies using Service Cloud and for new greenfield customers.

Salesforce benefits from its implementation partners, including Deloitte, Accenture, and PwC, all of which have large Salesforce practices. This will be a strong driver for future AI, CRM, and Contact Center deployments.

Today is an interesting day in the world of AI, and the Contact Center market just got a lot more interesting!

Thank you for the briefing and catch up over the last few weeks – Ashish Seth, Tim Shepheard David Stone

Voice AI Agents are gaining popularity in the Asia Pacific region. The intricacies of Asian languages are both the competitive edge and the main challenge. Many of the leading CX vendors are collaborating with partners to improve how they enhance Voice AI agents in languages such as Bahasa Indonesia, Mandarin, Thai, Tamil, and others.

Small nuances matter. In ‘Singlish’ or Malaysian English, it’s important to understand how some sentences might end with a “la” or a “lor.” These are ways locals communicate when calling banks, airlines, telcos, and others. Therefore, bridging that gap is essential for the success of a Voice AI deployment. Otherwise, customers will call to speak to an agent!

If you’re looking for a solution that needs to bridge the challenges of Asian languages, do consider some of the following:

• Define the use case for Voice AI: Is this for inbound service IVR replacement, outbound collections/tele‑sales, appointment reminders, or agent assist? Each point narrows the vendor list.

• Consider native Asian voice AI vendors: these include Toku, WIZ.AI and many others.

• Look at the global platform vendors and assess their offerings. These players include Google, Cisco, Amazon Web Services (AWS), PolyAI, NiCE Cognigy, and others.

• Run a tightly scoped PoC, include local accents in test scripts, and test for language quality.

• Involve your telco/CPaaS provider early, and ensure handoff to agents, reporting, and failure modes perform well under challenging conditions. Test for latency.

At the #MWC last week, Singtel announced it is working with Sierra to strengthen customer interactions through AI across its operations. The collaboration started late January with a pilot involving Singtel Singapore’s CX teams. “Shirley,” the AI assistant, has been designed to understand local expressions and colloquialisms, including Singlish!

Singtel went live in less than 10 weeks, and in the first six weeks since launch,” Shirley” handled over 70,000 customer cases involving high-volume requests in areas such as mobile issues and roaming services.

Initial results have been positive:

• 73% of mobile and home troubleshooting cases were resolved without requiring a Customer Care officer.

• 76% of roaming sign-up requests were completed successfully without requiring a Customer Care officer.

• More than 200 roaming add-ons were purchased independently

In addition, Singtel will deploy voice-based AI agents for Outbound sales calls.

Congratulations to Bret Taylor and the team at Sierra on this deployment.

The CX Market is going through disruption as AI takes centre stage. Building a contact center meant buying analytics and knowledge from one vendor, AI from another, and CRM and ticketing from others. The system integrators would sell the licenses and implement the solution. At times, integrating the various CX applications was an arduous task. Each new layer required additional licenses and integration costs to ensure everything was well orchestrated.

The market is witnessing the emergence of a new breed of tech AI vendors that are focused on improvements and outcomes in CX. These players are not selling CCaaS licenses or asking customers to do away with their CRM, Ticketing, CCaaS or other exsisting CX investments. They are focusing on delivering CX outcomes by overlaying their AI on top of an enterprise’s existing solutions. It is a different kind of value proposition and something that the CCaaS market is not used to. These types of models will become increasingly important in the market.

I recently spoke to the team at Crescendo. The company was founded in 2024. They have raised $50M in Funding, have 3,500 Employees, $100M in ARR, and have 500+ AI deployments. Not bad at all for a company founded 2 years ago!

How are they disrupting the CX space?

• By combining infrastructure, AI, the right type of people, and analytics, Crescendo collapses what is typically a complex stack of applications across stack of CCaaS, WFM/WEM, QA, bot platforms, and BPO providers into a single contract and SLA

• They introduced the “Crescendo Total Outcome Guarantee” model – Guaranteed to outperform any AI bot, Guaranteed go-live in <30 days, and Satisfaction Guaranteed: never pay for DSATs.

• They offer a fully managed, AI-intelligent contact center that replaces the CCaaS stack with an outcome-based pricing model, looking at bringing together “AI + people”, rather than selling software seats or bots.

• They can also take over the BPO contract and deliver the ROI from Day 1!

• They use an augmented AI model (their secret sauce) where advanced AI handles most tasks and human CX experts supervise and intervene as needed in real time.

I truly enjoyed my chat and learning from the team at Crescendo. Thank you, Matt Price and Tod Famous, for the briefing. Congratulations on a fantastic ride so far, and I am sure this is just the beginning!

It was a great week at Cisco Live in Melbourne, and I had the opportunity to interview 3 global leaders at the analyst sessions. Here are some key highlights:

Espen Løberg – VP and GM, Collaboration Devices

I asked Espen about how he sees the whole workplace collaboration market changing in the next few years and he mentioned – ‘’Imagine how we have noise cancellation now on every call and users don’t even notice it. With AI we are entering into a phase where the quality of the room experience, video meetings, problems with the audio and camera or the headset will be naturally and seamlessly detected by multiple AI agents and bots on the back end that will work to correct these inefficiencies in ”real time” so meeting experiences will adjust itself accordingly without the need for users to do anything”

Abhiram Kramadhati Krmadhati – Director AI Go to Market and Ops

I asked Abhiram about what it takes to get your Voice AI deployment right? While there are many important stages in the design of the solution, Abhi spoke about the importance of understanding Active Data and Passive Data.

Active Data is data generated as part of the ongoing conversation in real time, while Passive Data looks at data that sits in an Enterprise’s CRM, Knowledge, and other Enterprise Business Applications. He also talked about how Cisco’s customers are seeing success through Topic Analytics. This is where the Cisco solution will analyse calls over the last 3 months, then do a deep dive into why people are calling the contact centre. It is through this process that you uncover why, for example that an appointment cancellation with an agent can take up to 15 minutes!

Amey Parandekar – VP of Product and GM for Cisco’s Calling Business

Amey and I spoke about how while there is growth in cloud calling, the APAC market is largely still an on-premises market, and the on-premises and hybrid market remains relevant for government, defense, emergency services, and many other mission-critical sectors. Many of these customers will not move to the cloud but will want the ability to innovate with AI technologies while they are on these architectures. Cisco’s strength, underpinning all of these, is its ability to serve customers on any architecture of their choice and to guarantee high levels of security in calling.

The big news for the APAC region is the expansion of Webex Calling’s presence in India with dedicated data centers in Mumbai and Chennai. 2026 will also mark the launch of Webex Contact Center in India. India is poised to see good growth in 2026 and Cisco is setting itself up well to take on this opportunity!

Thank you, Archana Shah and Ruth Busbee, for the opportunity to be at these sessions! Cisco Anne Purvis-Blomquist Alison St.Cyr (Parker) Sophie McNeill

Having a good data foundation is key in every AI deployment. When enterprises start on their data orchestration journey and pull the data from multiple back-end systems, getting the foundation right seems easy, but it is an arduous task. How do you begin? What tools are the best for data collection and data ingestion? These are common issues surfacing, and many enterprises want to get it right, as that is the foundation for successful AI deployment.

I recently caught up with Trusst AI. Think of them as the overlay and the brain in finding the best ways to manage the complexities within the entire customer journey all within the customer’s cloud. They are positioning themselves at the forefront of analytics and automation for contact centres. The platform is the ‘intelligent brain’ that helps enterprises use the data to understand what should be automated. The platform ingests data from multiple data sources, which include contact centre applications, chatbots, CRM systems, social media monitoring applications, billing systems, ERP systems, and more. The platform learns from data, and the constant continuous learning reveals new patterns that have not been seen before.

It can continuously improve agent accuracy and efficiency, both human and AI agents. The platform has the ability to spot new customer patterns, and, as they emerge, feed insights and learnings back to the platform for further insights.

They are helping enterprises build a CX engine that can adapt to any circumstance and evolve alongside the business. From the data, you will also now how to get started in your AI Agents and Voice AI journey.

So, their take is that while everyone is building AI agents, they have built the BRAIN!

So if you’re not sure where to begin in your AI journey, this might be a good starting point for your enterprise.

Great to see the momentum Luke McNamara, Ryan Kohler, Sarel Roets Trusst AI

I had the pleasure of attending the ServiceNow analyst briefing in Singapore last week! Some quick and high-level facts – $10.65 billion in FY24 Subscription revenue, ~8400 customers (86% of the Fortune 500), ~20% YoY growth in Q1 2025. Not many players can boast of such statistics in this current economic climate.

What they have built is enviable. They are the underlying glue that brings it all together to resolve every single problem of the customer’s journey and as a consultant recently wrote in a blog – ServiceNow is ‘’the mother of all workflows’’. They have truly moved and innovated beyond the ITSM space.

In most enterprises, when a customer issue arises and becomes complex, it typically moves from the CRM to multiple departments, the back office, the contact centre, and, in some instances, to field services and billing. The complexity lies in the inability of multiple departments to have a clear and unified view of the problem. Departments will be calling each other to understand the issue, and the back office will have its own issues. Much of this is due to data sitting in siloed systems. The delay means the customer has to wait and keep calling the contact centre to follow up on the issue. Time to resolution increases from something that could have been done in a few days to 6 weeks!

ServiceNow is thinking about the bigger picture as they co-create unified workflows with Contact Centre vendors. They are now taking the contact centre deeper into the Enterprise. The co-creation of workflows for complex customer experience issues is about unifying data across ERP systems, Billing, Financial Services applications and many more. ServiceNow are helping contact centres to become truly data driven by being able to understand every single nuance of where the issue lies through AI enabled workflow orchestration across the entire customer journey. That is truly powerful and something that has been tough for contact centre vendors to achieve on their own.

As CX environments become increasingly complex and sophisticated, CX Observability solutions will become more critical.

1) CX environments face a major challenge ahead of them as they manage multiple stacks of cloud applications. With the growth of AI Agents, Voice AI, and other new applications, ensuring these technologies run smoothly to prevent failures is essential. Agents operate remotely, and parts of operations are outsourced, increasing the complexity within contact centre operations. Many testing tools are available for IT teams, including those that handle regression testing, network testing, performance testing, and more. But is that sufficient?

2) CX Observability goes a step further. The IT and CX teams use the data to understand ‘how’ and ‘why’ these changes occur. It enables them to access real-time insights into customer and agent experiences through continuous monitoring of experiential, operational, and technical data! Some of these data points include CPU and memory usage, browser activity, response times, voice interaction durations, hold times, call transfers, latency, execution times, and others. Having this data in real-time, along with an understanding of what’s happening at the network and infrastructure level, is equally important. It’s also crucial to analyse agent behavior and combine that with technical data from agent workstations to understand, for example, why poor experiences are occurring. The correlation between agent behaviour and the technical aspects of performance will become more important than ever as AI applications usage increases within the contact centre. This holistic view of monitoring gives teams the BIG picture and how to unpack the hidden insights across technical, operational, and experiential data—all in real-time.

I recently caught up with Romilly Blackburn, the CEO of Operata, a company witnessing good growth in the CX Observability space. He explained how a major bank in the UK was struggling to manage a complex technology environment that included multiple IVR systems, several BPOs, remote agents in different locations, and various VDIs (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). The bank was unsure how to resolve these technical and operational challenges and turned to Operata for help.

This is a growing space, and there are niche and specialised vendors in this space. Cyara, IR, and Nectar are expanding their offerings. Cisco, through its Cisco ThousandEyes solution, is able to help enterprises overcome these complexities.

With AI being at the core of every Contact Center discussion, Hyperscalers will have an edge in the AI and Contact Centre race!

We are now in an AI-first world, and this will dominate every contact centre discussion. It is no longer about CCaaS or Cloud Migration. That is a thing of the past as the pace of innovation to have AI as the single orchestration layer that sits across the contact centre takes centre stage.

Many of the current solutions in the market do not address that. For many of these solutions, AI has been acquired to improve some part of the offering. What we are seeing now taking place is a fundamental shift in how buyers have to think about choosing to work with a vendor. Generative AI must be baked into WFM, WEM, Conversational AI, Knowledge, and others to drive unified agent and customer experiences. This means that it is ONE orchestration layer to allow for data to be fed into the AI at the core of the platform. From there, the Contact Centre solution works harmoniously to deliver the desired outcomes

As CIOs look to evaluate a Contact Centre vendor, AI will be at the foundation of how it cuts across cloud, data, IaaS, PaaS and other enterprise priorities. The Hyperscalers, which include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google, will be watched closely. While the contact centre decision remains a smaller part of the equation for the CIO, the move to have autonomous agents in delivering outcomes across HR, IT, Legal, Finance, and many other departments will also mean that the strategy will permeate the contact centre.

Hyperscalers come with that ability to be the ‘anchor’ in the Contact Centre orchestration layer across cloud, data, and the contact centre is part of this layer from the ground up. The data is looked at holistically across the platform. LLM’s are only as good as the data it is fed. With a platform where AI is the central engine, the data is harmonized, constantly updated across the platform, and stored in a single central location.

This will be the advantage hyperscalers bring to the contact centre space. In the Asia Pacific region, AWS is a disruptive force in the contact centre market and have demonstrated how CIOs and CX decision makers see the relevance in working with a Hyperscaler. Microsoft, although a new kid on the block, is a sleeping giant and they will soon be scaling their presence across the Asia Pacific region.