contact-center
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The Chat-to-Voice Handoff Stress Test
A support platform can promise omnichannel everything. The real test is what reaches the agent when a chat becomes a call—and whether the customer has to tell the story again.
The Acquisition Hangover in Your Contact Center
CCaaS acquisitions buy breadth fast. They can also leave seams in data, workflows and support—making a platform’s family tree a surprisingly useful buying guide.
Gupshup or Yellow.ai? Which One Keeps the Customer Whole
Both platforms promise one conversation across every channel. The real choice comes down to where identity lives, what survives a handoff, and whether the reporting can reconstruct the customer’s complete journey.
The Contact Center Compliance Shortlist Is Smaller Than It Looks
Eight cloud contact center vendors promise control. The real divide appears in audit evidence, data architecture, accessibility and the fine print around recordings, payments and resilience.
85% of Your Customers Still Want a Human. Draw the Matrix.
The automate-everything camp and the automate-nothing camp are both wrong, and most teams have no framework for deciding. The fix isn't a philosophy — it's a matrix: volume against emotional stakes, frequency against how much context a resolution needs.
The 95% Blind Spot Every Contact Center Pretends Isn't There
Most contact centers score under 5% of their calls and guess at the rest. Spiral by UJET reads 100% of conversations — and Turo used it to cut handle time by 28 seconds.
Which UJET Are You Looking For?
One UJET runs cloud contact centers; the other engineers electric scooters. The quickest way to tell them apart is the address bar.
KMS Lighthouse Puts the Answer Inside Zendesk
The integration brings governed enterprise knowledge into the ticket screen, giving support agents a faster route from customer question to approved answer without another tab.
Capacity vs Microsoft in the Fight to Kill the Support Ticket
Enterprise support is being rebuilt around AI agents. On one side, a St. Louis specialist that crossed $100M in recurring revenue; on the other, the largest software company alive shipping the same feature straight into Copilot.
Capacity Wants to Make the Support Ticket Disappear
The St. Louis company raised more than $155 million, turned profitable at $60 million in annual recurring revenue, and is pitching itself as the AI layer that answers questions before a ticket is ever opened - a direct shot at incumbents like Freshworks.
Conversational AI Stopped Talking and Started Doing the Work
Forrester's 2026 scorecard for customer-service AI crowns NiCE Cognigy, Kore.ai and Omilia as leaders, hands Bret Taylor's Sierra a breakout, and quietly leaves Google off the list entirely. The bots that used to answer questions now close tickets - and the whole industry is racing to prove it.
Retell AI Turned $5M Into $50M and a Voice on Every Phone Line
A five-person startup out of San Carlos hit $50 million in annual revenue on $5.1 million raised, powering more than 50 million voice calls a month while the giants it competes with spend hundreds of millions buying their way in.
Teneo.ai Wants Your Contact Center to Stop Guessing
The Stockholm company behind the Teneo platform is betting enterprises want AI agents that resolve calls at 99% accuracy - and that they would rather bolt that onto Genesys, Amazon and the rest than rip anything out.
Voice AI Agents Are Eating the Chatbot Business Alive
In 2026 the tidy world of customer-service chatbots split in two. On one side, legacy vendors like LivePerson and Verloop.io are being sold for parts; on the other, voice-native upstarts like Retell AI and deep-pocketed enterprise players like Kore.ai race to answer your next call in under a second.
AI Customer Service Agents Are Closing Tickets Without You
Intercom's Fin, Ada, Forethought, Gupshup, Five9 and Amazon are racing to build support agents that resolve tickets on their own. As the platforms buy up the startups, here is who does what - and where the real money is going.
Pypestream Bets the Enterprise on AI That Actually Finishes the Job
The New York AI company crossed 50 million monthly interactions for Fortune 500 clients in 2026, staking its pitch on agents that resolve problems rather than just talk about them - and drawing a line between itself and rivals like Teneo.ai and Parloa.
How boost.ai Turned Norwegian Banking Chat Into a Global AI Play
A conversational AI company from Stavanger now runs 600+ live virtual agents across 450+ organizations - and it is competing for enterprise deals against Uniphore, Intercom and Five9.
Voice AI Is Eating the Call Center, One Angry Caller at a Time
Observe.AI, PolyAI, Botpress, Forethought and a shrinking pack of rivals are racing to replace hold music with software that talks back. The funding says they are winning. The person still stuck on the line is not so sure.
AI Customer Service Agents Are Eating the Call Center
A pack of well-funded startups - Decagon, Ada, Uniphore, Omilia - plus Amazon, Kore.ai, Capacity and Five9 are teaching software to resolve support tickets end to end. The prize is a customer service market worth hundreds of billions, and the humans who used to answer the phone.
Omilia Built a Bot People Actually Say Thank You To
The Cyprus garage startup bootstrapped for 18 years, countersued the giant that tried to crush it, and just raised $67 million to finally kill the phone tree.
Teneo.ai Was Doing Agentic AI Before It Had a Name
The Swedish company behind a Loebner-winning chatbot now runs more than 17,000 AI agents for the likes of Telefonica and Swisscom - and finds itself at a crossroads as cash-rich rivals like Uniphore reshape the market it helped invent.
Pypestream Wants AI That Performs, Not AI That Pilots
The New York company behind agentic customer-service agents says it now handles more than 50 million interactions a month. Its pitch to enterprises: stop testing AI and start running the business on it.
Voice AI Is Quietly Winning the Customer Service War
Salesforce, Replicant, Rasa and Five9 are betting your next support agent won't be human. Here's who's ahead, what actually changed, and why the phone call became the last battleground.
The AI Agents Racing to Answer Your Support Calls
Infobip, PolyAI, Cresta, Botpress and a pack of rivals are pouring hundreds of millions into software that picks up the phone before a person can. Here is who is winning, who got bought, and what it means the next time you dial support.
Teneo.ai Bets the Contact Center on Boring, Reliable AI
While Zendesk rewires customer service around outcome-priced AI agents, Sweden's Teneo.ai is chasing the same market with a different promise: 99% accuracy, no LLM output reaching your customers, and voice bots that answer millions of calls a month.
AI Agents Are Quietly Taking Over the Contact Center
Observe.AI, Google, Five9 and Forethought are racing to hand your next support call to software. The prize is a customer-service market worth tens of billions - and the human seat on the other end of the line.
Yellow.ai Is Going Public To Buy The Call Centers It Wants To Replace
The Bangalore-born, San Mateo-based agentic AI company is merging with Bluerock Acquisition Corp in a deal valuing it near $550 million - then spending the proceeds on the human-run BPO firms its software is designed to automate.
Retell AI Built a $60M Business on 5 Cents a Minute
The YC-backed voice startup raised about $5 million, then rode 650% growth to a $60 million run rate - selling AI phone agents by the minute while Microsoft, Salesforce and Cresta chase the same calls.
Four Contact Center Platforms, One Confusing Choice in 2026
NICE, UJET, Kustomer and XCALLY all promise to fix your customer service. They come at it from four very different places - and the gap between them says a lot about where support software is heading.
Odigo Wants Europe's Call Centers to Stay in Europe
For nearly 40 years Odigo has quietly run the phone lines behind Air France, DHL and Allianz. Now the French CCaaS firm is betting that Europe's biggest brands would rather keep customer data on a sovereign cloud than hand it to Silicon Valley.