Within four days last week, Salesforce agreed to acquire Cresta, Dialpad announced a merger with Ada, and Five9 announced that it’s buying Level AI. Each of these deals folds conversational AI specialists into broader customer experience (CX) platforms and puts a perennial question squarely in front of CX leaders: Should AI agents come from a unified platform or a best-of-breed specialist? Metrigy’s 2026 AI and CX research studies suggest enterprises have already answered, and the answer is, “Both.” 

In our Contact Center & Beyond: Elevating CX 2026-27 study, conducted in the third quarter, 57.2% of the 626 participating companies see value in buying as many applications as possible from a single provider. Yet our AI’s Role in Customer Experience: 2026-27 study, conducted in the second quarter with 759 companies, shows an average of 12 vendors with AI capabilities in place across CX stacks. The companies getting the most from AI don’t resolve that tension so much as exploit it: 76.5% of the  Contact Center & Beyond study’s Success Group, drawn from companies reporting above-average gains in key business measures from AI’s use, see value in a single provider, while 62.9% of the most successful companies  in our AI’s Role in CX study plan to add AI vendors in the next year.

A Week of Deals: The Specialists Fold Into the Platforms

The terms of the deals tell their own story. Salesforce’s deal for Cresta, which offers voice agents, real-time agent assist, and conversation intelligence, comes at a reported $2.7 billion; Five9 will pay $325 million in cash for Level AI, whose AI agents, agent assist, and quality management run on a shared conversation-intelligence layer; and the all-share Dialpad-Ada combination reportedly values Ada at roughly $430 million.

None of these deals arrives in a vacuum. NiCE closed its acquisition of Cognigy, an enterprise conversational and agentic AI provider, in September 2025 in a deal reported at about $955 million; Genesys bought agent builder Pinkfish in June 2026; and Salesforce struck a reported $3.6 billion deal for Fin, the AI customer service business formerly known as Intercom, that same month. The pattern is hard to miss: The conversational AI software, long the technology that CX leaders bolted on top of a contact center or customer relationship management (CRM) system, is becoming part and parcel of the platform itself.

Read the fine print, though, and the acquirers are hedging. Salesforce says Cresta “will continue to support the leading contact center and telephony platforms its customers rely on today”; Five9 will sell Level AI both inside its platform and as a standalone product; and NiCE positioned Cognigy the same way, as part of the CXone platform and as an independent offering.

An Old Question, Recast for AI Agents

Consolidation complicates the sourcing decision rather than settling it. A company that chose Cresta, Level AI, or Ada for its focused expertise now finds that specialist sitting inside a platform it may or may not use, with roadmap priorities that will inevitably tilt toward the new parent. Conversely, a company that standardized on a unified platform that brings together CRM, contact center, knowledge, and AI natively gains capabilities it might otherwise have had to integrate on its own.

Metrigy’s research offers a closer look at how CX leaders are navigating the decision and why those who are seeing the strongest results from AI decline to pick a side.

The Data: Platform Instincts, Multivendor Reality

The platform instinct runs deeper than a general preference for fewer providers. Participants in our Contact Center & Beyond study would like, on average, 48.4% of their tech stack to come from one provider, and when asked to rank which components matter most to source natively from the same provider, they placed AI agents second, behind only CRM and ahead of knowledge management. Additionally, 67.0% say the coordination of AI, humans, data, and workflows to determine the next-best action in a customer journey, otherwise known as “AI orchestration,” belongs in the core of a platform rather than at its edge.

The multivendor reality runs just as deep. In our AI’s Role in CX study, 46.3% of companies plan to increase the number of AI vendors they use in the next 12 months, and they buy AI agents from one or more of a range of provider types. This includes CRM providers (68.9%), contact center as a service (CCaaS) providers (38.5%), and AI specialists (28.5%)—precisely the three vendor types the recent deals are blurring together.

Our CX Assurance for AI-Powered Contact Centers: 2026-27 study, conducted in the third quarter with 428 companies, shows how this plays out operationally: 47.8% of companies assure their AI agents with a mix of native platform tools and a centralized tool, 25.3% use one platform-agnostic tool, and 19.1% rely on each platform’s native tools in silos.

Success Group data is telling, too. In our Contact Center & Beyond study, 76.5% of the Success Group see value in a single provider, as noted, vs. 62.7% of the Non-Success Group; in our AI’s Role in CX study, 62.9% of the Success Group plan to add AI vendors, as noted, vs. 38.8% of the Non-Success Group. Top performers, in other words, want a strong core platform and are still willing to go outside it.

Weighing the Tradeoffs: Neither Path Comes Free

The unified platform’s appeal is real, and our data shows where it comes from:

On the other hand, the platform route has costs, and last week’s deals make them hard to ignore:

Best of breed offers the opposite tradeoffs. Specialists have historically moved faster on reasoning, voice, and conversation intelligence, which is precisely why platforms are paying to acquire them. Additionally, our Contact Center & Beyond research shows AI specialists rising from the primary customer interaction platform for 27.7% of companies today to 48.1% by the end of 2028. The cost is sprawl. A dozen AI vendors means a dozen data models, pricing schemes, and governance regimes, and with 44.3% of companies in our CX Assurance study experiencing an AI incident at least monthly, failure to escalate to a human (45.2%) chief among them, a gap between two vendors quickly becomes a customer’s problem.

Standards such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which lets AI agents connect to applications and data without custom integrations, promise to ease that burden—and Genesys’s acquisition of Pinkfish, whose prebuilt MCP-based tools connect AI agents to common enterprise applications, signals that platform providers see as much. Adoption is still early, however: Fewer than 20% of companies in our Contact Center & Beyond study use MCP to connect CX applications today, though 37.2% plan to by 2027.

The Answer Is Both—With Conditions

The acquirers themselves seem to concede that the either/or framing is a false choice. By keeping Cresta, Level AI, and Cognigy available to customers of competing platforms, they’re betting that buyers want a strong platform core with an open door. That is, not coincidentally, what top performers in our research are already doing. 

For CX leaders whose AI agent provider just changed hands, or might soon, the questions worth asking now include:

Last week’s deals won’t be the last, and CX leaders who treat consolidation as a reason to revisit their sourcing strategy will be better positioned for the next one, choosing a core platform for shared data and orchestration while reserving the right to bring in specialists where they demonstrably outperform, and holding every AI agent, from every source, to the same standard of assurance.

When a familiar voice can’t be trusted, every call carries risk

Voice calls are essential to doing business, whether it’s banking, healthcare, government, customer service, employee support, or thousands of other engagements. Phone calls are also fundamental to staying connected. From the joy of engaging with a loved one to the pain of an accident or emergency.

Deepfake technology challenges the basic assumption behind all of those interactions…trust. Trust that the voice on the call belongs to the person it claims to represent.

Modern AI tools can use a small audio sample (from social media, a recorded call, YouTube, etc.) to reproduce a person’s voice, tone, and cadence. Attackers use that deepfake voice during a live call to deceive their intended victim.  

Attackers use that deepfake voice during a live call to deceive their intended victim, impersonating executives, coworkers, and family members to exploit the trust people place in a familiar voice. They use that trust to gain access to corporate networks, execute fraudulent business transactions, or defraud the most vulnerable members of our community.

Download and read this issue paper at ribboncommunications.com.

AI-driven vishing against communications platforms gives attackers access to a variety of enterprise resources. CISOs should proactively work with UC teams to enhance security.

Vishing, in which an attacker uses voice calls to gain access to company or personal information, is on the rise. Vishing attacks grew by a whopping 442% in 2024 alone, according to CrowdStrike. They are also growing more sophisticated as AI enables voice deepfakes to impersonate customers and employees and engage in social engineering attacks.

Protecting against vishing attacks is increasingly top of mind for those responsible for enterprise communications platforms, according to Metrigy’s “Workplace Collaboration Security and Compliance: 2027” global study of 403 organizations. Nearly 60% of respondents said they are adopting additional customer identity verification approaches to protect against vishing, and more than half are implementing security platforms specifically for that purpose.

What is vishing?

Continue reading at techtarget.com.

New Metrigy research finds AI coaching narrowed the customer-rating gap between top and low performers by 19.4%

Every contact center has them: The agents who customers rave about and the agents who generate callbacks and complaints. The gap between them is one of the most expensive problems in CX, because customers don’t choose which agent they get. Vendors pitch AI-based coaching as the fix. Their stance is that personalized feedback, generated from every interaction, helps struggling agents improve faster than a supervisor could manage alone.

So does it work? Metrigy’s Workforce Engagement Management: 2026-27 study of 108 companies globally suggests it does, though not necessarily—or equally—for everyone.

The gap is narrowing

We asked companies to rate the customer experience their top and low performers delivered on a scale of 1 to 10, before and after they introduced AI-based coaching. Both groups improved. Top performers rose from 6.4 to 7.9, and low performers rose from 5.1 to 6.8.

The low performers gained more, though. Their ratings climbed 33.2%, compared with 22.6% for top performers. As a result, the gap between the two shrank from 1.3 points to 1.0 points, a 19.4% reduction.

Companies are noticing. Among those that compare customer ratings for their best and worst agents, 46.4% say AI coaching has helped close the performance gap, up from 34.8% last year. Another 36.2% use AI coaching but haven’t seen the gap change yet.

The results aren’t automatic

The companies in our Success Group—those with the biggest measurable gains from WEM—get far more out of AI coaching. Their low performers reach an average rating of 7.3 after coaching, compared with 6.2 for low performers in the Non-Success Group. The Success Group’s top-to-low gap narrowed by 25.3%, more than twice the Non-Success Group’s 12.0%. Successful companies are also more likely to say AI coaching closed the gap: 54.3%, vs. 30.4%.

Company size matters, as well. Only 25.0% of small companies (fewer than 250 employees) say AI coaching closed the gap, compared with 59.3% of mid-size companies and 50.0% of large companies.

What sets the leaders apart isn’t simply having the tool. Successful companies are more likely to measure the gap in the first place: 71.9% compare customer ratings for top and low performers, vs. 53.5% of the Non-Success Group. They’re also twice as likely to say human coaches remain critical even with AI (43.8% vs. 20.5%). They aren’t replacing coaches with AI; they’re giving their supervisors and agents better coaching tools.

What CX leaders should do

Here are four surefire ways to get more out of AI coaching, based on what the most successful companies in our study are doing:

AI coaching won’t turn every agent into your best agent. But, as our data shows, it can make your weakest agents noticeably better—and customers notice the difference.

Metrigy’s global Workplace Collaboration and Employee Experience 2027 study of 403 organizations finds AI moving from pilot to practice, and the office growing, not shrinking.

November 3, 2026 – Research and advisory firm Metrigy released its Workplace Collaboration and Employee Experience 2027 research study, finding that AI is moving from pilot to practice across collaboration apps, phone systems, and meetings. Based on research with 403 organizations globally, the study finds that 40.8% already use AI assistants or copilots within their collaboration apps, and employee access to these assistants is expected to climb from 56.5% today to 73.0% by the end of 2027.

Agentic AI is following close behind. More than one-third of organizations (35.1%) already allow autonomous AI agents, and another 34.8% are evaluating them. Organizations seeing the greatest results from their collaboration investments are further ahead on nearly every AI measure, and they are twice as likely as their peers to allow autonomous agents.

AI is not the only shift underway. Despite years of debate over remote and hybrid work, the office is growing: 41.0% of organizations expect their office space to increase in 2027, compared to just 7.8% expecting a decrease. Investment is flowing into meeting rooms, with video, touch screens, and reservation software all set to expand by the end of 2027.

“AI is moving into the mainstream, and delivering measurable business value,” said Irwin Lazar, president and principal analyst at Metrigy and lead author of the study. “Organizations with the highest return on their workplace collaboration investments are deploying AI at a higher rate than others. IT and business leaders should ensure that they are positioned to leverage AI to improve collaboration and automate repeatable workflows.”

Workplace Collaboration and Employee Experience 2027 Highlights

Additional findings from the study include: 

Despite the momentum, gaps remain. Nearly 42% of organizations lack AI for proactive management of their collaboration environment, and a similar share lack analytics—leaving room for improvement as AI spreads across the workplace. 

Metrigy’s Workplace Collaboration and Employee Experience 2027 study examines how organizations are adopting AI, evolving the office, and investing in meetings, video, and calling technologies, and compares the practices of the most successful organizations with those of their peers. 

The full report, including detailed findings, success-group analysis, and recommendations for technology and business leaders, is available for download to Metrigy clients or for individual purchase. 

If you are interested in Metrigy’s Workplace Collaboration and Employee Experience 2027 study, please reach out to [email protected]. 

Media Contact:

Elly Hertz

Sr. Director of Content Marketing and Design, Metrigy

[email protected]

Phone: 877-638-7449 · Cell: 815-735-7059

The next generation of AI platforms won’t compete on model size or speed. They will compete on how much context they can assemble, understand, and act upon in real time. That’s why it’s important to position your CX strategy to gather, maintain, enrich, share, and govern context–and then apply context to every AI decision. Today, only 35.4% of companies say their AI platforms maintain full context across workflows and interactions, yet 95.7% say this contextual awareness is critical or important to AI’s effectiveness, according to Metrigy’s research. This series covers the following:

Contextual AI: The Next Wave of AI that’s Vital to Successful CX

Presented by: Andy Watson, Director of Product Marketing for CX Solutions, RingCentral; Robin Gareiss, CEO and Principal Analyst, Metrigy

Date and Time: December 3, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT

Register to Attend

This first-annual UCaaS + CCaaS MetriRank report takes a deep dive into 10 leading providers offering combined enterprise communications and contact center services from a common platform

October 13, 2026 – Research and advisory firm Metrigy released its UCaaS + CCaaS MetriRank 2026 report, identifying Zoom as No. 1 among Top 10 providers leading the market today and best positioned for long-term success. To assess long-term market sustainability and success, Metrigy evaluates providers on customer business success and sentiment, financials, market share, market share momentum, and product.

The market is at an inflection point where businesses are actively seeking unified UCaaS and CCaaS services. Metrigy’s MetriCast 2026 global market study of 1,437 companies finds that 41.8% of research participants are using the same vendor for UCaaS and CCaaS, although not all are doing so via an integrated platform. The top values companies have recognized in working with a single vendor solution are the ability for contact center agents to chat and collaborate seamlessly to resolve customer issues and cost savings.

Among the six criteria evaluated, as noted above, market share is the gating factor for MetriRank inclusion. The four largest UCaaS + CCaaS providers globally based on combined market shares are: RingCentral, Zoom, Cisco, and 8×8. Rounding out the 2026 list, in alphabetical order are: Content Guru, Dialpad, GoTo, Intermedia, Nextiva, and Vonage.

In this report, Metrigy measured and plotted each of the Top 10 provider’s scores into our Leadership Landscape for UCaaS + CCaaS. The landscape comprises three categories: foundation, customer, and market. The scoring results in three segments in which to view the top providers, as follows: 

“In total, there are fewer than 20 providers that offer UCaaS and CCaaS over a unified platform. With their integrated platforms, these providers offer a distinct advantage to the growing number of businesses seeking unified services compared to competitors in the larger, individual UCaaS and CCaaS markets,” said Diane Myers, senior research director and principal analyst responsible for Metrigy’s MetriRank reports as well as market share and forecasting. 

The full report, including all of our methodology, scoring indicators, standard deviations, deep-dive profiles on each provider, and much more, is available for purchase. 

If you are interested in Metrigy’s 2026 UCaaS + CCaaS MetriRank study, please reach out to [email protected]. 

Media Contact:

Elly Hertz

Sr. Director of Content Marketing and Design, Metrigy

[email protected]

Phone: 877-638-7449 · Cell: 815-735-7059

As CX leaders navigate rapid growth of technology and the need for integration, they’re evaluating where to buy services. When we asked which type of provider delivers the most value, the platform provider came out on top, chosen by 32.4% of companies, and no single channel partner type matched it. But that’s the biggest slice, not a majority. Add up the channel partner types, and partners collectively earn the value vote from 67.6% of companies.. 

Interestingly, the same three factors top the lists both for where companies see value and for why they change how they buy, according to Metrigy’s Buying Strategies for Communications Services 2026-27 study of 202 companies (including a subset of channel partners) headquartered in North America and Europe. Integration capabilities (44.4%), pricing (35.2%), and AI expertise (33.8%) are the top three reasons companies selected the provider type that delivers the most value, and the same three lead the reasons companies switched purchasing methods. 

We also asked the study’s channel partners why they represent the platform providers they do, and where those providers need to improve. On AI, partners want the same thing buyers do.

AI Expertise Is a Two-Way Street

More than half (50.7%) of companies say the rise of AI has changed their vendor-selection requirements. Of the five capabilities we asked about when selecting a communications provider, AI integration ranked highest, with 62.7% calling it vital. And AI expertise is the No. 1 reason companies changed their purchasing method, cited by 65.7% of those that made a change—well ahead of integration capabilities.

Channel partners are holding their platform providers to the same standard. In fact, 60.3% of partners say they represent those vendors because of their AI expertise, second only to technology innovation (63.8%) and nearly double the share citing profit margin. When we asked where their primary contact center provider must improve its relationship with the channel, 47.4% said AI expertise, and none of the other items reached 30%. That should get contact center platform providers’ attention. Nearly half of partners want their primary contact center provider to get better at AI, and I suspect it’s because AI is what their customers are seeking. 

Buyers, meanwhile, put AI specialists at the top of the list of partner types that will become more important to them over the next five years (53.5%), well ahead of any other type, such as managed service provider, value-added reseller, technology services distributor, systems integrator, etc. 

Integration: Everybody’s Priority, Everybody’s Job

As noted above, integration is the No. 1 reason companies value a provider type, and demand is growing. Integrating applications, platforms, and systems is the role companies most often expect to become more important over the next two years, for both platform providers and channel partners.

Who does that work varies widely. Platform providers led 28.9% of companies’ most recent communications integration, and internal IT led 24.6%. Channel partners collectively led 46.5%—though no single partner type topped 11.3%. When we asked companies who they most rely on for application integrations, internal IT and the platform provider are essentially tied. For partners, that’s an opening: They already handle nearly half the integration work, and buyers expect integration to matter more than any other partner role.

AI will only make this harder. Among the outside providers we asked about, AI application providers were most often rated most capable for AI agents, AI receptionists, AI governance, and AI analytics, while UC/CC platform vendors led for agent assist. If buyers combine AI from more than one provider, somebody must connect all of it to the contact center, the UC platform, the CRM, and the data behind each of these.

Don’t Write Off Price

With so much attention on AI, it’s easy to treat price (and pricing models) as a secondary concern. Buyers don’t, as noted above. Pricing is the No. 2 reason companies value a provider type (35.2%) and the No. 3 reason they changed how they buy (45.7%)—and for global voice services, it’s the top selection criterion, cited by 63.4%.

When buyers look ahead, though, integration outranks price negotiation. Among companies that use a channel partner, most say the partner played a major role in negotiating pricing, more than for anything except ongoing support. Looking ahead two years, less than half expect that negotiating role to become more important.

My view: Price will matter in more ways than just the bottom line. Value is key: I’ve talked to CX leaders over and over who have said they don’t care about going with a more costly service if they get more value. And with AI pricing complexity taking center stage, they want predictability so that things like seasonal bumps in AI usage don’t blow the entire budget. These are mandates for both the platform providers and channel partners. The providers that make that cost understandable, predictable, and tied to business results will have the edge.

What Companies Should Do Now

Buyers will go direct when the platform provider covers what they need, and they’ll bring in a partner when that partner adds something the platform can’t. Here’s where I’d focus:

Third-quarter 2026 results show regular AI use at 39.6%, widening adoption gaps by gender and income and broad support for AI accountability legislation

Oct. 2, 2026 — Metrigy today released third-quarter 2026 results from its AI Sentiment Index, finding U.S. adults’ views of artificial intelligence (AI) improved for a second consecutive quarter even as their expectations for AI’s effect on society slipped.

The Overall AI Sentiment Index rose to 103.0, up from 101.4 in the second quarter and the first-quarter 2026 baseline of 100. Unlike last quarter, when current sentiment drove nearly all of the gain, both both current sentiment and future expectations  advanced: The Current AI Sentiment Index reached 103.8 and the Future Expectations AI Index reached 102.2. Five of the six dimensions that make up the Overall index improved, led by expected economic impact, where net sentiment (positive responses minus negative) rose 4.0 percentage points to +20.7.

The one dimension to decline was expected impact on society’s future. Net expected societal impact fell 1.2 points to +20.0 while net expected personal impact climbed 3.2 points to +31.4, widening the gap between what Americans expect for themselves and for society from 7.0 points in the second quarter to 11.4 points.

“People are drawing a line between their own experience with AI and what they expect it to do to everyone else. Hands-on use is making Americans more confident they will personally come out ahead, but that confidence isn’t transferring to society at large. For businesses deploying AI, the harder job now is showing the public that the wider effects are being managed responsibly,” said Matt Craig, senior director of product development at Metrigy.

Adoption also accelerated. Regular AI use, defined as daily or weekly, reached 39.6% of U.S. adults, up 5.1 points from the second quarter and the largest quarterly increase since the tracker began. The share who have never used an AI tool fell to 20.6%.

The growth is uneven. At baseline, men and women were regular users at nearly the same rate, 34.3% and 31.3%. Men now stand at 51.3% while women, at 28.3%, are below their first-quarter level. The income divide is widening at the bottom: The share of adults earning under $20,000 who have never used AI rose from 33.7% in the first quarter to 46.1%, the only income band seeing a rise here. Among those earning $125,000 or more, only 5.0% have never used AI.

Americans also want accountability from AI developers. Nearly seven in 10 (68.6%) support the proposed AI Kill Switch Act, the bipartisan House bill introduced in July by Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas) that would require AI companies to report security incidents and build the technical capacity to shut down AI systems. Only 9.7% oppose it. Net support was positive in every age, gender, income, education and regional group measured, the only question in the survey where that held. Support was highest among adults ages 25 to 34, at 78.8%, the most optimistic and heaviest-using age group.

The Metrigy AI Sentiment Index reflects a survey of 1,000 demographically representative U.S. adults, balanced and weighted by age, gender, household income, region and education. Respondents rate AI’s current and expected one- to two-year impact on their personal lives, society, and the economy, and scores use a diffusion index methodology rebased to 100 at the first quarter of 2026. The full third-quarter 2026 report is available from Metrigy at metrigy.com.If you are interested in Metrigy’s CCaaS MetriRank study, please reach out to [email protected]. 

Media Contact:

Elly Hertz

Sr. Director of Content Marketing and Design, Metrigy

[email protected]

Phone: 877-638-7449 · Cell: 815-735-7059

Consumer expectations are evolving quickly, shifting from reactive problem-solving to a demand for anticipatory service. The tools to meet these expectations have never been stronger. Metrigy’s latest Consumer Experience Index research study reveals a highly positive shift in how consumers engage with AI, especially when it’s leveraged to predict their needs and empower proactive outreach.

This session from Senior Research Analyst Layne Haaksma equips senior leaders with actionable strategies to transform their customer journeys from reactive to proactive. We’ll explore how AI successfully identifies friction points before they escalate and resolves issues faster. We will also look at the “three strikes rule” of brand loyalty and discuss how AI can help intercept and prevent those strikes from ever occurring. Attendees will walk away with a deeper understanding of how consumers perceive today’s CX and what actions companies must take to deliver personalized experiences.

AI and the Art of Anticipation: Powering Proactive Customer Journeys

Presented by: Layne Haaksma, Senior Research Analyst, Metrigy

Date and Time: September 23, 2026, 11:00 AM EDT

View Replay