The recent Enterprise Connect 2026 – where a wide range of collaboration and communications vendors gather annually to discuss trends and announce new products and services – was once again dominated by AI, says GlobalData.
This, the research firm says, again demonstrates how the technology continues to play a major role across vendor platforms.
“By far, most striking this year was how widespread the reach of AI has become within organisations,” says Gregg Willsky, principal analyst, Enterprise Technology & Services at GlobalData. “AI is becoming more broadly entrenched regardless of size or industry.”
AI is becoming just as fundamental to easing interactions between contact centre agents and customers as it is to facilitating team collaboration. The technology is being adopted by frontline workers as widely as it has been by knowledge workers. Most significantly, AI is moving from use in silos to being leveraged on a far grander scale – across vendor platforms, connecting parts of organisations, and linking organisations with external partners, suppliers, and the like.
“In the contact centre, AI agents can connect human agents with back-office workers to address customer inquiries, melding what have been two very distinct spheres,” Willsky continues. “In addition to contact centre and back-office workers, knowledge workers and frontline workers are earning close attention from vendors. Knowledge workers have been the primary target for AI-driven offerings while frontline workers have recently become a priority as they are believed to vastly outnumber knowledge workers.”
By far the most consequential trend is the way that AI is serving as connective tissue, threading sections of vendor platforms such as meetings, chat, and calling; establishing links between those platforms and third-party applications used in various parts of the business such as Salesforce; and integrating platforms from different vendors making things possible such as joining a Zoom meeting with an external partner from a Cisco Webex device.
The unifying theme among these scenarios is the distribution and exchange of data related to operations, customers, suppliers, partners, and similar groups. AI bots or agents often act on that data, performing tasks and orchestrating workflows. These bots are increasingly proliferating within a given environment, often created by non-developers using low-code or no-code tools.
“The expanding reach of AI comes with a heavy price,” says Willsky. “Compliance, confidentiality, and security issues, among others, abound when platforms are intra- and inter-connected, with data flowing across boundaries and AI agents manipulating and disseminating that data.
“Vendors have made assurances regarding the integrity of their platforms, but there remains a sense that the issue has not been adequately addressed,” Willsky adds. “Vendors need to take a much deeper look.”