Telecom Reseller / Technology Reseller News

Recorded live at Cloud Connections in Delray Beach, Doug Green, Publisher of Technology Reseller News, spoke with Mark Vange, Founder & CEO of Autom8ly, about how AI voice agents are reshaping complex, regulated, and high-value communication workflows.

Vange explained that Autom8ly specializes in building AI solutions for partners and service providers that serve customers with nuanced and often highly regulated requirements. Rather than focusing on generic AI reception or basic appointment setting, Autom8ly targets verticals where complexity, compliance, and scale intersect—use cases where off-the-shelf AI voice agents fall short.

One of the company’s primary areas of focus is the collections market. Autom8ly is deploying AI voice agents to handle high-volume, routine collections calls while allowing human agents to concentrate on more complex, high-stakes cases. Early observations suggest that consumers may respond less defensively to AI-initiated outreach than to human collectors, particularly for smaller or straightforward obligations such as missed payments, parking fines, or one-time healthcare balances. In these scenarios, the AI agent can confirm details, negotiate payment terms, and securely process payments, while automatically escalating more complex disputes to human staff.

Vange emphasized that Autom8ly’s AI agents are designed with strict boundaries. They do not cross regulatory red lines, attempt legal persuasion, or handle cases involving attorneys, court orders, or disputed liability. Instead, they address the majority of routine interactions that consume time and resources but generate limited strategic value when handled by humans.

From an operational standpoint, AI voice agents offer significant efficiency gains. Human collectors often achieve utilization rates as low as 25–30 percent due to unanswered calls, breaks, and administrative overhead. AI agents, by contrast, operate at near-100 percent utilization, reducing cost per dollar collected while accelerating time to revenue. Autom8ly has also engineered its platform to meet PCI and compliance requirements, ensuring sensitive payment data is never exposed to large language models or unsafe systems.

Beyond collections, Vange highlighted broader opportunities for MSPs and channel partners. Autom8ly has delivered AI voice agents for underserved language communities, including healthcare environments where providers lack staff fluent in languages such as Haitian Creole. By combining language capability with cultural awareness and compliance controls, AI agents can expand access to essential services while reducing operational strain.

For MSPs and service providers, Vange positioned AI voice agents as a “high-value voice” opportunity—particularly in industries such as healthcare, utilities, finance, and public services, where multilingual communication, compliance, and scale are critical. When interactions move beyond simple scripts and require deep customization, Autom8ly’s partner-led model is designed to fill that gap.

More information about Autom8ly and its AI voice agent solutions is available at https://autom8ly.com/.

Recorded live at Cloud Connections in Delray Beach, Doug Green, Publisher of Technology Reseller News, spoke with Jon Brinton, Chief Revenue Officer at Crexendo, about how artificial intelligence is reshaping voice communications—and why 2026 may mark a turning point for the industry.

Brinton described what he sees as a “renaissance of voice.” After years in which enterprises attempted to push customer interactions toward chat, email, and other less personal channels, advances in AI are restoring the central role of voice conversations. Modern AI applications, he noted, are making voice interactions more natural, more efficient, and more valuable—reintroducing clarity and immediacy into customer communications strategies.

That vision is reflected in Crexendo’s recent product launch: CAIRO, an AI-powered receptionist and operator introduced earlier this year. Integrated directly into the NetSapiens platform, CAIRO is designed to give organizations of all sizes access to a highly capable, natural-language AI voice interface. Unlike generic AI assistants trained on external datasets, CAIRO is driven by each organization’s own data, enabling fully customized interactions for businesses ranging from medical practices and school districts to local retailers.

Brinton explained that CAIRO supports real-time, conversational voice interactions in multiple languages, including English and Spanish, with the flexibility to switch languages during a call. The AI can answer questions, route callers to departments, and assist with tasks such as scheduling—while always allowing seamless escalation to a human when needed. This blend of automation and human handoff reinforces voice as a core channel rather than a legacy one.

From a channel perspective, Brinton emphasized that CAIRO represents a significant opportunity for Crexendo’s partners. The solution is available both within Crexendo’s VIP offering and to its global NetSapiens licensee community, which includes approximately 240 service providers serving more than seven million users worldwide. Partners can brand and bundle CAIRO as part of their own UCaaS offerings, creating new value-added revenue streams while enhancing customer experience.

CAIRO is commercially available today and includes advanced features such as transcription and sentiment analysis, giving organizations deeper insight into customer interactions even after calls are completed.

More information about Crexendo and its AI-powered communications solutions is available at https://www.crexendo.com/.

Don Witt of the Channel Daily News, a TR publication, interviews Kevin Nethercott, CEO of Tresic, to discuss the company’s focus on bringing intelligence to the mid-market through CSP partners.

Kevin explains Tresic’s mission to leverage AI for conversational intelligence, offering products like After Call and First Alert that provide automated transcription, to-do item tracking, and keyword alerts for businesses. Kevin highlights Tresic’s partnership with service providers like NetSapiens and their ability to quickly deploy solutions for mid-market companies. Kevin also shared his background in communications technology and expressed excitement about Tresic’s potential to transform business operations through AI.

Mid-Market AI Solutions for Frontline Workers

Kevin explains Tresic’s focus on mid-market businesses, which represent 60% of US businesses and a larger percentage globally. He emphasizes that mid-market companies need easy-to-use AI solutions to help frontline workers improve customer interactions and competitiveness.

Before: missed moments. After: action is already done.

For more information, go to: Tresic

Recorded live at Cloud Connections, Doug Green, Publisher of Technology Reseller News, spoke with Sabeeh Hameed, Founder of Sabrhub and a newly announced member of the Cloud Communications Alliance (CCA). The conversation focused on how service providers can offset declining voice revenues by accelerating business messaging adoption—while navigating the growing complexity of 10DLC registration.

Hameed explained that Sabrhub was built to address a fundamental shift in the market. As industry reports continue to show declining voice revenues and tightening margins, messaging has emerged as a critical growth opportunity for CSPs and service providers—especially when messaging is enabled on existing voice numbers. However, the introduction of mandatory 10DLC registration has transformed what was once a simple service into a major operational bottleneck.

Rather than viewing 10DLC as a barrier, Sabrhub treats it as an opportunity. Hameed noted that many service providers experience campaign rejection rates as high as 70–90 percent, often due to incomplete or improperly structured submissions. Each rejection adds weeks of delay, additional fees, and customer frustration. Sabrhub’s platform uses AI to pre-vet campaigns before submission, dramatically increasing approval confidence and reducing onboarding time.

According to Hameed, Sabrhub has reduced the brand registration process from hours—or even weeks—down to approximately 15 minutes, with approvals often completed within 24 hours and a reported 99 percent success rate. The platform abstracts away the complexity of use cases, opt-in requirements, privacy policies, and legal disclosures, presenting the process in a customer-friendly format that improves both speed and experience.

While AI powers the platform, Hameed emphasized that Sabrhub is not “selling AI” as a product. Instead, AI operates behind the scenes to eliminate friction, guide brands through compliance requirements, and enable service providers to bring messaging services to market faster and more reliably.

For MSPs, channel partners, and voice service providers attending Cloud Connections, Hameed positioned messaging compliance as a direct revenue opportunity. By simplifying 10DLC registration and accelerating time to service, partners can increase ARPU, reduce churn, and offer differentiated messaging solutions without taking on regulatory complexity themselves.

More information about Sabrhub and its AI-driven 10DLC solutions is available at https://www.sabrhub.com/.

Recorded live at Cloud Connections, Doug Green, Publisher of Technology Reseller News, sat down with Jeff Pulver, CEO (Chief Evangelist Officer) of the vCon Foundation, to discuss why vCon represents a foundational shift at the intersection of artificial intelligence and communications.

Pulver describes the conversations at Cloud Connections as a “ground zero” moment—one where a new industry is beginning to take shape. Drawing a parallel to the early days of VoIP and the first VON conferences in the 1990s, he argues that vCon is enabling a similar inflection point, this time driven by AI. At its core, vCon introduces a standardized way to capture and structure conversations—across voice, video, messaging, email, and more—so they can be securely stored, analyzed, and shared.

According to Pulver, this standardization is transformative for AI. Large language models perform best when fed consistent, structured data, and vCon provides a common format that eliminates the fragmentation caused by proprietary conversation systems. By doing so, vCon enables interoperability and allows organizations to extract meaningful intelligence from conversations regardless of platform or application.

Pulver outlines three pillars defining the emerging AI communications industry: high-definition voice, memory, and trust. High-quality audio improves transcription accuracy for AI analysis. Memory comes from virtualized conversations that preserve context and history. Trust is established through built-in compliance features, including consent tracking, purpose limitation, and the ability to revoke or manage permission—capabilities that are increasingly critical as AI regulations evolve globally.

Reflecting on past regulatory battles during the rise of internet telephony, Pulver notes that compliance pressures are inevitable during periods of disruption. He believes vCon offers a proactive solution by embedding compliance directly into the communications infrastructure, allowing organizations to demonstrate consent and governance rather than retrofitting controls after the fact.

Pulver also highlights the commercial implications. With an open standard now taking shape through the IETF process, he expects 2026 to mark the emergence of a full ecosystem of products, services, and revenue opportunities built on vCon. Service providers, vendors, and entrepreneurs who engage early, he says, will be well positioned to define new offerings that were previously impractical or impossible.

To learn more about vCon and the work of the foundation, visit https://www.pulver.com/vconfoundation.

Recorded live at Cloud Connections, the Cloud Communications Alliance event in Delray Beach, Doug Green, Publisher of Technology Reseller News, spoke with Bill Placke, Co-Founder & President, Americas at SecurePII, about one of the most pressing challenges facing AI-driven communications today: how to scale AI while complying with global data privacy regulations—and how that challenge can become a competitive advantage.

Placke explains that SecurePII was formed to address a growing structural problem in AI adoption. While organizations are eager to deploy AI and train large language models, regulatory uncertainty around personally identifiable information (PII) has stalled progress. Citing industry research showing that more than 60 percent of AI initiatives have been paused due to data privacy concerns, Placke argues that governance policies alone are not enough. Instead, SecurePII takes an architectural approach.

At the core of SecurePII’s solution is data minimization at the point of ingestion. The company’s technology prevents sensitive information—such as credit card numbers, names, addresses, or social security numbers—from ever entering enterprise systems. SecurePII’s existing PCI-focused offering already removes cardholder data from call flows, keeping organizations out of PCI scope entirely. The same approach is now being extended to broader categories of PII, enabling AI systems to operate and train on clean data streams that are free from regulated information.

Placke emphasizes that this upstream architectural design fundamentally changes the compliance equation. Regulators and plaintiff attorneys, he notes, care about outcomes—not intent. If sensitive data never enters the system, compliance scope, audit costs, breach exposure, and regulatory risk are dramatically reduced. “Downstream controls don’t scale with AI—architecture does,” Placke says, positioning data minimization as a foundation for both trust and growth.

The discussion also highlights the role of consent and customer trust in an AI-enabled world. Rather than asking customers to consent to broad data use, SecurePII enables enterprises to clearly state that sensitive information is neither seen nor stored, while still allowing AI to learn from outcomes and sentiment. This approach removes what Placke calls the “creepy factor” associated with AI and personal data, while aligning with emerging frameworks such as the EU AI Act and long-standing NIST guidance.

For MSPs, UCaaS providers, and channel partners, Placke frames compliance not as a cost center but as a revenue opportunity. By embedding privacy-preserving architectures into voice, AI, and communications solutions, service providers can differentiate themselves as trusted advisors—helping customers deploy AI safely, reduce regulatory exposure, and accelerate adoption.

To learn more about SecurePII and its privacy-first AI architecture, visit https://www.securepii.cloud/.

In a recent sit-down with Senior Editor Moshe Beauford for the Technology Reseller News podcast, Brandon Thomas, RingCentral vice president of channels, outlined what he sees as a massive opportunity for partners to evolve from resellers into strategic trusted advisors. According to RingCentral’s forthcoming 2026 Agentic AI Trends Report, 97% of organizations have adopted AI, yet many are stalled by integration complexity. Thomas noted this creates a high-value opening for partners to deploy RingCentral’s AI Conversation Expert (ACE) as the connective tissue to bridge organizational silos.

RingCentral’s report also found that by unblocking the 80% of business intelligence currently trapped in voice and video, partners can help clients realize a 61% increase in productivity and a 49% improvement in customer experience. Thomas emphasized that the real value lies in moving beyond basic automation toward full workflow orchestration.

In a market projected to reach $305 billion by 2031, Thomas further maintains that partners should leverage AI that maintains human oversight for high-stakes decisions while automating the manual data entry that plagues traditional CRMs. This shift enables partners to offer richer consulting services, using AI to predict elements like churn and employee turnover.

RingCentral’s report will go live at the end of February.

Visit www.ringcentral.com

Recorded live at the Cloud Connections event in Delray Beach, Doug Green, Publisher of Technology Reseller News, spoke with Darin Gull of C3 Complete about the growing importance of compliance, cyber resilience, and partner-centric security services in today’s cloud and UCaaS ecosystem.

Gull describes C3 Complete as an “anything IT” company with a clear mission: to complete a partner’s portfolio without ever competing with it. Working exclusively through channel partners, C3 Complete focuses on filling gaps—particularly in security and compliance—while preserving partner ownership of the customer relationship. “We’re here to complete, but never compete,” Gull explains, emphasizing the company’s commitment to protecting partner equity.

A central theme of the conversation is compliance, which Gull frames less as a punitive obligation and more as an education and awareness challenge. C3 Complete leads with what it calls cyber resilience—helping organizations understand what they are required to do, why it matters, and how to consistently track and maintain compliance over time. “Most compliance failures aren’t bad actors trying to break rules,” Gull notes. “It’s usually a lack of awareness.”

C3 Complete’s approach begins with deep listening and discovery. By understanding a client’s operational realities and pain points, the company’s subject-matter experts—guided by its security leadership—identify shortfalls, improve efficiency, and develop clear, actionable roadmaps to move customers from their current state to their desired level of compliance and security maturity.

Gull also reflects on the relevance of the Cloud Communications Alliance community, noting that many of the challenges facing today’s UCaaS and cloud providers—particularly around security, governance, and AI—mirror those seen in earlier phases of the industry, albeit at greater scale and complexity. As AI adoption accelerates, he sees compliance and governance as unresolved but critical questions that service providers must address proactively.

Looking ahead to 2026, C3 Complete plans to expand its partner ecosystem, deepen its security offerings, and continue delivering what Gull calls “white-glove service without the insane price.” For MSPs and service providers lacking a full security stack, C3 Complete positions itself as a trusted extension of their business—stepping in when needed, then stepping back to ensure partners retain the customer relationship.

More information about C3 Complete is available at https://c3-complete.com/.

“These are life-safety lines, and failure is not an option,” says Jake Jacoby, CEO of TELCLOUD. “Our solution has to last 20 years, not five—and that’s why partnering with Ericsson makes so much sense.”

In the latest episode of the TELCLOUD POTS and Shots Podcast Series, Doug Green, Publisher of Technology Reseller News, is joined by Jacoby and special guest Ian Tearle of Ericsson to discuss how global partnerships are accelerating the replacement of legacy copper lines.

Tearle, a Technical Alliances Partner Engineer at Ericsson, explains that his role centers on validating and stress-testing partner solutions to ensure they meet the rigorous certifications required for environments such as healthcare facilities, public safety agencies, elevators, and fire systems. “We’re not just looking at whether something works,” Tearle says. “It has to be certified, resilient, and designed for real-world safety use. In many cases, what we deploy could literally save lives.”

Jacoby outlines how TELCLOUD’s POTS replacement platform depends on unbreakable cellular connectivity, making Ericsson’s router technology and long-term wireless roadmap—spanning 5G and beyond—a critical foundation. Together, the companies are enabling partners to replace copper lines while maintaining compatibility with legacy life-safety equipment.

The conversation also highlights how the partnership simplifies adoption for channel partners. By aligning and co-terminating licensing terms across TELCLOUD and Ericsson solutions, resellers can deploy future-proof POTS replacement without added operational complexity—making the opportunity accessible even for MSPs without deep telecom backgrounds.

Looking ahead, both companies view the partnership as part of a broader modernization of global telecom infrastructure. As copper networks sunset worldwide, the need for reliable, certified communication paths remains—and wireless has evolved into a primary connectivity solution.

The episode concludes with the Shots segment, where Jacoby introduces Dame Más Reserva Extra Añejo, a cognac-barrel-aged tequila designed to be sipped and savored—an appropriate close to a discussion focused on durability, precision, and long-term value.

For more information, visit https://www.telcloud.com/ or call 844-900-2270.

More about Ericsson: https://www.ericsson.com/en

Randy Dillard, Sales and Transaction Tax Lead at TaxConnex, joined Doug Green, Publisher of Technology Reseller News, for a Cloud Communications Alliance (CCA) podcast focused on one of the most complex—and often underestimated—issues facing cloud communications providers today: telecommunications tax compliance.

Dillard explained that TaxConnex serves as a specialized outsourcing partner for telecom and transaction tax compliance, working closely with regulatory experts to deliver a unified approach that spans sales and use tax, telecom-specific taxes, and state and local filing obligations. Unlike general accounting firms, TaxConnex is purpose-built for the telecom and cloud communications industry, where tax requirements can extend far beyond state-level filings into counties, cities, and even ZIP-code-level jurisdictions.

He emphasized that telecom taxation is fundamentally different from standard sales tax, with layered obligations that can include “tax on tax,” recurring billing changes, credits, and constant regulatory updates. With more than 50 states, thousands of local jurisdictions, and frequent filing deadlines, providers face significant risk if compliance processes are not handled accurately and consistently.

Dillard also stressed the importance of timing, noting that providers should engage a telecom tax specialist before launching new services or expanding into new markets—not after revenue is already flowing.

“It often makes sense to pause and speak with a telecom tax advisor before you open that honeypot,” Dillard said. “Understanding your obligations upfront can save you from costly penalties, audits, and surprises down the road.”

TaxConnex’s role, he explained, goes beyond filing returns. The company provides monthly tax liability reporting that shows what has been collected, where it is assigned, and how it will be remitted—giving providers visibility and confidence that nothing is slipping through the cracks. This becomes even more critical as AI-driven services and usage-based models create unexpected spikes in transactions and tax exposure.

As an active member and sponsor within the Cloud Communications Alliance, TaxConnex views its role as helping demystify telecom tax compliance so providers can focus on growth, innovation, and customer success—while staying compliant in an increasingly complex regulatory environment.

Learn more: https://www.taxconnex.com/