Artificial intelligence has moved well beyond the hype cycle. It’s quickly becoming the underlying operating system for CX, quietly powering conversations, routing decisions, service journeys, intent detection, and forming the connective tissue between every customer touchpoint.
While much of the industry is only just grappling with what this means, three leaders who helped shape today’s communications and CX landscape - Michael Tessler, Tomas Gorny, and Ray Nolan - have already spent years preparing for this inflection point.
Rob Scott, founder of CX Today, sat down with them on the Binary to Billions podcast to understand how AI is becoming the foundation for the next generation of customer experience.
Michael Tessler - AI Needs a Strong Communications Backbone
Michael Tessler, co-founder of BroadSoft and the architect of the modern UCaaS ecosystem, has seen every transformational shift in enterprise communications. For him, AI’s emergence is not an isolated revolution, but rather the natural evolution of a communications infrastructure that has been decades in the making.
“Voice, messaging, and meetings have reached maturity,” Tessler says in his Binary to Billions interview. “The innovation now sits in the intelligence layer on top.”
In other words, ‘UC helped us digitise the conversation. AI will help us understand it.’
Tessler’s perspective is grounded in scale. BroadSoft supported carriers serving tens of millions of seats globally. He notes that AI can only succeed when the underlying network is robust enough to handle real-time intelligence. This is where he sees the shift happening now: enterprises moving from communication delivery to experience orchestration. And increasingly, that orchestration is powered by AI models analysing context, sentiment, behaviour, and intent.
AI is the Engine of the Unified CX Platform - Tomas Gorny
While Tessler focuses on the infrastructure, Nextiva CEO Tomas Gorny focuses on the intelligence platform itself.
Gorny saw early (well before the industry did) that AI would become central to how businesses manage customer relationships. Between 2014 and 2017, his team filed patents in customer journey orchestration, NLP, machine learning, and automation. In his interview with Rob Scott, he explains why: