Artificial intelligence has moved well beyond the hype cycle. It’s quickly becoming the underlying operating system for CX, quietly powering conversations, routing decisions, service journeys, intent detection, and forming the connective tissue between every customer touchpoint.
While much of the industry is only just grappling with what this means, three leaders who helped shape today’s communications and CX landscape – Michael Tessler, Tomas Gorny, and Ray Nolan – have already spent years preparing for this inflection point.
Rob Scott, founder of CX Today, sat down with them on the Binary to Billions podcast to understand how AI is becoming the foundation for the next generation of customer experience.
Michael Tessler – AI Needs a Strong Communications Backbone
Michael Tessler, co-founder of BroadSoft and the architect of the modern UCaaS ecosystem, has seen every transformational shift in enterprise communications. For him, AI’s emergence is not an isolated revolution, but rather the natural evolution of a communications infrastructure that has been decades in the making.
“Voice, messaging, and meetings have reached maturity,” Tessler says in his Binary to Billions interview. “The innovation now sits in the intelligence layer on top.”
In other words, ‘UC helped us digitise the conversation. AI will help us understand it.’
Tessler’s perspective is grounded in scale. BroadSoft supported carriers serving tens of millions of seats globally. He notes that AI can only succeed when the underlying network is robust enough to handle real-time intelligence. This is where he sees the shift happening now: enterprises moving from communication delivery to experience orchestration. And increasingly, that orchestration is powered by AI models analysing context, sentiment, behaviour, and intent.
AI is the Engine of the Unified CX Platform – Tomas Gorny
While Tessler focuses on the infrastructure, Nextiva CEO Tomas Gorny focuses on the intelligence platform itself.
Gorny saw early (well before the industry did) that AI would become central to how businesses manage customer relationships. Between 2014 and 2017, his team filed patents in customer journey orchestration, NLP, machine learning, and automation. In his interview with Rob Scott, he explains why:
“AI should be the helping hand that connects communication, data, and context to drive better outcomes at the moment of interaction.”
Gorny views CX not as a department, but as a connected system, one where calls, messages, CRM data, workflow logic, and historical behaviour all flow through a single intelligence layer.
For him, AI’s power is unlocked when customer experience platforms combine:
- Unified communications
- Customer data
- Journey awareness
- Predictive automation
This unification enables a business to transition from a reactive service to a proactive, contextual engagement. The “CX OS,” in Gorny’s view, is the platform where every signal is captured – and every insight is delivered to agents or customers in real time.
AI Is Already Automating Most of CX – Ray Nolan
If Tessler lays the foundation and Gorny builds the platform, Ray Nolan provides the proof of what AI can do today. As the founder of eDesk, Nolan works at the sharp end of CX automation. While many organisations are talking about AI transformation, his customers are already living it.
“AI is automating 70–80% of support tickets,” he said on Binary to Billions. “Not just chat – every channel, from Amazon to TikTok to email.”
Nolan’s perspective is refreshingly practical. AI, in his world, isn’t an abstract concept. It categorises tickets, identifies intent, generates responses, translates languages, and resolves issues in seconds. For e-commerce sellers, he notes, this is the difference between scaling or stagnating. AI becomes the agent that never sleeps, never queues, never loses context – and passes only the edge cases to humans.
The takeaway? AI isn’t a feature – it’s the new operating system for customer experience. Enterprises that embrace this shift will transform not only how they serve customers, but how they compete.
Listen to the Binary to Billions podcast for more insights from tech leaders.
