Liz Miller

What if you could leave the hard stuff where you built it? The channels...the flows...the telephony...left right where your current contact center solutions built them. That's the promise behind Microsoft's Contact Center Intelligence (CCI) offering, released today in public preview. It's all the agentic capabilities in their flagship Dynamics 365 Contact Center solution...built to work with any contact center via open connector. Powered by Microsoft IQ, Microsoft CCI promises contact center insights, organizational intelligence AND data from your existing CRM to deliver the intelligence needed to reason, act and resolve in real-time context.

At the center of the solution are three ready to roll agents:

• Customer Assist Agent: resolves customer issues autonomously...or delivers critical context to a human representative to improve their resolution skills in real time
• Quality Assurance Agent: continuous evaluation against quality, compliance and stand standards
• (coming soon) Service Operations Agent: helps configure, monitor and optimize contact center operations with an eye on managing costs

Microsoft has focused the offering on what customers consistently need from AI and intelligence solutions...instead of dropping all of the bells and whistles into the sink hoping something floats. There is also a shiny new harness, the customer conversation harness, available for public preview in Copilot Studio, The harness is purpose-built for conversational agents with a core set of conversational capabilities.

It's a smart move considering data from the smart folks at Metrigy that estimates 66% to 68% of organizations remain on non-cloud or hybrid/hosted legacy models. As the industry shouts that nobody can afford to NOT adopt agentic applications and solutions, there is still a large swath of organizations still struggling to justify and fund a full migration. Instead of being resigned to a state of agentic-FOMO, Microsoft has built a glide-path to intelligence and agentic self-service offerings that scale.

This is about deploying agents over the top of existing operational infrastructure, delivering voice and digital self-service interactions that can be personalized and secure. BUT...this is also a clever stop-gap measure as Microsoft has also noted that when customers "are ready to migrate" they can migrate to a more fully baked and feature rich CCaaS with Dynamics 365 Contact Center.

The "come as you are" motion is certainly not new, but what makes Microsoft's take different is not from the contact center at all: Microsoft has long held the belief that AI and intelligence should come to where you want to work instead of making work conform to where AI lives. When you look across the recent legacy of Microsoft tools, from Viva to CoPilot, an organization lets people work where they like to work and brings the intelligence to them. Sales people who realistically spend all day in Outlook...stay in Outlook...the sales and revenue intelligence and AI assists come to Outlook. So it stands to reason if your contact center telephony is deeply rooted in Avaya, Cisco WebEx, or even Five9, Microsoft CCI brings the intelligence to you.

In global public preview now, Microsoft anticipates additional capabilities later this year (think: coaching, evaluations, agent assist).

For more on the new offering, visit: https://ccai.preview.microsoft.com/about

There's even a video for the TL;DR set: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics-365/blog/business-leader/2026/10/21/microsoft-contact-center-intelligence-transforming-customer-experience-at-agentic-speed/

With a stream of news coming from SAP thanks to their SAP Connect event in Las Vegas this week, it is no big surprise that we would see lots of partners putting forth their best and brightest better together announcements. So why highlight this announcement between IBM and SAP? Because it focuses attention on those fast moving midsized organizations accelerate everything from ERP implementations to data foundations critical to being an AI enterprise (as opposed to being an enterprise that does lots of AI things.) The newly announced IBM Ready for SAP Solutions can support a broad range of business and operational needs, from improving operational efficiency to integrating acquired businesses onto a common enterprise platform. Billed to support business transformation at scale, IBM is bringing a deep bench of expertise from IBM, including its AI-powered consulting delivery platform, IBM Consulting Advantage. Read the full announcement here, including two customers already working with the IBM Ready for SAP Solutions as a path to transformation and growth driving.

What makes this announcement even more interesting is not necessarily in the act of modernization per se, but more around the readiness for what comes next: turning this aspirational mandate around AI into a true driver of exponential growth. For fast moving organizations, AI feels like a perfect fit...it moves as fast as their fast-moving ideas and dreams. But when the reality of infrastructure, data, operational systems and the dreaded specter of governance becomes a requirement and not a check-box, AI can become siloed to limited efficiency gains and isolated improvements. This is the interesting opportunity for two 3-letter brands not particularly synonymous with fast moving midsized organizations. IBM and SAP go hand in glove with massive, global and complex enterprises. But perhaps that's exactly why IBM Consulting Services is ideally suited to navigate modernization with SAP. These are two giants well versed in navigating multiple eras of modernization...they are the adults in a room full of excited teenagers. They know the foundation and what success is for businesses.

These are the types of services to watch as AI exacerbates the need for true modernization across everything from infrastructure and core systems to data layers, knowledge and growth-critical applications. In an age where kicking the can down the road is the difference between unicorn and luddite, fast isn't fast enough, mid-market and fast movers can't afford loose the can for a moment.

“We just delivered one of our best quarters ever, outperforming across every key metric,” said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce.

Without question, Salesforce delivered one heck of a quarter. By the number highlights include:

• Revenue of $11.3 billion (+11% YoY)
• Subscription and support revenue of $10.8 billion (+12% YoY)
• Operating cash flow of $1.3 billion and free cash flow of $1.1 billion
• Agentforce and Data 360 ARR reached nearly $3.9 billion
• Agentforce ARR exceeded $1.5 billion. That's a boost of over 240% YoY.
• Bookings from Agentforce One Edition and Agentforce for Apps (which are the dominant Agentforce premium SKUs tied to Sales and Service clouds) more than doubled quarter-over-quarter.

As a reminder, Salesforce has restructured its reporting, moving away from reporting on individual cloud performance (eg Service Cloud, Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud revenues) to instead reporting on Agentforce Apps and Data360/Platform. This has created a bit of a mind-bending follow the revenue game when you consider Slack was outlined as a Data360/Platform inclusion, while Slackbot is included as an Agentforce App. No matter where you hide the nut, the message is clear: adoption and utilization of these agent force tools on top of the Salesforce platform and Data360 is ramping up and returning revenue.

All of this goodness is of course prologue to a BUSY fall for Salesforce with two big acquisitions on the closing horizon—both Fin (a customer support agent platform) and Contentful (a leading headless content management system)—and Dreamforce around the corner in September. This revenue momentum is the exact boost that one can imagine will bring an extra spicy spring to the MainStage greatest showman Benioff.

For more on the earnings: https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2026/08/26/fy27-q2-earnings/

Colin Fleming, the ex-race car driver for Red Bull Racing and ex-Salesforce CMO has just added another ex- to his list...ex-ServiceNow CMO. Fleming took to LinkedIn to announce his departure and his gratitude to the SN community and executive leadership, fresh off the heels of a wildly successful Knowledge 26 event in Las Vegas. Within a couple of hours, he posted that he was joining OpenAI as its Chief Marketing Officer, Business.

This is, as Fleming noted, a swing for the fences kinda moment. His track record is one of those "Songs of CMO Glory" told about doing all the marketing things the academics would say couldn't possibly work, but do work in spectacular fashion. At Salesforce, he championed narrative transformation based on an understanding that B2B buyers still needed memorable moments, especially when most of those buyers are to constantly dreaming of new software tools to buy. At ServiceNow, he flipped the convention of "all demand, no brand" for B2B marketing strategies, instead focusing on making the narrative of ServiceNow durable and memorable by making the brand more about the customer and far less about the expected GTM lead machine.

While he's already taken Matthew McConaughey and Idris Elba out of play for a big brand campaign, OpenAI will be in for a much-needed jolt of Fleming energy as it readies for a much-rumored IPO where Wall Street will expect more Enterprise-driven profitability on the books than roadmap of promises. There's a big need for OpenAI to quickly further establish itself as a serious Enterprise grade brand with serious Enterprise grade leadership. While there is little doubt the impact OpenAI has had in disrupting the technology landscape, enterprise buyers are still unsure of the brand and the enterprise-ready offerings. That doesn't even begin to touch on the lasting questions CXOs have around security, governance and long-term viability.

This is a massive swing at bat...but, it's also a CMO role that demands someone to come in who just doesn't think like your average bear.

• Fleming's Departure Post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/colinfleming_thank-you-servicenow-after-a-chapter-ugcPost-7465069428586680320-GLwL
• Fleming's OpenAI Arrival Post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/colinfleming_earlier-today-i-shared-that-i-was-leaving-ugcPost-7465105851809292288-efe2

Sure, 8x8's recent reveal of Q4 FY26 momentum metrics show growth and promise for the global engagement and experience platform, but it's the boom in interest and adoption of the 8x8 Engage solution that caught my eye. While the 8x8 Platform as a whole focuses on integrating the contact center (CCaaS), unified communications (UCaaS) and communications platform as a service (CPaaS) into a single platform, the Engage solution was purpose built to deliver contact center capabilities to teams and workers that sit outside the contact center. These non-traditional seats still need everything from voice, meeting, messaging, and engagement, just not at the mass fire-power that the contact center demands. As their own release notes, "these are signals of adoption, not just interest."

It's also a signal that the market may want to note: customers want tools right-sized for utilization. While others try to squeeze opportunity from adjacent Customer Experience markets by trying to convince customers that their "end-to-end, holistic, comprehensive" solution somehow sits in the center of a Venn diagram where CCaaS and CRM collide, 8x8 is intentionally building solutions that are fit for purpose and right-sized for use. 300% adoption feels like a pretty clear signal they are on to something.

• Read the Release: https://www.investors.8x8.com/news-releases/news-release-details/8x8-reports-strong-q4-fy26-demand-ai-powered-cx-and

Not so long ago, in a galaxy only Wall Street pundits seem to understand, predictions boomed that Figma was dead. Or close to dead. Or on death's door. Or hanging out with death who was also hanging out with AI. But Figma co-founder and CEO took to social with a simple message: Figma is FAR from Dead. 46% YoY growth. Net dollar retention rate increased to 139%. Guidance? Yeah, that's up too.

But it's his closer: Design matters more than ever.

Yes Dylan. Yes it does.

• Check the Post: https://x.com/zoink/status/2055018215152234926
• Check the Earnings: https://s206.q4cdn.com/973901332/files/doc_financials/2026/q1/Figma-Q1-2026-Prepared-Remarks.pdf

While analysts called for his resignation, Pichai remained calm; he had been lying in wait for this moment for a decade.

I'm not sure what is more chilling about this line from a new Time Magazine story on Google: analysts calling for a CEO's resignation or the fact that the CEO had been lying in wait. Either way, this is an interesting read on Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. Worth taking a look at what a magazine owned by a notably influential tech CEO has to say about the Time 100 list of most influential companies for 2026. Granted, I did NOT have Pichai and Hailey Bieber appearing on the same list for business influence on my 2026 bingo card, yet here we are. Recently, the AI race has been dominated by big loud voices saying big bombastic loud things to gain the attention of Wall Street. And for the most part, it has been a winning strategy. When looking at leaders like Pichai, it's easy for some to mistake kindness for weakness, when in truth, he was a strategic shark pretending to be asleep.

• How Sundar Pichai Pushed Google To the Front of the AI Race (Time Magazine)
• The Time100 Most Influential Companies for 2026 (Time Magazine)

Adobe has closed on its acquisition of Semrush. We initially got the nod in meetings during Adobe Summit 2026 that the approvals had come through but that it may take a couple weeks to formalize and finalize. That week was actually 5 business days. So nice to see tides roll faster than expected. While new conversations are booming around what AEO, GEO and SEO now mean, Semush and Adobe are smack in the center. If last week at Adobe Summit was any early indicator, this topic is a burning reason to shift from status quo strategies. Now the burden will be on marketing and communications teams to take a breath and really rethink their strategies by actually going back to marketing 101 basics: where do your paid, earned and owned efforts really make an impact. Time to say goodbye to the days of set-it-and-forget-it search. And time to stop putting PR, comms and perception management on the back burner.

• The News: https://news.adobe.com/news/2026/04/adobe-completes-semrush-acquisition
• HOT TAKE: Adobe Scoops Up Semrush to Expand Brand Visibility Play
• AEO, GEO, and What Happens as AEM Enters the Chat

AWS has unveiled a growing portfolio of AI-forward solutions under the product family umbrella of Amazon Connect. The name should sound familiar to CX watchers. Connect had been tied to the Contact Center solution that unified engagement and communications with a healthy dose of AI powered skills and insights that focused on how to better connect the needs and intentions of the customer with the demands and expectations on the people in the contact center from agent to supervisor. That focus...bridging processes between people...still sits at the heart of the Connect porfolio. The "OG Connect (OGC)" as I've come to call it, is now Amazon Connect Customer. Joining it is Amazon Connect Talent (a really slick high volume recruitment tool better connecting the needs of the candidate with the needs of the recruiter), Amazon Connect Health (breaking down the conversational gaps in the patient and provider experience) and Amazon Connect Decisions (a supply chain focused solution focused on decision velocity across the strategic optimization of supply chain operations.)

• https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/amazon-connect-ai-business-set