What's New In CPaaS? Trends, Capabilities, & What's Coming

CPaaS platforms are shifting from a nice-to-have to a must-have.

Indeed, Gartner research suggests that - by 2028 - 90 percent of businesses will leverage CPaaS platforms. That's up from just 30 percent in 2022.

Nevertheless, no two platforms are the same, and the most prominent players in CPaaS have different visions for the future.

That's evident in the responses of spokespeople from five prominent CPaaS providers when asked: What’s new in CPaaS?

These spokespeople are:

• Sam Richardson, Executive Engagement Director, EMEA & APJ at Twilio
• Sudarshan Dharmapuri, VP, Products, Webex Customer Experience Solutions at Cisco
• James Stokes, Head of Enterprise, UK & Nordics at Infobip
• Robert Gerstmann, Chief Evangelist & Co-Founder at Sinch
• John Bell, Chief Product Officer at Bandwidth

Below, they touch upon the latest CPaaS market trends and capabilities before teasing: what comes next?

CPaaS Market Trends

The Channel Mix Expands Further

Richardson: Brands are under pressure to meet their customers on whatever channels they’re comfortable with, whether that’s traditional channels - like voice, email, and SMS - or emerging channels, like RCS, WhatsApp, or Viber.

Yet, these brands must also understand their customers deeply, leveraging data and AI to deliver tailored experiences that meet heightened expectations.

This involves analyzing customer preferences, past interactions, and behaviors to create communications that resonate with each individual.

These trends and expectations are reshaping the CPaaS market, as there is a much wider array of different types of data, channels, and platforms that any CPaaS technology needs to integrate.

Brands that successfully integrate multiple channels, maintain consistency, and leverage data for personalization will be better positioned to meet the evolving demands of consumers.

AI-Powered Automation

Dharmapuri: The most significant trend impacting the CPaaS market today is AI-powered automation.

That involves delivering conversational, multimodal experiences that fulfill customer requests while enabling AI-driven personalization.

Yet, it also involves solving queries before the customer makes contact, by tracking signals in other systems to trigger proactive alerts.

Additionally, organizations must be confident that the AI automation they deploy is secure, and end-customers can trust the automation's outcomes, which makes in-built AI security and safety key considerations.

The Rise of Agentic and Generative AI

Stokes: One of the biggest trends is the rise of agentic AI paired with generative AI (GenAI) to create smarter, more proactive conversational experiences across messaging channels.

It’s no longer just about responding to customers; it’s about having smart virtual assistants or chatbots that can take initiative, plan, and carry out tasks to move conversations and business goals forward.

Agentic AI is a step beyond traditional bots or GenAI.

While GenAI helps create human-like, personalized responses, agentic AI adds a whole new layer, making decisions, managing multi-step workflows, and adapting in real time without human input.

This is pushing businesses to rethink engagement. Instead of being present on every channel, they can now deliver personalized conversational journeys at scale.

RCS Adoption Spikes

Gerstmann: One major trend shaping the CPaaS market today is the growing adoption of Rich Communication Services (RCS).

RCS is a next-generation messaging protocol that adds richer, more secure, and interactive features to standard messaging.

With Apple supporting RCS, over a billion iOS devices are joining the ecosystem, allowing brands to reach the entire mobile market. RCS makes messaging feel more like using an app.

Brands can send video, audio, images, and interactive buttons, all within the chat.

Sinch even reports that 74 percent of users are more likely to engage with a brand through RCS, and 77 percent prefer verified messages, which build trust and credibility.

We’re on the edge of a significant shift: just as SMS became universal, and RCS is on track to reach full global penetration - that’s five to six billion unique users.

For brands, this opens up a huge opportunity to connect with customers in a much more dynamic and trusted way.

Voice Agents Come to the Fore

Bell: The explosion of highly specialized AI voice agents is driving the next wave of AI transformation. 

Given the many industry-specific use cases and need for specialization, Bandwidth believes there won’t be a single winner in this category.  

That’s why Bandwidth's strategy is to extend its open technology approach, allowing enterprises to integrate the AI voice agents of their choice to experiment and innovate toward their customer experience goals. 

Our AIBridge solution offers flexible deployment paths to help enterprises get up and running quickly. 

At the same time, our network delivers the high fidelity, low latency, rich data, and intelligent routing that AI voice agents require to function properly. 

Rather than locking enterprises into a walled garden, this open approach gives the flexibility to adapt as the AI voice ecosystem evolves and find the right mix of technologies that best support the CX outcomes they want to achieve.

New CPaaS Capabilities

ConversationRelay

Richardson: With AI-powered data analysis, voice recognition technologies have seen remarkable improvements.

Built to integrate effortlessly with existing AI capabilities, Twilio’s ConversationRelay, alongside Natural Language Processing (NLP), helps create interactions where customers feel understood and supported.

ConversationRelay works as the interface between a caller’s voice input and an AI-powered bot, while NLP extracts meaningful insights from the cadence and tone of a human caller using Speech-to-Text (STT) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) with low latency.

Together, these innovations create fluid, efficient voice interactions, reducing wait times, improving customer satisfaction, and enabling scalable, intelligent communication solutions.

It marks a significant leap forward in enhancing business-to-customer engagement.

Webex AI Agents

Dharmapuri: The introduction of Webex AI Agent is a significant new capability for Cisco customers.

The Webex AI Agent answers inquiries and fulfills customer intents – all while delivering personalized, human-like conversational experiences.

AI Agent Studio - AI Agent's design tool capability - offers a platform for users to build, preview, deploy, manage, and analyze autonomous and scripted AI agents for digital and voice channels tailored to specific business needs.

By integrating AI Agent and AI Agent Studio, organizations can improve customer engagement and gain valuable insights from interactions, driving strategic decision-making and fostering innovation in delivering great customer experiences.

AI agents have significant business benefits, such as the ability to scale contact center operations without significant cost overheads. This allows agents to focus on higher-value interactions instead of mundane tasks.

RCS

The biggest change impacting the CPaaS landscape has been the rise of RCS, especially following Apple’s adoption.

Due to this trend, Infobip has furthered its collaboration with clients such as Telekom Deutschland and nextbike.

For Telekom Deutschland, Infobip used RCS to promote a Spotify Premium trial.

By blending rich media and personalized interactions, the experience included tactical transitions to live agents and resulted in a 120 percent increase in conversions.

Meanwhile, nextbike leveraged RCS for Business Messaging to improve customer communication and send visually rich and interactive transactional messages, resulting in a 50 percent reduction in response times.

These partnerships highlight how RCS - delivered via a CPaaS partner - can deliver personalized, secure, and interactive experiences at scale across industries.