The enterprise UC market is growing fast, and recording is being pulled along with it. Microsoft, Cisco and Zoom remain the dominant players, and their voice user bases are expanding by around 15% a year, according to Guy Yaffe, VP of Interaction Recordings at AudioCodes, a pace that's driving parallel growth in demand for recording.
That growth was already reshaping the market before generative AI arrived. Yaffe points to the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 as the moment the picture changed again, not just for UC but across every industry now working out what's possible with the data it already holds.
Recording is becoming a commodity. This is becoming the building block for a more lucrative service, voice analytics.
Before any organisation gets to that layer, it needs recording that can actually support it. And that starts with a distinction Yaffe sees organisations get wrong constantly: the difference between recording that's convenient and recording that's compliant.
Native Teams Recording Was Never Built For This
Microsoft Teams has offered native recording for years, and for a lot of use cases, it works fine. The problem, Yaffe argues, isn't that it falls short. It's that it was never designed to do what regulated organisations now need from it.
They were designed to give us basic recording functionality, when we want it, how we want it, with full control as a user. I can delete it whenever I want, and it will expire in two or three weeks, like it never happened.
That user-controlled model, opt-in, deletable, expiring, is a long way from what a bank or insurer needs. A recording a user can switch off or erase isn't a record at all once it matters most.
What Compliance-Grade Recording Actually Requires
For regulated organisations, Yaffe says the requirement is policy-based recording: automatic, non-negotiable capture applied to specific users rather than left to individual discretion. Typically that covers 10 to 15% of the organisation, usually customer-facing roles, with the exact scope shaped by local regulation such as MiFID II in Europe.
