Enterprise Connect 2022: ushering in a new type of interaction management platform?

After 3 years, Enterprise Connect could resume in person at Orlando last week. The energy was palpable at the show, with everyone so happy to attend physically. Google and UJET made the headlines. Google announced its CCAI Platform, a combined Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) and Conversational AI solution built on an OEM of UJET CCaaS. Simultaneously, UJET won the Best of Enterprise Connect 2022 Overall Award.

One after the other, the large cloud infrastructure and AI providers are getting into the contact center space. Amazon Web Services was the first to move in 2017. Last year, Microsoft introduced Dynamics 365 Customer Voice. Now, Google is joining the fray with its newly minted CCAI Platform. It has shared little detail, though. I am guessing it is part of an effort to remain balanced across its other partnerships. Indeed, many CCaaS vendors have built their AI solutions and practices around Google CCAI.

3 years ago, I wrote an article discussing the blossoming of options for sourcing contact center technologies (Who Will Your Next Contact Center Provider Be). I then listed 6:

1. Purpose-built CCaaS;
2. Contact center built-in Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) that companies such as 8x8, Dialpad, and RingCentral develop aggressively;
3. Contact center built-in CRM with Salesforce joining last year the early entrants Freshworks, Zendesk, and Zoho;
4. Digital Customer Service from the likes of Glia, Liveperson, or Sprinklr;
5. Low/No-Code Platforms with packaged contact center capabilities offered by Appian, Pegasystems, or ServiceNow; and
6. Contact center components from Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) vendors such as MessageBird, Twilio, or Sinch.

Google CCAI Platform announcement signals the emergence of a 7th option combining CCaaS and Conversational AI in one platform. This is not the first such announcement. Last September, Kore.ai introduced SmartAssist, a contact center built on top of its no-code conversational AI platform. And, of course, a key benefit of Amazon Connect, launched five years ago, is to offer contact center and AI capabilities as a set of cloud services that can be easily combined.

Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant for Conversational AI platforms is showing a rapidly evolving market shaping up around low/no-code platforms for managing the conversation flows. These platforms are starting to overlap with the tools CCaaS providers offer to manage interaction self-service and routing.?

Today’s integration model between CCaaS and Conversational AI is built on interactions being redirected from CCaaS to a conversational AI platform where they can be self-served or returned to the CCaaS platform to be distributed to agents. These conversation logics can get pretty sophisticated and having to handle two makes things harder to manage and maintain. Furthermore, the underlying queuing paradigm is becoming less relevant with AI.

Google CCAI Platform announcement goes beyond Google's entrance into the contact center market and marks the dawn of a new type of interaction management platform with, at its core, AI and a unified orchestration logic.?

What do you think?