From reported layoffs at Verint to a new Agentforce release, here are extracts from some of this week’s most popular news stories.
What Verint’s Mass Layoffs Mean for Your CX Tech Stack
Verint has reportedly laid off hundreds of employees worldwide as the company begins life under private equity ownership following its $2 billion acquisition by Thoma Bravo.
The cuts, first reported by Israeli business publication CTech, affect staff across multiple regions.
Several dozen of those let go are based in Israel, where Verint operates an R&D hub of around 200 employees – roughly five percent of its pre-layoff global headcount of approximately 3,800.
The news was also discussed by Enterprise Communications Analyst, Dave Michels, who wrote on LinkedIn:
“Who could have predicted this? After $2 billion buyout, Verint lays off hundreds as private equity era begins”
Despite these reports, it is important to note that the layoffs have not yet been confirmed by Verint (Read more…).
Salesforce Launches Agentforce for Communications to Target Telecom Efficiency and Customer Retention
Salesforce has announced the launch of Agentforce for Communications, a vertical solution with telco-specific AI agents designed to automate and improve telecommunication tasks in CX, sales, and business operations.
By using real-time data and natural language understanding to take actions and provide insights, this will enable telecom companies to tackle unnecessary technical debt and allow service agents to focus on complex tasks, improving productivity in customer interactions.
The CRM giant reveals that this set of AI agents was launched in response to telecom companies seeing slow ROI and rising customer churn despite heavy investments, allowing these businesses to move away from repetitive workloads and fragmented systems to improve their CX.
David Fan, SVP & GM for Communications at Salesforce, explains how these AI agents will allow telecom companies to operate more efficiently and generate higher revenue.
“With Agentforce for Communications, we’re helping telecom companies work smarter by connecting every part of their business, from sales to customer service to field operations, with AI agents that work 24/7 alongside human teams,” he said (Read more…).
Four Data Broker Breaches Cost U.S. Consumers $20BN Over a Decade, Congress Finds
A new U.S. Congressional report is putting a figure on something many consumers already feel. Beyond inconvenience, data breaches create lasting financial harm.
A report released by U.S. Senator Maggie Hassan, ranking member of the Joint Economic Committee, estimates that four major data broker breaches over the past decade have cost U.S. consumers more than $20BN in losses tied to identity theft, fraud, and scams.
To arrive at the estimate, the committee evaluated how many people exposed in each breach were likely to experience identity theft, scaled that number down, used federal data to determine how many victims lost money, and then multiplied those losses by a typical $200 per person.
But this likely understates the real cost to consumers, the committee acknowledged:
“Notably, consumers with data exposed in a breach may try to recover losses through a class action lawsuit against the companies that experienced the breach.
“These cases make clear that the total financial losses that victims of identity theft experience are likely far greater than the median of $200 lost to identity theft.”
Read the full article to find out more.
Santander And Mastercard Put AI Agents Into Payments, The Next CX Friction Fight
Santander and Mastercard say they have completed Europe’s first live end-to-end AI agent payment.
The payment was executed by an AI agent, with the two banks describing it as the first agentic payment carried out within a regulated banking framework.
An AI agent payment is designed to remove a moment of effort, and that can change the customer journey far beyond checkout.
In discussing the news, Matías Sánchez, Global Head of Cards and Digital Solutions at Santander said:
“At Santander, we see AI as a transformative force in the evolution of payments. Our role is not only to adopt innovation, but to shape it responsibly, embedding security, governance and customer protection by design.”
“As AI agents become part of everyday commerce, building trusted, scalable frameworks will be essential to unlocking their full potential.”
