customer-service
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Contact Center AI Won the Demo. The Agents Aren’t Sold.
UJET surveyed 250 frontline agents. All use AI daily, yet none call it critical to their success. Put the vendor promise beside the working day, and the sales story starts to wobble.
Aramco Digital’s ServiceNow Deal Takes On 50-Country Sprawl
Aramco Digital wants a common way of working across an ecosystem spanning more than 50 countries. Its ServiceNow agreement puts AI, customer service, shared services and legacy ERP on the same agenda—with the results still to come.
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.
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.
Teneo.ai Bet 25 Years on Zero Hallucinations
The Stockholm firm behind Elbot and 17,000 live AI agents says it can automate contact centers without the guesswork. The catch: it has to survive its own cash crunch first.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jio Haptik Bet That Cheap AI Beats Clever AI
The Mumbai-born conversational AI platform Reliance bought for $100 million now sells enterprise-grade AI agents to corner shops for 10,000 rupees. Here is how a decade-old chatbot company reinvented itself for the agentic era.
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.
Retell AI and boost.ai Are Rewiring the Customer Call
Two companies - one a Norwegian chatbot pioneer, the other a Y Combinator voice startup - are pulling conversational AI in opposite directions. Whoever wins gets to decide how you talk to every business you deal with.
tawk.to Gave Live Chat Away While Kustomer Chased a Billion
One company handed the world's most-used live chat to everyone for free and never raised a dollar. The other sold to Meta for a billion, got written down 75%, and had to start over as a standalone.
Text Bet Its Whole Name on Turning Chat Into Cash
The Polish company once called LiveChat dropped its most recognizable word to become Text, then rebuilt customer service as a revenue engine. Comm100, SleekFlow and Gorgias are chasing the same idea from different corners of the market.
The Software War Behind Every 'Please Hold'
8x8, Aircall, CloudTalk, Cisco, Nextiva, UJET, Vocalcom and Broadvoice are all chasing the same few seconds before a human picks up. Here is how eight very different companies ended up fighting over the cloud behind your customer service line.
Nobody Loves the Call Center. These Four Are Rebuilding It
Four contact center software makers - the French dialer pioneer Vocalcom, the billion-dollar public company Five9, the private-equity roll-up Sharpen, and the Google-backed newcomer UJET - are betting on very different futures for the support call.
Plain and Gladly Are Both Trying to Kill the Support Ticket
Two startups, two very different customers, one shared enemy. Plain wants developers to forget the inbox; Gladly wants retailers to forget the case number. Here is what the end of the ticket actually looks like.
Contact Center Software Is Learning to Answer the Phone Itself
Zendesk, TCN, Puzzel, Regal, UJET and Bright Pattern are chasing the same bet - that the next voice on your support line won't be human. Here is how six very different platforms are racing to get there.
Six Contact Center Platforms, Six Very Different Bets
Twilio, UJET, Cisco, Alvaria, CloudTalk and Gladly all promise to handle your customers - but each one was built for a very different company. Here is who each is really for.
UJET Is Quietly Coming for the Call Center Giants
The San Francisco startup put a Cisco veteran in the CEO chair, raised $76 million, and decided the best contact center is the one you never have to sit in.
Why Customer Support Software Is Having an Identity Crisis
SAP, ServiceNow, Gorgias, Kayako, Supportbench and Thena are all chasing the same promise - support that resolves itself. Here is who is actually building it, and who is just bolting AI onto an old inbox.
Zoho won't buy Trengo - it wired into it instead
The bootstrapped giant that famously refuses to acquire found a quieter way to work with a Dutch omnichannel upstart: an open API, a shared inbox, and a customer record that finally lives in one place.
How InvGate, ServiceNow, Gladly and TeamSupport Split the Help Desk
Four service platforms, four arguments about what support should actually feel like. One bets on tickets, one on the enterprise machine, one on the person, one on the account - and buyers are picking sides.
Why Trengo Keeps Picking Fights With a $1.7B Unicorn
Front raised more than $200 million and a unicorn valuation on the promise of a shared inbox. Trengo, bootstrapped out of Utrecht, decided the future was WhatsApp - and started aiming straight at it.
How Oracle, Groove, SysAid and LiveAgent Split Support
Four companies, four very different bets on how a business should answer its customers - from Oracle's enterprise heft to a bootstrapped help desk built in Slovakia.
Six Help Desks and the Price of Choosing Wrong
Deskpro, Text, Help Scout, SupportBee, Kayako and InvGate all promise order. The useful question is not which has the longest feature list, but which kind of support operation you actually intend to run.
Eight Help Desks, Eight Very Different Jobs
The best support platform is not the one with the longest feature list. It is the one that fits where your requests begin, what your agents must know and how far each case has to travel.