Enterprise Connect 2026 has revealed a significant shift in the enterprise communications and CX market.
Moving on from prioritizing AI capability to how organizations should manage these innovations, this year’s conference focused on deployment, governance, and measurable ROI, with many vendors showcasing autonomous service agents, workflow automation, and cross-platform orchestration.
Top CX announcements from last week focused heavily on contact center innovations, including Salesforce’s launch of Agentforce Contact Center as a CRM-native execution layer, NiCE’s transformation of digital channels to accelerate contact center automation, and Amazon Connect’s four contact center updates to improve how enterprises measure and manage AI performance.
However, away from the headline-grabbers were a series of significant announcements that flew under the radar. Below are five announcements you may have missed last week:
Dialpad Launches AI Testing and Governance Tools for Contact Centers
The vendor announced a set of updates to its agentic AI platform, aiming to address the “AI execution gap” by allowing enterprises to test out AI agents before rollout.
Craig Walker, CEO at Dialpad, explained that these updates are expected to close this gap for organizations before deployment.
“Enterprises aren’t struggling with AI ambition – they’re struggling with AI execution,” he said.
“Billions have been spent on agentic AI, but too many projects stall before delivering real, measurable results.
“Our latest platform advancements eliminate the guesswork, helping organisations identify the right use cases, validate ROI before launch, and deploy AI agents that are safe, governed, and ready for production from day one.”
With many companies struggling to prove ROI, determine risks, or perform sufficient operational testing, Dialpad’s updates provide enterprises with a complete lifecycle for AI agents, from identifying use cases to governance after deployment.
These additions include:
Skill Mining: This capability analyzes historical customer interactions to identify recurring customer issues, friction points, and automation opportunities, helping companies determine which tasks AI agents should automate first.
Proving Ground: This operates as a testing environment for AI agents, allowing companies to simulate real-world customer scenarios and receive reports based on expected performance and ROI, helping organizations de-risk AI deployment.
Agent Studio: Companies can utilize this capability to build AI agents without coding, providing enterprises with a conversational design interface, integrations with enterprise systems, and policy integration, allowing operations teams to design automation without relying on developers.
Guardian: A monitoring layer that supervises AI interactions in real time, ensuring data is protected, interactions are compliant with regulations, and has human agents on standby where necessary, detecting instances of harmful content, prompt injection attempts, and signs of customer friction, ensuring control and oversight.
Furthermore, Dialpad has also introduced closed-loop analytics that connect AI interactions directly to contact center metrics, allowing companies to track whether AI agents are improving service outcomes.
Together, these capabilities aim to move enterprises away from AI experimentation to real operational deployment.
8x8 Introduces JourneyIQ and RCS Messaging
As another vendor that announced its new set of updates, 8x8 has revealed its decision to expand its CX platform into a broader omnichannel and AI-driven orchestration environment.
These capabilities are designed to connect communications data, AI automation, and messaging channels.
One of the more prominent capability announcements was JourneyIQ, designed to track and analyze the complete customer journey across channels and departments.
By extracting interaction data from UCaaS, CCaaS, and CPaaS, this creates a fuller view of the customer journey, mapping each agent touchpoint such as transfers, back-office actions, and resolution steps, allowing CX teams to move from reactive to proactive journey management.
8x8 also announced its decision to focus on workflow automation across CX systems by integrating orchestration capabilities to identify opportunities to automate tasks, reduce unnecessary agent escalations, and improve routing and resolution workflows.
These capabilities connect different enterprise tools and interactions into a single operational flow, helping CX teams to coordinate customer journeys across marketing, sales, support, and back-office teams.
Furthermore, the vendor announced it was expanding messaging support for its contact center platform, introducing Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging.