The founders spent six years running a contact center that customers hated calling. Now they sell software so other companies don't have to.

Dialpad, UJET, Regal, Twilio, Bright Pattern, Kustomer, Mitel and XCALLY are all chasing the same moment - the second a customer reaches out. Here is how eight very different companies are betting on what happens when AI picks up the phone.

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.

The New York startup is betting the future of the call center isn't fewer humans and cheaper bots - it's AI voice agents that sound like your best rep, never sleep, and have already worked their way through 500 million calls.
Jake Saper is a General Partner at Emergence Capital, the San Francisco-based venture firm that backed Zoom, Salesforce, and Veeva before the rest of the world caught on. Over a decade at Emergence, he has become one of the loudest and most credible voices on AI-native services — companies that combine human expertise with AI to displace the $200B consulting industry. His 2024 essay 'The Death of Deloitte' earned him a cease-and-desist from Deloitte and a loyal readership of founders rebuilding professional services from scratch. A Yale and Stanford-trained operator-turned-investor, he grew up in Austin watching serial-entrepreneur parents build companies, started his own career selling rocks door-to-door from a Radio Flyer wagon, and today holds board seats at category-defining enterprise companies while maintaining a side career as a self-described 'mediocre guitar player.'