2025 ZKast

In this episode of What's New in CX, Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research and Juanita Coley of Solid Rock Consulting discuss the massive wave of AI innovation transforming the Customer Experience landscape, dissecting major announcements from top vendors.

Key Discussion Points:
Talkdesk's Agentic AI Leap: We lead with the news that Talkdesk is infusing agentic agents into their Copilot. This moves beyond basic agent assist to allow multi-step process automation and drawing from disparate knowledge sources. Juanita shares the on-the-ground reality: agents love AI for automating boring, mundane tasks like call summaries and note-taking!

The "Why": We explore how automating these operational tasks (which agents hate) will not only boost agent job satisfaction but also dramatically improve the quality of contact center and CRM data.

The New Era of CX Partnerships: Talkdesk's partnership with Databricks (following NICE's partnership with Snowflake) signals a major trend. CX vendors are now AI companies, requiring robust data management, governance, and large-scale analytics capabilities provided by data platforms.

The Interoperability Challenge: Zeus raises a critical industry challenge: Will these new multi-step AI agents be able to talk to each other across different vendor systems (like Talkdesk, Salesforce, etc.)? If we can't get Slack and Teams to interoperate, the industry must prioritize open standards now to avoid creating new "walled islands" of automation.

Salesforce's Agentforce 360: Following Dreamforce, we discuss Salesforce's launch of Agentforce 360, their fully integrated platform connecting humans and AI agents. We analyze the significance of a CRM giant leaning into a unified platform approach and what it means for customers.

NICE Solidifies CX Leadership: We break down the key takeaways from the NICE analyst event. Their integrated platform—which combines CCaaS, WFM, WFO, and AI (including the recent Cognigy acquisition)—reinforces their pole position as the undisputed leader in the CX space, far outpacing the competition in platform completeness and feature parity.

The Universal Service Fund (USF) Call to Action: A brief, non-traditional CX topic: we discuss 8x8's call for Congress to modernize the Universal Service Act, as the funding mechanism (taking a percentage of declining interstate voice revenues) is unsustainable. Modernizing the USF to include broadband services is critical for closing the digital divide.

Don't miss this deep dive into the technology and industry moves shaping the future of customer and employee experience!

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News of the Week: Talkdesk's infusion of agentic agents into Copilot—a key step in making AI and people work together seamlessly.

‪@NICEinContact‬ ‪@8x8Inc‬ ‪@Talkdesk‬ ‪@salesforce‬

Connect with the hosts:

Zeus Kerravala, ZK Research
  / zkerravala  

Juanita Coley, Solid Rock Consulting
  / juanitacoley