UC Today

In this UC Today interview, host Kristian McCann speaks with Callum Pennington, CEO & Co-Founder of HBHR, to unpack a growing issue facing modern organizations: employee wellbeing that’s treated as a bolt-on rather than a business-critical priority. 

If you think wellbeing is about perks, think again. This discussion reveals why the fundamentals—like accurate pay, workload visibility, and unified data—are the real drivers of trust, engagement, and retention. 

Pennington joins UC Today to explain why organizations need to rethink how they approach wellbeing from the ground up.

Key points:
🔵 Why “bolted-on” wellbeing strategies fail to address root causes like payroll errors and workload imbalance
🔵 The role of unified HR, payroll, and operations data in identifying burnout before it’s too late
🔵 Eye-opening stats: one in three employees are one paycheck away from financial crisis
🔵 How AI-powered alerts helped uncover a costly payroll error—paying a former employee for 18 months

For more leadership and workplace insights, visit UC Today and explore related stories and interviews.

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For more Unified Communications & Collaboration Tech News visit https://www.uctoday.com/

In this interview, Mitel CTO Luiz Domingos discusses why frontline-first, voice-first communications are becoming essential operational infrastructure — and why organisations can no longer afford to connect their entire workforce with the same one-size-fits-all tools.

The conversation covers how embedded, real-time communications enable faster decisions, safer work, and better outcomes; why voice is making a strong comeback as the interface of choice in hands-free environments; where AI adds the most practical value for frontline workers; and how hybrid and edge architectures ensure resiliency, security, and control in mission-critical environments. Luiz also shares the biggest mistakes organisations make when modernising frontline communications — and how to avoid them.

Cisco TMS is approaching end of life, and organizations across the enterprise collaboration landscape are now facing major decisions about the future of their video infrastructure.

In this episode of UC Today, Kristian McCann speaks with Giles Adams, CEO at VQ Communications, about the real-world impact of the TMS transition, the growing divide between cloud and on-prem strategies, and why regulated industries are taking a far more cautious approach to collaboration infrastructure.

From government agencies protecting sensitive communications to enterprises balancing operational resilience with modern cloud innovation, this conversation explores the practical and strategic implications behind one of Cisco’s biggest ecosystem shifts.

Key discussion points include:
🔵 Why Cisco TMS end of life is creating urgency for enterprises and channel partners
🔵 The growing importance of sovereign, air-gapped, and on-prem video environments
🔵 How Cisco Control Hub compares with alternative migration paths
🔵 Why analytics, automation, compliance, and device management are becoming critical priorities

For more Unified Communications & Collaboration Tech News visit https://www.uctoday.com/

In this UC Today conversation, host Kristian McCann speaks with Hayley Mann, Chief People Officer at Formula E, about why the all-electric racing series picked HiBob with its people operations.

Formula E is not just managing people; it is supporting a workforce that spans the world, operates under pressure, and needs tools that make leadership easier, not heavier. Hayley explains why HiBob stood out to help with this, how its AI performance management was a key feature in the procurement process, and what good looks like as the partnership evolves.

Key topics include:
🔵 Why Formula E needed one platform to unify HR, employee experience, and manager workflows.
🔵 How HiBob’s culture fit, mobile usability, and AI-enabled performance tools helped tip the decision.
🔵What “embed and involve” means when you’re trying to make people processes part of the day job.
🔵The 12-month roadmap for talent, workforce planning, and freeing up the people team for more strategic work.

Watch to hear how market-leading companies like Formula E approach vendor selection and platform consolidation. Look for the practical takeaways on non-negotiables, employee experience, and using technology to support high performance rather than adding friction.

AI is reshaping the security operations center (SOC), shifting it from a manual, reactive function into a faster, intelligence-driven environment. For organizations dealing with alert fatigue and limited analyst capacity, AI is becoming a practical tool for improving how threats are identified and managed.

In this UC Today discussion, Kristian McCann speaks with Morgan Adamsky, Principal at PwC, to explore how enterprises are operationalizing AI in the SOC. 

Adamsky brings a pragmatic perspective, focusing on how AI can be deployed responsibly. Her insights center on aligning technology with people and process, ensuring AI enhances rather than complicates decision-making in high-pressure environments.

From Hype to Operational Reality

Traditionally, analysts have had to manually review large volumes of data, often taking significant time to identify real threats. AI is changing that by rapidly surfacing anomalies and prioritizing potential risks, helping teams respond faster.

Adoption, however, varies widely. Many organizations are still taking a “bolt-on” approach, adding AI into existing workflows. More advanced organizations are rethinking the SOC entirely, treating AI as a “force multiplier” and designing operations around it from the outset.

This gap highlights different levels of maturity. While some are experimenting, others are investing in deeper transformation, a move Adamsky suggests will deliver greater long-term value, particularly as attackers also leverage AI to accelerate their efforts.

Challenges remain. Organizations must integrate AI across the full security lifecycle, ensure outputs can be trusted, and train teams to use it effectively. As Adamsky notes, the human factor is still a key hurdle in scaling adoption.

Building a Smarter, Safer SOC

To manage these challenges, organizations are introducing clearer boundaries between AI and human decision-making. AI can handle tasks like initial triage, but critical actions such as containment or shutting down systems typically require human validation.

This human-in-the-loop approach helps maintain trust while still benefiting from automation. It ensures that AI supports, rather than replaces, human judgment in high-stakes scenarios.

Adamsky also outlines what effective implementation looks like. This includes combining threat intelligence, vulnerability data, and network activity into a unified view. AI then helps identify patterns and surface meaningful insights, enabling more informed decisions.

She also points to three priorities: faster vulnerability management, stronger third-party risk oversight, and preparing for breaches. The latter reflects a growing recognition that incidents are increasingly likely, making readiness essential.

From Experimentation to Transformation

The discussion makes clear that incremental adoption is not enough. While bolt-on AI can deliver short-term gains, long-term success requires rethinking the SOC as a whole, with AI embedded across workflows.

At the same time, core cybersecurity fundamentals still matter. Practices like patching, testing, and incident planning remain critical, but must now operate at greater speed to keep up with AI-driven threats.

For security leaders, the focus should be on both technology and people. That means investing in tools while also upskilling teams and adapting processes to fully leverage AI.

Ultimately, organizations that treat AI as foundational rather than optional will be better positioned to keep pace in an increasingly automated threat landscape.

In this session of UC Today, host Kristian McCann sits down with Simon Peters, Director of Channel Sales at Smarsh, to unpack one of the most pressing questions facing regulated industries in 2026: Is your compliance solution really secure — and is its AI even compliant?

It’s a wake-up call for compliance, risk, and IT leaders who assume ticking the compliance box equals airtight data protection. As global fines for compliance and data breaches continue to climb — including over $63 million in penalties in early 2025 alone — this conversation exposes the two blind spots most organizations still overlook.

Peters explains how compliance and security aren’t interchangeable, why third-party AI models can create new compliance gaps, and how Smarsh has built “compliant AI by architecture” — keeping all data, transcripts, and analysis inside customers’ own sovereign environments.

Key discussion points include:

• Why compliance ≠ security — and how most tools leave key data unprotected
• The hidden AI compliance gap: when “smart” systems leak sensitive data externally
• How Smarsh’s regional AI architecture ensures zero data leakage and full audit readiness
• The real-world consequences of breaches — from SEC fines to reputational damage

Next steps:

Visit Smarsh.com to download the “Compliance Must-Haves” checklist and the Seven Hidden Voice Data Risks guide.

In this episode of UC Today, host Kristian McCann sits down with Bill Dunnion, Chief Information Security Officer at Mitel, to unpack one of the most persistent challenges in enterprise security: getting cybersecurity onto the C-suite agenda before disaster strikes.

In this candid conversation, Mitel’s CISO Bill Dunnion explains why security still struggles to compete with revenue targets at the executive level, and what needs to change.

Rather than framing cybersecurity as a technical issue, Dunnion argues the case for repositioning it as a core business enabler—one that directly impacts revenue, competitiveness, and customer trust. 

Whether you're a business leader trying to understand your true exposure or a security professional struggling to make risk resonate at board level, this discussion offers practical, real-world insight you can apply immediately.
 
Key topics include:
🔵 Why cybersecurity still takes a back seat to revenue in the C-suite
🔵 How AI is accelerating risk by exposing existing vulnerabilities at scale
🔵 Why breaches remain the biggest (and most dangerous) wake-up call
🔵 How CISOs can translate cyber risk into business impact and revenue terms

For more insights on cybersecurity, visit to UC Today https://www.uctoday.com/

Agentic AI is moving from a promising productivity tool to a security problem that enterprise leaders can no longer ignore. In the conversation below, Kristian speaks with Irina Tsukerman, President at Scarab Rising; Shlomi Beer, Co-Founder & CEO at ImpersonAlly; and Roey Eliyahu, Co-Founder & CEO at Salt Security, about what agentic AI is, where the risks are emerging, and how organizations can manage systems designed to act on their behalf.

What makes the topic urgent is that agentic AI is not simply a chatbot with a smarter interface. These systems can make decisions, take actions, access data, and move across business systems with limited human oversight. That creates efficiency, but it also creates exposure, especially when companies are adopting the technology faster than they are building the controls around it.

Kristian frames the discussion around a simple but important question: how do you secure systems that are meant to behave autonomously when traditional security assumptions are no longer enough? The answer, as the guests make clear, is that the companies moving fastest on agentic AI are often the ones least prepared for its consequences.

Where The Security Risks Emerge

The first major theme in the conversation is that adoption is outpacing governance. Shlomi Beer says attackers do not always need to break through classic perimeter defenses; instead, they can manipulate external inputs, prompt chains, or other content that agents ingest and trust. In that environment, the attack surface is no longer just a network or an endpoint. It is the workflow itself.

Roey Eliyahu adds a broader operational view. He argues that consumer-facing sectors, where support volume is high and repetitive tasks are common, are adopting agents aggressively because the business case is compelling. But once an agent is expected to act like an employee, it also needs the permissions of an employee. That is where the security problem begins to scale.

Both guests point to the same underlying issue: the more useful the agent becomes, the more access it needs. And the more access it receives, the more dangerous it becomes if it is abused, hijacked, or allowed to make the wrong call. What begins as automation can quickly become a privilege problem, an observability problem, and a governance problem at the same time.

A second theme is that organizations often leave the rules unclear because the technology is moving faster than internal policy. Irina Tsukerman says some companies rush into deployment because they want competitive advantage, while others delay formal controls because they do not yet understand the risks well enough.

Why Governance Is Lagging

But the risks are not abstract. Irina points to predictable failure modes: an agent being hijacked, exposing customer information, or falling for a deepfake-style manipulation. Roey widens that lens by explaining that agents also create compliance exposure, especially in regulated sectors such as finance, insurance, and pharma. Even when the agent improves service, it still has access to sensitive data.

The discussion also shows why the current security market can feel fragmented. Vendors often sell point solutions for one layer of the stack, such as identity, the model, or the MCP layer, but the speakers argue that this rarely maps cleanly to the real business risk. The problem is not one isolated component. It is the chain linking agent, prompt, data, API, and downstream action.

The conversation turns to remedy, and here the emphasis is clear: start with visibility, then add guardrails, then add detection. Roey says readiness begins with full discovery and observability across agents, MCP servers, APIs, code, runtime, and configuration. Without that holistic view, security teams are trying to defend something they cannot fully see.

Once organizations understand the full chain, they can apply business-s

Host Kieran Devlin (UC Today) sits down with Mike Frayne, CEO at Voss, for the 2026 Big UC Update. They unpack what’s changed over the last 12 months—from AI adoption to platform consolidation—and why digital workplace management is becoming mission-critical as tool sprawl, data silos, and policy complexity accelerate.

Voss started in UC automation—but in this conversation, Mike Frayne explains how the company is widening the lens: bringing migration, automation, analytics, and telemetry data into a single platform that helps organizations manage not just UC, but the broader Microsoft ecosystem too.

AI is a major theme, but not as hype: Mike outlines why good AI depends on accurate, up-to-date telemetry, how Voss is building agents on top of that data, and why customers also need the freedom to build their own agents. The big watch-out? Agent governance—access control, policy compliance, duplication, adoption, and proving ROI—may be the next management frontier.

Key points we cover:

• Voss’s shift to a unified platform (not siloed products) to unlock richer telemetry
• Expanding beyond UC into Microsoft 365, security, auditing, and governance
• AI enablement: internal acceleration + customer-facing agents built on trusted data
• “Take back control” via discovery, hierarchy, RBAC, and spend/licence optimization

In this interview, UC Today's Kristian McCann sits down with Bob Pruett, Senior Solutions Architect at Myriad360, to tackle one of the most underappreciated security risks in modern business: data leakage through everyday collaboration tools. Most organisations have firewalls, permissions, and email controls in place — but nothing for the conversation happening right now in Teams, Zoom, Slack, and Google Chat? 

Data leakage isn't a new problem, but the way it happens in 2026 looks almost nothing like it did five years ago. 

Key Topics:
🔵 The real-time problem changes everything. Voice and chat can't be paused for inspection the way email can. If sensitive data is shared in a live call or instant message, it's gone before any traditional DLP tool can react — making prevention and policy far more important than detection after the fact.
🔵 Passwords and API keys are leaking through chat. One of the most common and overlooked risks Bob flags is credentials being shared in what employees assume are private conversations. Those messages are logged, searchable, and far more permanent than the post-it note people think they're replacing.
🔵 Your policies don't follow you across platforms. If you're on Zoom, Teams, Google Chat, and Slack in a single day, your security settings only apply to calls you initiate. The platform the other person starts controls the rules — including whether the call is transcribed, recorded, or shared.
🔵 Tools exist — most companies just haven't deployed them. Bob highlights Truffle Hog as a practical starting point for finding leaked secrets in chat logs, alongside built-in platform features that most organisations simply haven't switched on. The gap isn't tools — it's awareness and policy.

For more on UC security, compliance, and collaboration strategy, visit UC Today.

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