UC Today

In this interview, UC Today's Kristian McCann speaks with Stephen Baer, leadership advisor and author, about one of the most stubborn paradoxes in modern business: organizations that say people are their greatest asset, then manage them on spreadsheets.

With Gallup reporting that 79% of employees worldwide are disengaged in 2025, Stephen makes a compelling argument that the way most companies measure engagement is actively undermining it — and that the fix starts not with better tools, but with better leaders.

Topics include:
The invisible drag is costing more than you think. Disengagement is estimated to cost the global economy $8.8 trillion annually — equivalent to 9% of global GDP. Meanwhile, companies that genuinely invest in their people see a third of average staff turnover and eight times more revenue per employee.
Quiet quitting has a tell. When employees stop saying "what if we tried this?" and start saying "just tell me the deadline," ownership, creativity, and innovation have already left the building. Compliance is what remains.
Metrics should lag, not lead. The right question isn't "what's our engagement score?" — it's "where are we losing people emotionally?" Tools and platforms work best as early warning systems for broken human experiences, not surveillance dashboards.
Train coaches, not managers. Stephen's framework — greet them, know them, grow them — gives middle managers a practical way to build the kind of relationships where people feel seen, understood, and clear on how their work connects to something bigger.

Next Steps 
For more leadership and workplace insights, visit UC Today and explore related stories and interviews. Join the UC Today LinkedIn community at linkedin.com/groups/9551264 and subscribe to the newsletter at uctoday.com/register.

In this UC Today roundtable, host Kristian McCann brings together leading security experts to confront the escalating risks of agentic AI—autonomous systems that make decisions, take actions, and roam across enterprise tech stacks often without human oversight. You’ll hear from Irina Tsukerman, President at Scarab Rising; Shlomi Beer, Co-Founder & CEO at ImpersonAlly; and Roey Eliyahu, Co-Founder & CEO at Salt Security. Together, they reveal how rapid adoption in customer support, sales, and finance is outstripping governance, enabling silent breaches via prompt injections, privilege accumulation, and API exploits that blend into normal workflows.

Expect straight talk on the productivity boom versus harsh realities—like 80% of companies facing unintended agent actions such as data leaks or unauthorized access—and proven strategies for observability, dynamic guardrails, and non-human identity governance that safeguard UC&C environments without killing innovation.

Talking points include:

Why agentic AI supercharges insider threats and erodes perimeters, exposing "internal" APIs to external manipulation even within legitimate agent permissions.

Governance blind spots in high-stakes sectors like retail and airlines (e.g., fraudulent refunds, customer data spills), demanding end-to-end visibility from LLMs to backend actions.

Runtime defenses against self-learning exploits, deceptive "sleeper" code, and endless trial-and-error attacks that humans resist but agents can't.

Zero-trust models, NHI in IAM, and regulation readiness to align agent efficiency with compliance and CX protection.

Next Steps

Share this roundtable with your CISOs, IT leaders, and business units to map agent permissions and API exposures right now.

Evaluate IAM for non-human identities and pilot tools like Salt Security for holistic agent discovery.

Subscribe to UC Today for more expert roundtables on AI risks, UC&C security, and enterprise compliance.

In this interview, UC Today's Christopher Carey sits down with Sam Liang, CEO and Co-founder of Otter.ai, to discuss the company's newly launched Conversational Knowledge Engine and what it means for enterprise productivity.

Sam explains how Otter is moving beyond siloed meeting notes to build a longitudinal knowledge graph connecting thousands of meetings, people, topics, and projects — arguing that conversational data has been the missing piece of enterprise infrastructure for over 100 years.

The conversation also tackles the privacy debate head-on, including the ongoing class action lawsuit facing Otter, with Sam making the bold claim that lawsuits are simply "part of doing business" when you're disrupting an industry.

Topics covered:
🔵 How the Conversational Knowledge Engine works
🔵 How Otter differentiates from Microsoft, Zoom, and Google
🔵 Enterprise security, data retention, and permission controls
🔵 The class action lawsuit and the future of AI consent
🔵 Why Sam believes your voice will replace manual AI prompting

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

In this interview, UC Today's Marcus Law speaks with Carmit DiAndrea, Director of Value Realization Services at NiCE, about what the next chapter of AI in unified communications actually looks like for enterprises. The conversation moves beyond transcription and meeting summaries to explore supervisor copilots, business intelligence tools, agentic AI, and how organisations should be measuring outcomes rather than activity.

Carmit also addresses the surveillance line, accountability in agentic AI, and gives practical advice to IT leaders on avoiding the "Frankenstack" problem heading into the rest of 2025.

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

The next phase of workplace transformation starts beyond the meeting room.

Most enterprises have deployed Microsoft Teams Rooms and the core meeting experience is working. But beyond the meeting room sits a much larger opportunity, lobbies, huddle spaces, event venues, open collaboration areas, and most organisations are managing those with a disconnected patchwork of point solutions that wasn't designed to scale. 

In this video, Marcus Law sits down with Vic Bhagat, Senior Director of Alliances at Q-SYS, to explore what a genuinely high-performance workplace requires, what changes when you connect every space type through a unified platform, and what Microsoft's decision to build Experience Center One on Q-SYS tells us about where enterprise AV is heading. 

If you're responsible for a Teams Rooms estate and thinking about what comes next, this is the conversation to start with.

As organisations modernise their digital workplaces, service management and connectivity are no longer separate disciplines – they're converging into a single experience layer that shapes how people work, sell, and serve customers.

In this UC Today roundtable, Christopher Carey is joined by Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst at Metrigy; Chethan Visweswar, Chief Product Officer at Movius; John Finch, Global VP at RingCentral; and Mark Bunnell, Chief Operating Officer at Nuwave.

Together they explore how the market is evolving, where organisations are falling behind, and what it takes to move from reactive IT to predictive, AI-driven operations.

Topics covered include:
🔵 The convergence of service management and network connectivity
🔵 Why tech debt and silos are slowing digital transformation
🔵 How automation and AIOps are reshaping IT operations
🔵 The challenge of measuring experience vs. traditional SLAs
🔵 What the next 24 months could look like as AI agents enter the workforce

Whether you're an IT leader, a service provider, or a technology decision-maker, this conversation cuts through the hype and gets into what's actually changing on the ground.

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

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 free 18-stage “Compliance Must-Haves” checklist and the Seven Hidden Voice Data Risks guide.

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.

Join the UC Today LinkedIn community at linkedin.com/groups/9551264 and subscribe to the newsletter at uctoday.com/register.

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

In this UC Today interview, host Kristian McCann sits down with Kunal Shukla, GM and Head of Network APIs at Vonage, and Chung H. Lee, AVP of Product Innovation at AT&T Business, to unpack why traditional authentication methods are breaking down—and what comes next.

From the hidden cost of fraud to the growing limitations of SMS-based verification, the discussion reveals why enterprises must rethink how they balance security with seamless user experiences. More importantly, it introduces a new, network-led approach that leverages telco intelligence to authenticate users silently—without adding friction.

This isn’t just theory. Vonage and AT&T break down how network APIs are transforming authentication and reducing friction across the customer journey.

Key points include:
Why a $10 trillion cybercrime economy is forcing businesses to rethink authentication strategies
How SMS OTP creates friction—and opens the door to phishing, interception, and poor UX
What “silent authentication” looks like using real-time network intelligence and telco data
How Vonage, AT&T, and partners are building an ecosystem to deliver secure, seamless digital trust
Next Steps:
Stay ahead of fraud trends and join the UC Today LinkedIn community at linkedin.com/groups/9551264 and subscribe to the newsletter at uctoday.com/register.

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/