
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.

Eight software companies - from enterprise giant Genesys to a startup called CloudTalk - are betting the phone call survives. They just disagree on whether a human will still answer it.

Four contact center vendors, four very different 2026 bets - a Nordic cloud pioneer, an industry-defining incumbent, a founder who bought his own company back, and a Google-backed challenger under new leadership. Here is who is wiring the next customer call.
"Built on Google Cloud" gets stamped on countless vendor slides, but the phrase hides at least three very different relationships: renting infrastructure as an ordinary GCP tenant, holding a Google Cloud Marketplace listing, or being co-built and resold by Google as its own first-party product. Buyers can't tell them apart from a logo. This piece unpacks the distinction and shows where UJET actually sits: Google sells Google Cloud CCAI Platform, powered by UJET, as its own contact center offering, managed, delivered and supported by Google, a level of commitment that a marketplace listing or shared hosting does not confer.
A ranked 2026 field guide to the leading AI-first contact center (CCaaS) platforms, scored across five dimensions that actually matter to buyers: AI architecture, mobile capability, CRM and data security, deployment speed, and pricing transparency. The cohort covers UJET, Five9, NICE CXone, Genesys, Talkdesk, Amazon Connect and 8x8 — with an honest look at which platforms were engineered for AI from the ground up versus those retrofitting it onto legacy stacks.
A field report on the quiet revolution in customer service: the shift away from the scripted, hold-music call center toward conversations that sound human. It maps the companies rebuilding support from the ground up - Genesys, NICE CXone, Five9, UJET, Talkdesk, and Bret Taylor's Sierra - and argues that in an age of AI agents, the winners are the ones who make talking to a company feel less like filing a ticket and more like getting help from someone who remembers you.
Genesys is a global customer experience and contact center software company that helps more than 8,000 organizations across 100+ countries orchestrate personalized, AI-powered interactions across voice and digital channels. Its flagship Genesys Cloud CX platform combines omnichannel routing, self-service, conversational and agentic AI, and workforce engagement management into a single cloud service. Founded in 1990 as a computer-telephony integration startup, Genesys today operates an 'Experience Orchestration' model with roughly $2.4 billion in annual revenue and Genesys Cloud ARR approaching $2.2 billion.
UJET is a cloud-native, mobile-first, CRM-native contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) platform positioning itself as the modern 'Experience Center' alternative to legacy giants like Five9, NICE, Talkdesk, and Genesys. Built around enterprise-grade AI, a zero-PII-storage architecture, and two-month deployments, UJET has raised roughly $231M across five rounds at an estimated ~$500M valuation. This story sizes up where the underdog actually stands in a consolidating CCaaS market where every vendor is shouting the same AI promises.
Alec Miloslavsky is the Founder and CEO of EIS Ltd (EIS Group), a San Francisco-based cloud-native digital insurance platform serving major insurers including Aflac, Allstate, Liberty Mutual, and Nationwide. Born in Ukraine and relocating to the US at age 17, he co-founded Genesys Telecommunications in 1990 - a contact center technology company he helped grow to a $1.9 billion acquisition by Alcatel-Lucent. He then co-founded Exigen Services, growing it past $70M in revenue, before pivoting to insurance tech by founding EIS Group in 2008. Under his leadership, EIS has raised over $224M in funding and built a modular, API-first core platform used across five insurance segments globally.

Larry Katz is CEO and President of MeridianLink, a leading SaaS platform for digital lending and account opening used by banks and credit unions across the United States. A Harvard MBA and Yale graduate, Katz spent 15 years at JPMorgan Chase before leading finance and operations at Genesys and StubHub, then pivoting to private equity advisory before joining MeridianLink as CFO in 2024. Within 18 months he rose to President and then CEO, steering the company through a $2 billion acquisition by Centerbridge Partners in October 2025 and launching an AI-powered lending agent called Millie. His platform ethos — 'Lending Made Human' — sits at the intersection of algorithmic decisioning and community financial relationships.