# The Quiet Redesign of Customer Service

> Customer service is being rebuilt in the background, one conversation at a time. A wave of companies - Cognigy, Parloa, Cresta, UJET, Amazon Connect, Cisco's Webex Contact Center, 8x8 and Vonage - are turning the contact center from a cost you apologize for into software that answers the phone. This is the story of the quiet redesign: who is building it, what changed in 2025 and 2026, and why the hold music is finally getting shorter.

## Achievements

- Turned the contact center from a cost center into one of enterprise software's fastest-growing categories.
- Cognigy sold to NICE for ~$955M at roughly 25x revenue - one of the largest agentic-AI exits to date.
- Parloa reached a $3B valuation in January 2026, up from $1B eight months earlier.
- Cresta recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave for Conversation Intelligence Solutions for Contact Centers, Q2 2025.
- Amazon Connect proved a full contact center could run as rented cloud software billed by the minute.
- Drove per-interaction voice costs from an estimated $7-12 for a human agent toward roughly $0.40 for voice AI.

## Latest updates

- **2026-03** — UJET launched Agentic Experience Orchestration (AXO) to unify CX data and AI across the agent workflow.
- **2026-01** — Parloa raised a $350M Series D led by General Catalyst at a $3B valuation.
- **2026-01** — Cisco's Webex Contact Center began rolling out agent-to-agent (A2A) and Model Context Protocol (MCP) support for multi-agent collaboration.
- **2025-07** — NICE announced its ~$955M acquisition of Cognigy, kicking off a wave of consolidation in agentic CX.

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Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-07-30