CF20: 2024's 20 Top UCaaS, CCaaS Providers Making the Most of AI

AI is now a must for all UCaaS and CCaaS providers to stay relevant in today’s competitive landscape.

Many use cases for AI are in the market now, such as speech to text, real-time transcription, real-time translation, smart framing for video and more. And new uses are hitting the market at a record pace.

Our latest CF20 focuses on vendors doing business in the channel that are making the most of AI in UCaaS and CCaaS. It includes a new list of UCaaS and CCaaS providers, and fresh views on changes in the competitive landscape.

The global AI market is anticipated to grow from $214.6 billion in 2024 to over $1.3 trillion by 2030, according to MarketsandMarkets. Widespread adoption of self-governing AI systems, coupled with the emergence of AI and deep learning technologies changing the landscape, stands out as significant contributors to this growth. Additionally, improvements in processing power and data accessibility will drive growth.

UCaaS and CCaaS Providers ‘Stole the Spotlight’ with AI

Raul Castanon, unified communications and collaboration (UCC) analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence, said the use of AI in UCaaS and CCaaS “stole the spotlight” in 2024.

S&P Global Market Intelligence's Raul Castanon

“The market hype triggered by generative AI was the result of significant innovation,” he said. “However, its use in UCaaS and CCaaS is for the most part a continuation that builds on previous innovations.”

Related:Vultr, AMD, Broadcom, Juniper Team for ‘AI Innovation’

The availability of generative AI technology have made latest capabilities table stakes, making it a “must have” for UCaaS and CCaaS vendors, Castanon said.

“This makes it challenging for vendors to differentiate solely based on AI capabilities,” he said. “Rather, differentiation has shifted to leveraging AI to deliver measurable results. Vendors with an outcome-based approach that are able to deliver a clear ROI on a company’s AI investment will have a competitive advantage. This reflects an evolution in the market from discovery and experimentation to results-focused deployments.”

The Rise of Agentic AI

Jon Arnold, principal of J Arnold & Associates, said agentic AI is going to be one of the big AI trends in 2025. Agentic AI systems are built to proactively analyze, recommend and even take actions on behalf of users.

J Arnold & Associates' Jon Arnold

“What's new is the AI has gone far enough along now that it's able to manage processes or transactions end to end now without human supervision,” he said. “Sometimes a bot will take a call and then it hands it off to an agent because it can't take it any further. Well, there are processes that they're pushing to say, 'No, this AI agent as opposed to a human agent is getting more and more on par with the skills of a human agent, so you can trust this AI bot to handle a whole process and just move things along.' That’s a huge breakthrough for AI in the sense that you can trust it to handle things. In other words, it’s self-learning and independent of what the agent is doing.”

Related:Microsoft Ignite 2024 Overflowing with AI News

More tasks can be pushed away from your workload for AI agents to handle, Arnold said.

“It's not intentionally about contact center agents,” he said. “It's rather a personal agent that does your bidding for you. In other words, it's not just for contact centers, but in the UCaaS space it will be the same thing. It will automate workflows in a collaboration environment, so it might automate the whole end to end of, 'OK, book a meeting next Thursday at 3 p.m. for the team,' and it will know enough to access all the calendars of everybody, find the right time, send out the invites, send out the reminders, prepare materials in advance to be ready for the meeting and all the steps. It's all about automating processes. That's kind of the big driver for this stuff.”

Next Wave of AI Improvements

William McKeon-White, senior analyst of infrastructure and operations at Forrester, said the best AI is focused on improving communications. Taking on tasks like real-time translation, transcription and AI note-taking are the most prominent.

Related:Accenture, Microsoft Team Up to Help Businesses Use Copilot More

“The next wave of improvements are focused at compressing the amount of reading users need to accomplish as well,” he said. “Functions like meetings summarization, catch-me-up capabilities for chat rooms and similar. With agents on the horizon, the next step is connecting language to action, and sufficiently anticipating user needs.”

CCaaS is a bit of a different story, where all the same applications remain true, but with an increased focus on automation and call deflection, McKeon-White said.

“Virtual agents have done this for years, but we anticipate them becoming more flexible in their language understanding and action taking,” he said. The first large language model (LLM)-powered systems are already online, but the results are mixed. There have been some very public successes, as well as failures. There are other neat enhancements like better analysis of transcripts that allows you to have a better understanding of contact center performance and identify opportunities for improvement.”

Not everyone needs to be an "AI-first" provider, but features like automated note-taking and translation are extremely handy, and platforms without them will be at a loss, McKeon-White said. The only exception to this is in the secured communications realm.

Based on feedback from analysts and recent news reports, we’ve compiled a list, in no particular order, of 20 UCaaS and CCaaS providers that are incorporating AI into their offerings. This is by no means a complete list. Our list above offers a mix of well-known providers as well as lesser-known companies that are making big strides in AI.