2025 Enterprise Connect Conference Showed Off AI’s Electric Potential

In 2021, Google’s chief executive Sundar Pichai said, “The artificial intelligence revolution is poised to be more profound than the invention of electricity, the internet, and even fire.” While there were many skeptics at the time, most attendees of the 2025 Enterprise Connect Conference held in Orlando from March 17 to 20 were seeing some big-flickers of light. Contact Centers are evolving to Customer Experience (CXaaS) Centers and are widely regarded to be the first major industry to be transformed by AI. Below are some highlights from the show regarding AI’s impact on customer experience and the workplace itself.

• Virtual Voice and Chat Agents—also known as bots or VAs—are working seamlessly with human agents. There are now many customer engagement use cases that are being handled entirely by VAs with no human assistance, and humans are being elevated to manage the more complex customer challenges and to monitor and manage the bots themselves. Bots are acting as real-time coaches to human agents and providing agent scorecards to ensure quality assurance and compliance.

• Voice Agents are increasingly impressive conversational robots. These Voice Agents are not your grandfather’s IVRs. Stay with us here: the explosion of natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language processing (NLP) combined with generative AI (GAI) and the utilization of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), enables low latency intelligent, empathetic reasoning and planning voice bots. You can actually have a meaningful, informative and productive conversation with a Voice Bot. Really.

• CX is being reimagined with Agentic Agents. Agentic Agents have “agency”/freedom to reason, plan and make decisions to achieve goals. Agentic Agents collaborate with other virtual agent “experts” to provide the best advice for specific individuals and situations. The orchestration, monitoring and supervision of the Agentic Agents is an increasingly complex task being solved by both CX Technology Providers and Enterprise Application Providers.

• Customer Experience, Sales and Employee Experience Software are all merging. Several large players across sectors such as Nice, Salesforce, Teams and Zoom have demonstrated the ability for AI to summarize calls, set next steps and assign future tasks in addition to proactively remind humans of actions needed and propose interactions with clients and colleagues. As noted above, the role of agentic agent creation and orchestration will be a key area of vendor competition in the future.

• The consolidation, structuring and analysis of ALL conversational data is creating hyper-valuable knowledge centers that promise to deliver ROI. Conversational analytics engines are speeding access to actionable intelligence and enabling near real-time operational and marketing adjustments to lower cost of sales or increase revenue. The elusive question about the ROI of AI may rest in how quickly and well enterprises use the data. Avoiding the “garbage in, garbage out” paradigm is critical to creating effective agentic workflows and Virtual Agent experiences that are accurate and contextual and drive real value.

There are more than flickers of hope that AI will transform the customer experience industry. Every major vendor across Enterprise Application and CCaaS have detailed roadmaps and commitments. Use cases with real return on investment are materializing and the only remaining questions are how quickly the AI tide will rise all the boats.