AI in UCaaS: Transforming Business Communication and Efficiency

UCaaS continues to evolve.  Beyond offering PBX type call control, and desktop and mobile clients, we are seeing more and more call center and contact center type services become part of the UCaaS offering.   This evolution of bringing the departmental call center services into the core UCaaS offering is driven by the need to bring better customer service to the enterprise.  And this is also driving more and more 3rd party integrations with CRMs and other back-office software.    

And this is even driving integrations with other mobile and desktop clients that are not from the UCaaS vendor – i.e. integration with Microsoft Teams.  This is especially prevalent in organizations that have a central home office and many other small locations that tie into the central HQ office.  For instance, retail chains, hospitality, financial services, and even government agencies might all have Microsoft Teams in the HQ home office, but a UCaaS system in the smaller locations because the smaller locations need to provide a higher quality voice service because they are dealing with the outside consumer who is calling in to made an order, schedule an appointment, or talk to a support person.  

In other words, these locations need a voice centric UCaaS system as opposed to a collaboration-centric or video-centric UCaaS system.  The voice services need to be advanced and they need to work. 

At the core of UCaaS is “Unified Communications”.  As the definition of communications keeps expanding over time because of technical advancements, UCaaS needs to fold that in.  For instance 10 years ago UCaaS needed to integrate with fax and email.  A few years ago, video became a normal type of business communication. And so all UCaaS services now have evolved to handle video. 

What is the next frontier for UCaaS?  It is Artificial Intelligence, which can mean many things depending on what marketing organization you talk to.   But it certainly means the ability look at data, and make some decisions so you don’t have to.  And many of the UCaaS AI integrations will take place in the aforementioned clients.  For instance, perhaps the most popular AI integration now revolves around a conference call.  Yesterday, you needed to take hand-written notes and send out a meeting summary. Today, you can tell the AI-enabled client to summarize the meeting in a 1 page, 2 page, or whatever size document you want.