“AI has just joined the meeting.”
That message is coming to a screen near you, and sooner than you think. But before you start worrying about AI agents eavesdropping on your conversations, consider the benefits of having an AI agent parse and summarize your meetings. Imagine that you miss the first thirty minutes of a meeting because of a scheduling conflict. An AI agent can now summarize the meeting for you, bring you up to speed, and even suggest questions that are relevant to your job to bring you into the conversation.
According to Paul Binder, Manager of Channel Partner Services at Connection and an avowed XaaS (Anything as a Service) expert, the preceding illustration is exactly the sort of beneficial effect that AI has on Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). In a recent webinar entitled Navigating the UCaaS Landscape, Binder, Terry Corder (Vice President of Product Management and Strategy, Fusion Connect), and Leon Wright (Senior Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft Teams) examined how organizations will derive more value from UCaaS in the near future by leveraging AI technologies in their voice, video, and text communications.
Making a Good Thing Better
Even before the advent of AI, the case for UCaaS was a compelling one: lower costs, enhanced features, better integration across the communications stack, etc. AI builds on the benefits of UCaaS by helping to turn voice, video, and text information into actionable data that can be queried in real time or used to facilitate real-time conversations with AI agents. As Leon Wright sees it, AI’s real superpower lies in its ability to empower frontline workers with better decisioning tools.
It’s a perspective shared by Paul Binder, who noted that knowledge workers are already using AI tools like Microsoft Copilot to provide call summaries and act as an intelligent assistant that remembers who said what. So, knowledge workers can join a call today and, using Copilot, not only ask it to recommend relevant questions but also indicate who on the call is the right person to ask. It’s these sorts of UCaaS use cases that highlight how AI can enhance, rather than replace, human workers—particularly when you consider that the majority of people still prefer to talk to human beings and will for the foreseeable future.
Unify Costs and Enhance Security
Despite the rapid evolution and broad potential of AI technology, the move to UCaaS is still driven primarily by the desire to reduce costs and complexity in the communications stack. Terry Corder cited the example of one customer, a credit union, that had been using traditional copper lines and legacy applications to connect more than two dozen branch locations. By moving to a UCaaS solution on an SD-WAN architecture, the credit union was able to improve security (through network encryption), customize their communications features for each employee based on their roles, and move from high, unpredictable bills to a lower, predictable monthly cost. Not only did the back-office workers benefit from these changes, but so did the frontline workers—in the case, the credit union’s tellers.
UCaaS is about more than unified communications. It unifies costs, security and feature updates, and the company by giving everyone access to the same communications tools whether they’re in the office or working from home. All this unification naturally leads to higher employee productivity, as employees no longer have to spend hours each week toggling between different applications to attend videoconferences, call colleagues, send instant messages, and manage emails.
Mitigating Risk When Moving to UCaaS
Despite the rising popularity of UCaaS platforms, the move to UCaaS isn’t without its share of risk. Any time you’re dealing with mission-critical services such as telephony and email, a seamless move is crucial. For Paul Binder, Terry Corder, and Leon Wright, the adoption of UCaaS is a journey—one that depends on a clear and proven roadmap. In their experience, there are several potholes that organizations should watch out for when moving to a UCaaS platform:
- Mind your gaps. Assess your current communications gaps, including features that you’ll want in the future, and ensure that your UCaaS solution addresses those gaps.
- Detail your dependencies. Understand which tools and technologies will impact UCaaS, including integration points with Microsoft Teams and other critical applications.
- Calculate the cost upfront. The UCaaS solution itself is only part of the total cost. Transformation services (including potential downtime) and ongoing management should also be factored into the total cost of ownership.
- Expect delays. It will take time for some steps to complete, such as porting numbers from one service provider to another, so make sure you include that extra time in your transformation plans.
- Never on a Monday (or a Friday). Don’t plan moves on a Monday, because it’s the busiest day of the week, or on a Friday, since if something goes wrong you may not have the same level of technical support over the weekend.
Choosing the Right Partner(s) Is Key
Choosing the right partner—or partners—is critical to a successful transformation. Ideally, businesses will choose partners that work well together. For example, Connection, Fusion Connect, and Microsoft each bring their own unique expertise to UCaaS: Fusion Connect has the telephony and networking knowledge, Microsoft brings industry-leading communications and AI solutions to the table, and Connection is skilled in selecting, pricing, implementing, and managing UCaaS solutions for businesses of any size or industry.
Once a UCaaS solution is in place, businesses can then begin to overlay AI services on top of that solution. Here again, an experienced partner is important to help with things like tagging files for AI, setting security and access policies, integrating AI with existing CRM and call center applications, and creating test pilots for AI capabilities to measure their potential impact. Unification is really just the beginning. With AI layered on top, UCaaS has the potential to completely transform the user experience and the customer experience in any organization.
To learn more about UCaaS and AI, talk to your Connection representative or visit us online.
