Enterprise Connect 2026 has revealed a significant shift in the enterprise communications and CX market.
Moving on from prioritizing AI capability to how organizations should manage these innovations, this year’s conference focused on deployment, governance, and measurable ROI, with many vendors showcasing autonomous service agents, workflow automation, and cross-platform orchestration.
Top CX announcements from last week focused heavily on contact center innovations, including Salesforce’s launch of Agentforce Contact Center as a CRM-native execution layer, NiCE’s transformation of digital channels to accelerate contact center automation, and Amazon Connect’s four contact center updates to improve how enterprises measure and manage AI performance.
However, away from the headline-grabbers were a series of significant announcements that flew under the radar. Below are five announcements you may have missed last week:
Dialpad Launches AI Testing and Governance Tools for Contact Centers
The vendor announced a set of updates to its agentic AI platform, aiming to address the “AI execution gap” by allowing enterprises to test out AI agents before rollout.
Craig Walker, CEO at Dialpad, explained that these updates are expected to close this gap for organizations before deployment.
“Enterprises aren’t struggling with AI ambition – they’re struggling with AI execution,” he said.
“Billions have been spent on agentic AI, but too many projects stall before delivering real, measurable results.
“Our latest platform advancements eliminate the guesswork, helping organisations identify the right use cases, validate ROI before launch, and deploy AI agents that are safe, governed, and ready for production from day one.”
With many companies struggling to prove ROI, determine risks, or perform sufficient operational testing, Dialpad’s updates provide enterprises with a complete lifecycle for AI agents, from identifying use cases to governance after deployment.
These additions include:
Skill Mining: This capability analyzes historical customer interactions to identify recurring customer issues, friction points, and automation opportunities, helping companies determine which tasks AI agents should automate first.
Proving Ground: This operates as a testing environment for AI agents, allowing companies to simulate real-world customer scenarios and receive reports based on expected performance and ROI, helping organizations de-risk AI deployment.
Agent Studio: Companies can utilize this capability to build AI agents without coding, providing enterprises with a conversational design interface, integrations with enterprise systems, and policy integration, allowing operations teams to design automation without relying on developers.
Guardian: A monitoring layer that supervises AI interactions in real time, ensuring data is protected, interactions are compliant with regulations, and has human agents on standby where necessary, detecting instances of harmful content, prompt injection attempts, and signs of customer friction, ensuring control and oversight.
Furthermore, Dialpad has also introduced closed-loop analytics that connect AI interactions directly to contact center metrics, allowing companies to track whether AI agents are improving service outcomes.
Together, these capabilities aim to move enterprises away from AI experimentation to real operational deployment.
8×8 Introduces JourneyIQ and RCS Messaging
As another vendor that announced its new set of updates, 8×8 has revealed its decision to expand its CX platform into a broader omnichannel and AI-driven orchestration environment.
These capabilities are designed to connect communications data, AI automation, and messaging channels.
One of the more prominent capability announcements was JourneyIQ, designed to track and analyze the complete customer journey across channels and departments.
By extracting interaction data from UCaaS, CCaaS, and CPaaS, this creates a fuller view of the customer journey, mapping each agent touchpoint such as transfers, back-office actions, and resolution steps, allowing CX teams to move from reactive to proactive journey management.
8×8 also announced its decision to focus on workflow automation across CX systems by integrating orchestration capabilities to identify opportunities to automate tasks, reduce unnecessary agent escalations, and improve routing and resolution workflows.
These capabilities connect different enterprise tools and interactions into a single operational flow, helping CX teams to coordinate customer journeys across marketing, sales, support, and back-office teams.
Furthermore, the vendor announced it was expanding messaging support for its contact center platform, introducing Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging.
RCS allows enterprises to access branded business messaging, rich content such as buttons, images, and product cards, and two-way conversational messaging with analytics.
Having become one of the first contact center providers to add native RCS messaging, 8×8’s integration allows contact centers to interact with customers through richer mobile messaging experiences rather than relying on SMS.
These updates aim to provide CX leaders with end-to-end visibility and automation across the customer journey, rather than managing isolated contact center interactions.
Verint Brings AI Bots to Calabrio Customers
Having merged with Calabrio in 2025, the two providers announced that Calabrio customers could directly use Verint AI bots through the Verint CX Automation platform, enabling AI capabilities within existing deployments instead of enterprises having to migrate platforms for seamless automation delivery.
This merger expansion allows Calabrio customers to access several AI bots, including Genie Bot for conversational analytics insights, TimeFlex Bot for workforce scheduling optimization, Agent Copilot Bots to assist human agents during conversations, and Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) to autonomously handle customer interactions across channels.
In return, Verint customers can gain access to Calabrio workforce engagement tools, such as workforce management, performance analytics, and quality monitoring, expanding Verint’s capabilities in agent management and scheduling.
Infobip Launches AgentOS to Orchestrate AI Agents Across Channels
Enterprise Connect witnessed the announcement of Infobip’s latest platform, AgentOS, designed to run AI agents across customer communications and orchestrate end-to-end customer journeys.
Krešo Žmak, Chief Innovation Officer at Infobip, highlights that AgentOS lets AI agents automatically manage and optimize customer interactions across multiple communication channels, leveraging real-time customer data and context.
“AgentOS is the control layer where AI agents, data, channels and customer intent come together to decide what happens next in every interaction,” he explained.
“It leverages our omnichannel foundation to enable AI agents to operate autonomously across SMS, RCS, email, WhatsApp, voice, and more, adapting in real-time to optimize content, channel and timing based on customer context.
“With more than 15 natively integrated channels, Infobip is uniquely positioned to deliver agentic AI at scale.”
By combining these into a single operational layer for customer interactions, this platform will allow companies to move from scripted worfklows to autonomous, goal-driven interactions with customers.
This means AI systems can handle conversations, evaluate what actions to take, and manage next steps in the customer journey.
This platform aims to serve as a control layer that coordinates AI agents, data, and communications in real-time.
AgentOS’s release reflects a broader trend in the CX market where vendors are shifting toward platforms where AI agents handle interactions autonomously, customer data is unified, and customer journeys are orchestrated across channels.
Crescendo Wins Overall Best of Enterprise Connect with Multimodal AI
Having presented it’s Multimodal AI platform at the event, the platform provider received the Overall Best of Enterprise Connect 2026 award, as well as the Best Innovation for Customer Experience award.
The platform combines voice, text, and visual interactions into a single AI-driven conversation rather than treating each channel separately.
Tod Famous, Chief Product Officer at Crescendo, explains that CX platforms should be built around AI from the start to ensure interactions keep full context.
“The future of CX is AI-native. That means building from the ground up, not bolting AI onto legacy systems,” he said.
“Multimodal AI is a direct expression of that philosophy: one conversation, any channel, full context.
“Our customers are already experiencing what that means in practice, and winning both awards at Enterprise Connect tells us the rest of the industry is ready for this shift too.”
This platform allows customers to switch channels during conversations whilst the AI and agent retain full context, unlike traditional systems where customers are expected to repeat information when switching.
By inputting all customer conversations into a single continuous interaction, the platform reduces customer friction by keeping everything in one AI-managed conversation thread.
Enterprise Connect 2026 has signalled a clear vendor shift toward practical AI deployment in CX and communications, with many announcements, product releases, and updates designed to manage AI agents across voice and digital channels.
