In 2026, CX leaders may find themselves talking less about product labels like CCaaS and more about where value actually sits in the enterprise stack.
That is the prediction from Tim Banting, Head of Research at Techtelligence, who argues that traditional UC and CX categories are starting to describe “the packaging and not the power and the value that it offers an enterprise.”
His view is not that contact centers or collaboration suddenly stop mattering. It is that the competitive battleground is shifting.
Buyers, vendors, and regulators will increasingly care about data gravity, AI outcomes, and how well platforms integrate across front office and back office workflows.
“I think what’s happening is we’re seeing the stratification of UC and CX. These categories don’t really explain value anymore.”
1) 2026 could be the year “categories don’t really explain value anymore”
Banting believes UC and CX are “stratifying,” with the old vertical stacks breaking apart.
“Those categories really describe the packaging and not the power and the value that it offers an enterprise.”
In his framing, modern enterprise communications are distributed across layers: “infrastructure data, AI, communications and collaboration, business insights through dashboards and reports.” As these layers become more visible, labels like UCaaS, CCaaS, CPaaS, and even “voice of the customer” may feel less useful as decision shortcuts.
Why? Because many capabilities now overlap across platforms, and features replicate quickly. Banting describes “this ongoing battle between features,” where “someone releases a feature, it gets duplicated a couple of weeks later.”
In 2026, he expects differentiation to come from where vendors sit in the stack and how they capture value over time, not from who launches the next UI tweak first.
For CX teams, the practical implication is that supplier selection will increasingly be about architecture fit. Where does customer data live? What is the AI model actually reading? What is the workflow surface area across departments? These questions are likely to matter as much as routing, WFM, and channel breadth.
2) Data as the control plane, AI as the value engine, and outcomes over features
Banting argues the industry’s build order is out of date.
UC and CX “were built from the bottom up,” where telephony and contact center came first, and “analytics came much later as an overlay, AI even later still as an add-on.”
That no longer matches reality, where AI is touching every single interaction, regardless of the channel,” and data needs to “persist across journeys and not just for each product.”