Enterprise tech providers are taking steps to block their customers from giving third-party AI providers access to the data on their platforms.
An analysis from The Information brings this emerging issue to the fore, less than a month after Salesforce faced fiery criticism for making such a move.
Indeed, Salesforce implemented new “safeguards” in Slack that prevented integrated third-party solutions from pulling unlimited amounts of data from the collaborations platform via APIs.
Essentially, Salesforce obstructed its customers from using their own data as they please.
Still, the tech giant maintains that it made the move to protect customer data. Yet, it has inadvertently thrust into the limelight the ongoing battle between AI startups and the enterprise platforms from which they source data.
That battle is now spilling into the contact center space, with The Information isolating how NiCE and Genesys charge customers extra for analyzing customer calls with third-party AI solutions.
These AI solutions may monitor customer contact reasons, track sentiment levels, and auto-fill quality assurance (QA) scorecards.
After calling out the contact center providers, the authors namedropped Cresta as an example of an AI startup that bears the brunt of this trend.
Talking to CX Today, Russell Banzon, Chief Marketing Officer at Cresta, refrained from blasting the NiCE and Genesys specifically, noting that these AI markups are an industry-wide problem.
“Enterprise organizations need to be wary of CCaaS and telephony providers holding their data hostage,” he said.
“Today, many large vendors are taking steps to keep customer data locked within their platforms with the hopes of deepening the stickiness of their relationship. However, vendor-lock is becoming a top concern for many enterprise organizations as they view AI as critical to their long-term success.
Customers should be clear in their RFPs (Request for Proposals) for these types of platforms that they need an open data approach to future-proof their AI strategy.
Banzon did note how some CCaaS vendors are embracing this open data approach while partnering with Cresta and similar AI startups to “provide their customers with the best possible experience.”
In the CRM market, HubSpot even recently announced a first-of-its-kind integration to share data with ChatGPT.
However, vendors blocking the competition is nothing new in the contact center space, which has a history of providers making similar moves to lock in customers.
One classic tactic is to attach calling plans to CCaaS contracts, so businesses port their numbers to the vendor. By controlling those numbers, the vendor can make it difficult for their customers to test and shift to an alternative solution.
Yet, this latest lock-in tactic to obstruct the transfer of customer data has implications far beyond contact centers specifically.
Atlassian, Notion, and SAP Also Named & Shamed
In its analysis, The Information calls out several tech providers, which span the enterprise, for obstructing data access.
Atlassian, which develops team collaboration and software development solutions, gets a lot of heat for issuing rate limits for API usage.
As justification, Atlassian claimed the move aspires “to maintain reliable services for both Atlassian customers and partners” amid an “unusual increase in API usage”.
However, it effectively limits customers from using competitive solutions to pull data from Atlassian using APIs.
Notion, the workspace application, appears to be taking similar steps to restrict access to the data on its platform, with the vendor revealing in product documentation that it has “plans to adjust rate limits to balance for demand and reliability.”
It also suggests that it could soon introduce new rate limits for taking data from specific workspaces. That limit may vary across different pricing plans.
Elsewhere, there is an ongoing lawsuit against SAP brought about by Celonis, a process mining provider that extracts knowledge from systems’ event logs.
The lawsuit alleges that the enterprise tech juggernaut told joint customers they’d have to pay extra to access data stored in SAP via Celonis’ applications.
While judgment is yet to be passed in this case, these walled gardens, which many enterprise vendors are putting up, may require deep pockets and legal teams to tear down.
Increasingly, brands want to do just that, with AI agents promising to automate workflows that span the enterprise. Nevertheless, such obstructions could punish organizations for simply trying to innovate with their own data and new forms of AI.
