It’s been busy in the vendor M&A space in the past few months. Below are some that have stood out to me in no particular order. All are AI focused around specific use cases or customer types.

It is especially interesting to see the vendors acquiring the capabilities instead of building themselves. With a whole new set of AI first companies emerging, the success for many will be through acquisition instead of as a standalone product.

Zoom x BrightHire

Zoom’s acquisition of BrightHire brings interview intelligence directly into the Zoom workplace experience. BrightHire helps companies plan and execute interviews, raise decision making, and drive continuous improvement to the process. By embedding AI-powered interview intelligence into a core collaboration environment, Zoom adds highly relevant, specific use case functionality that expands its value within recruitment workflows – really interesting capabilities.

Zoom x Bonsai

Another strategic addition to Zoom’s portfolio is Bonsai, a business and CX management platform tailored to small and SOHO businesses. This segment sits outside the traditional Zoom Contact Center market, making the acquisition a way to serve a different (and often underserved) customer base. Bonsai strengthens Zoom’s offerings for small businesses that need accessible and sophisticated tools to run and grow their operations.

Cisco x EzDubs

Cisco’s acquisition of EzDubs brings speech-to-speech translation across 31 languages, with sentiment analysis. The solution has clear use cases across Cisco’s UCaaS and CCaaS portfolio, offering meaningful value for end users – particularly multinational organizations or businesses operating across multiple regions. It’s a powerful enhancement to real-time communication and collaboration.

RingCentral x CommunityWFM

RingCentral’s move to acquire CommunityWFM brings an AI-first contact center workforce management software solution, streamlining contact center operations and improving agent experience. Bringing WFM into the CCaaS portfolio and not having it as a standalone solution will improve the agent experience as well as allow buyers to buy an integrated solution from one vendor.

UJET x Spiral

UJET’s acquisition of Spiral strengthens its AI capabilities across interaction intelligence and customer feedback. These enhancements will be added to UJET’s CCaaS platform, while also being offered as a standalone service. The dual approach could allow UJET to position Spiral’s technology as an entry point into different competitive solutions, potentially serving as a ‘trojan horse’ for broader platform adoption.

NiCE x Cognigy

This all follows on from the acquisition of Cognigy by NiCE back in July 2025 – you can read more about that here, where my colleague Finbarr Begley gave his initial thoughts back then.

He said:

It has become clear that this was a technology-focused investment. NiCE’s messaging has continued to highlight the technology they wanted to buy: specifically, agentic and strength in conversational automation. NiCE likely sees this as the missing layer to fully automate resolution paths—moving beyond agent assist and analytics into end-to-end task execution. This could also open up new plays in sales and marketing automation.

A Market Shaped by AI-First Innovation

Across all these moves, the trend is unmistakable: AI is now a core differentiator, rather than just a bolt-on feature. Vendors are racing to deliver specialized, high-impact capabilities quickly, and acquisitions offer the fastest route.

As AI-native companies continue to emerge, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect more major platforms to acquire the technologies that help them deliver immediate value to targeted customer segments.

The past few months may just be the beginning of a much larger wave.