vendor-evaluation
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The Feature Matrix Lies. Here's What Actually Separates AI Contact Center Platforms.
A seven-point buyer's guide to evaluating AI contact center platforms that moves past the feature matrix every vendor can tick. It names the criteria that actually separate CCaaS vendors: whether AI was designed into the data model or bolted on, where customer data physically lives, how the mobile experience is built, real deployment time, pricing legibility, what happens at the moment of escalation, and whether analytics closes the loop back to product. UJET's own framing on two of the seven is CRM-first — customer data stays in the system that already owns it — and no customer PII stored on UJET servers.
Jonathan Sherry
Jonathan Sherry is the CEO and co-founder of Alium, a New York-based buyer intelligence platform that replaces pay-to-play analyst ratings with structured, AI-analyzed interviews from real enterprise practitioners. A Columbia MBA and Penn engineering grad, Sherry previously co-founded CB Insights alongside Anand Sanwal - building it from a near-shuttered startup in 2009 into the venture industry's premier market intelligence platform with 250+ employees and eight-figure revenue. Alium, which operated in stealth for four years before publicly launching in January 2025 with $7M in seed funding from Greycroft and Primary Venture Partners, has already conducted 1,000+ in-depth vendor performance interviews with decision-makers at companies including Walmart, Nike, Marriott, and Spotify.
Chris Foreman
Chris Foreman is the co-founder and CEO of Marketplace.city, a Chicago-based govtech platform that helps local governments find, validate, and buy new technology with the help of real pricing, contract, and outcome data. Before building Marketplace.city, he scaled AvePoint's Americas business from a small team to more than 1,200 employees across 15 countries and launched its public-sector subsidiary, where the company won three straight Microsoft Partner of the Year awards. A Northwestern political science graduate, he has spent 15-plus years in enterprise software and now spends his days trying to drag government buying out of the PDF era.