CX Today

Voice AI demos can look impressive, but what happens when the technology is live in a busy contact center six months later?

In this CX Today interview, Marcus Law speaks with Ilan Avner, Director of Product Management at AudioCodes, about the practical reality of moving Voice AI from proof of concept into production.

The conversation explores why so many Voice AI projects stall after promising pilots, what enterprises often underestimate about voice infrastructure, and why connectivity, latency, noise handling, scalability, redundancy, and human-agent handoff matter just as much as the AI model itself.

Avner also discusses how platforms such as AudioCodes Live Hub and AI Agents can help enterprises build a more resilient production environment for Voice AI use cases, including voice bots, agent assistance, and real-time translation.

Watch the full interview to learn what CX and contact center leaders should ask before putting Voice AI into production.

For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

SuccessKPI CEO Dave Rennyson on data governance, ground truth, and why excitement about AI is outrunning the ability to manage it 


In this CX Today discussion, host Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, sits down with Dave Rennyson, CEO of SuccessKPI, to tackle one of the most pressing yet underexplored challenges in modern contact center operations: what it actually takes to build an AI-ready data foundation. 

As AI agents become a fixture of the contact center, Dave makes a compelling case that the real risk isn't the technology, it's the lack of governance, measurement, and rigor underneath it. 

If your organization is deploying AI without asking how you'll manage it, this is essential viewing. 


As contact centers race to deploy AI, most are skipping the hard work that makes it sustainable. Dave Rennyson, CEO of SuccessKPI, pulls no punches on what's going wrong and what leaders need to do differently. 

AI agents actually produce more data than human agents, including failure signals and turn-taking data that human conversations never generate. The opportunity is significant, but only if you have the architecture to capture and act on it. 

"Ground truth" is the step almost everyone skips. Dave breaks down what it means to establish a reliable baseline for AI performance, why it demands real scientific rigor, and what model drift looks like when you ignore it. 

Agentic AI is genuinely different from legacy IVR. The removal of linear flow constraints opens up a new design space, but only if organizations build the right orchestration and monitoring layers on top. 

Rather than declaring surveys dead, Dave argues that generative AI can now appraise every single conversation at scale, turning a historically biased metric into something far more powerful.


For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

Rob Scott, Publisher at CX Today, sits down with Jeremie Abou, Sales Lead at Diabolocom, on the floor of CCW Las Vegas to ask the question the industry keeps dodging: is AI actually improving customer experience, or just cutting costs?

Jeremie doesn't pull punches. From automation hype to the uncomfortable gap between slick demos and live contact centre reality, this conversation gets into what vendors won't tell you — and what CX leaders need to hear.

They cover the 89% of CX leaders who expect humans to stay central to support, the 17% who think their agents are actually ready for it, and why Diabolocom believes the future of CX might be more human, not less.

If you're navigating AI investment decisions, workforce readiness, or just tired of the buzzwords — this one's for you.

Topics covered:

The AI hype problem and what it's costing CX
Why "presence" beats pure automation as a CX strategy
AI theatre vs. operationally useful technology
Agent enablement and the workforce readiness gap
The "super operator" — Diabolocom's vision for the future contact centre

CX Today is the leading news and analysis platform for the customer experience industry.

For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

If you want to know what is actually happening in customer contact — not the keynote version, not the vendor pitch version, but the version grounded in independent research across hundreds of organizations - you talk to Nicole Kyle. 

Nicole is Chief Product Officer at CMP Research, the Customer Contact Research Company, and the firm whose data quietly shapes much of what gets discussed, debated, and decided at CCW Vegas every year. I interviewed her on the floor of Caesars Forum this week, and the conversation did not disappoint. 

She gave me the three things keeping CX leaders and customer contact leaders up at night right now. Not three things from a slide deck. Three things she is hearing consistently, across CMP's entire client and community base. And each one of them cuts through the noise in a way that most of the sessions this week did not. 

This is one of my favourite interviews from the week. Nicole does not speculate. She does not perform optimism. She tells you what the data says — including the parts that are uncomfortable — and she does it with the kind of clarity that makes you want to act on it before you leave the building.

For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

What happens when your contact centre moves beyond scripted bots and into AI agents that can reason, understand context, and complete multi-step tasks end to end? 

In this CX Today interview, Rob Wilkinson speaks with Jonathan Barouch, GM of Contact Center at Zendesk, about what “AI-native” and “agentic” actually mean in practice, where enterprise teams get stuck (data silos, authentication, brittle infrastructure), and how to roll out automation without betting the whole operation on day one.

The conversation also challenges a common CX metric: containment. Barouch argues leaders should measure resolution, not deflection, and shares how teams can pilot agentic workflows, run A-B tests, and build a learning loop that turns real interactions into better knowledge, self-service, and agent support.

At CCW 2026, CX Today's Rob Scott sat down with Chris Morrissey, General Manager of Zoom Customer Experience, to explore what separates genuine AI-native contact center platforms from legacy CCaaS vendors with AI bolted on — and why that distinction is now showing up directly in resolution rates and agent productivity.

"AI-native" and "AI-first" are buzz phrases — the real question is whether you're building better customer experiences or just creating a new generation of AI silos. Chris shares how Zoom CX customers are seeing virtual agent no-match rates drop to zero, CSAT scores rise by 25 points, and agents working from a truly unified omnichannel desktop — voice, video, chat and messaging in one place — rather than tabbing between five different windows.

In this interview, you'll hear:

- What "AI-native" contact center architecture actually means — and why vendors claiming it may be building AI silos instead of integrated platforms
- How Zoom CX customers are measuring success beyond handle time and deflection: the shift from deflecting calls to actually resolving them
- What a true omnichannel contact center agent desktop looks like day-to-day — and how Zoom eliminates the "toggle tax" of switching between CRM, ticketing, and billing systems mid-call
- How Zoom's virtual agent and IVR capabilities handle automated customer interactions — and why passing full context to human agents is the difference between AI that helps and AI that creates friction
- How Zoom keeps agents in control while contact center AI handles the heavy lifting — and why the goal is making both customer and agent lives better, not replacing human judgment

See what Zoom CX can do for your contact center: zoom.com/zcx

Filmed on-site at CCW Las Vegas 2026 in partnership with Zoom.

For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

What happens when powerful AI models become easier to access, harder to control, and more deeply embedded in customer experience workflows?

In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Geoffrey Mattson, CEO of SecureAuth, about the identity and security gaps exposed by Anthropic’s reported model shutdown and the wider rise of agentic AI.

Geoffrey explains why today’s AI systems often lack a reliable identity layer at the point of model access, how Know Your Customer (KYC) principles could apply to high-risk AI use cases, and why enterprises need stronger ways to trace delegated authority across autonomous agents and subagents.

The conversation also explores what this means for customer experience teams as AI agents begin taking action on behalf of businesses and consumers. Geoffrey outlines why guardrails alone are not enough, why real-time monitoring matters, and how organizations can start building safer AI agent infrastructure without slowing innovation.