From one major CX player completing an acquisition to another making moves to improve contact center reliability, here are extracts from some of this week’s most popular news stories.
Zendesk Acquires HyperArc: A Triple Win for Analytics, AI Agents, and Pricing
Zendesk has acquired HyperArc, the analytics and business intelligence (ABI) platform provider.
Built by some of the brains behind Tableau, the solution plugs into data and knowledge sources, takes user questions in plain English, and instantly generates insights.
Interestingly, it also claims to be the “first” solution that learns from a business’s top analysts, turning AI into an analytical partner.
In doing so, it tracks each step of a brand’s analysis to understand what the user is looking at and why it matters, while capturing that context that so often gets lost along the way.
Yet, the acquisition doesn’t signal a major step into the ABI space; it’s a move that will lay new analytical capabilities across the Zendesk Resolution Platform. (Read more…).
AWS Makes a Big AI Agent Launch, Demonstrates How It Could Benefit Customer Service
AWS has announced Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, a new set of services that assist developers in bringing AI agents into production.
Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Agentic AI at AWS, made the announcement during the cloud giant’s 2025 New York Summit.
In his keynote, Sivasubramanian discussed how “undifferentiated heavy lifting” slows down the development of AI agents.
For instance, a developer may build something exciting on their laptop, demo it, get the CEO excited, but then they hit a brick wall trying to scale it and get it production-ready.
To break down that wall and make AI agents enterprise-ready, IT teams must go through several cumbersome processes. These include:
- Choosing the right models
- Doing extensive prompt engineering
- Creating evaluation frameworks
- Building memory and personalization features from scratch
- Setting up tool stacks manually
All these processes create what AWS termed a “chasm of production readiness”, with prototypes on one side and production on the other.
That’s where Amazon Bedrock AgentCore comes in. (Read more…).
Microsoft Boosts Contact Center Reliability with a New Desktop App
Microsoft has launched a new native desktop app for businesses that leverage its Dynamics 365 Contact Center.
While the announcement isn’t as headline-grabbing as agentic AI or Copilot enhancements, this one could quietly solve a major pain point: contact center reliability.
Indeed, the “Desktop Companion App”, now in public preview, will help prevent dropped calls, stabilize agent workflows, and minimize session interruptions.
In many hybrid and high-volume environments, these issues are too pervasive, with dropped customers often leading to customers calling back angry.
Yet, the new desktop app keeps agent sessions alive and stable, even when browsers crash, cookies disappear, and network gremlins strike.
Moreover, the app helps to combat browser-based interruptions, which sometimes result in agents losing session data. (Read more…).
Zoho Makes 5 Major Moves to Expand Its AI Portfolio
Zoho has announced several new AI solutions for its ecosystem.
That ecosystem comprises AI tools integrated into the user experience, so they work in the background without the user even knowing it’s AI.
Yet, there are also default Zia Agents that cross Zoho’s products. Businesses can deploy these agents – often at no extra cost – to automate simple tasks or as “digital employees” within a system.
Zoho has built and hosted much of this AI on its own infrastructure, enabling the business to better manage costs and its roadmap.
Now, it has made several significant steps along this roadmap. Here are five of the highlights. (Read more…).
