Enterprise Connect 2025 took place at Gaylord Palms in Orlando, Florida, this week for what turned out to be the last time.

This venue has long been the spiritual home of the event but will be confined to the past next year in favour of the Forum at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

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In truth, the event felt tired this year. The expo hall, previously filled to the corners with stands, felt sparse – with wide, empty spaces surrounding stands in the middle of the room. Some vendors were notably absent or occupying far smaller spaces than in previous years.

The general rationale for this, they told Cavell, was a lack of enterprise buyers in the room over recent years. This trend, they told us, continued into this year. An event that previously helped drive enterprise leads felt closer to an industry trade show – which suits Cavell!

Let’s hope the move to Las Vegas next year can spark a renaissance.

The mood around the venue was reflected in the relatively light news load. Yes, most vendors had press releases – but the announcements were largely restricted to incremental feature updates over full-blown product releases.

As expected, AI dominated. We’ve rounded up some of the biggest news from this year’s event.

Microsoft made a substantial showing at the conference, with CVP Ilya Bukshteyn delivering a keynote that highlighted several updates to the Teams platform focused on security, simplicity, and AI-powered features.

Perhaps the most significant Microsoft announcement is Teams Phone extensibility for contact centres, launching in public preview in April. This feature will allow organisations to extend their Teams Phone investment into contact centre solutions, starting with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Centre integration. The move addresses a long-standing customer request to unify telephony infrastructure across unified communications and contact centre environments, potentially streamlining deployment, management, and billing processes for organisations. Microsoft will also expand this functionality to certified ISV solutions leveraging Azure Communication Services, providing customers with additional options to integrate Teams Phone with their preferred contact centre applications.

Microsoft is enhancing Teams Phone with several AI capabilities. Copilot in Teams Phone will function without transcription or recording, allowing users to leverage AI during live calls without creating permanent records of sensitive conversations. Coming in April, Copilot summary for transferred calls will generate AI notes when a call is transferred, providing context about previous conversations. New supervisor capabilities in the “Queues app” will enable monitoring of agent calls, whispered guidance, call joining, and conversation takeover if necessary – particularly valuable in help desk environments.

The company is generally releasing its redesigned chat and channels experience in early 2025. This update focuses on making communication and information management more efficient with unified message management across chat, channels, and teams, along with filters for triaging messages and custom sections to organise conversations by topics. Enhanced threaded conversations will follow in mid-2025.

Teams meetings are receiving several improvements. Users can now pop out, drag, and resize meeting panes from the meeting window, allowing them to view multiple features simultaneously. Microsoft has extended intelligent meeting recaps to town halls and webinars, with features like speaker identification and AI-generated notes. Town halls can now accommodate up to 50,000 simultaneous attendees, a substantial increase from the previous 20,000 limit. Coming in April, DVR-like support for town halls will allow attendees to pause and rewind live streams, navigating to any previously streamed timestamp.

Microsoft is enhancing workplace coordination through Teams with features like Chat @nearby (coming in April) to connect with physically proximate colleagues, improved presence detection based on Wi-Fi and LAN data, and meeting room intelligence that uses sensor data to display real-time availability status and suggest alternative meeting locations.

On the security front, Microsoft continues to add features, including external verification via time-limited passcodes, CAPTCHA tests for meeting joiners, and improved tools for sensitive information protection. Mobile and device updates include SMS for Teams Calling Plans in the US and Canada, general availability of Teams Phone Mobile with operators including Bell Canada, Odido, Vodafone UK, and Vodafone Germany, and line key enhancements for Teams-certified phone devices.

Zoom made an announcement around agentic AI capabilities for its AI Companion, along with over 45 new innovations across its platform. During her keynote, Chief Product Officer Smita Hashim emphasized the evolution of AI Companion “from a personal assistant to being truly agentic.”

The enhanced AI Companion features four key capabilities. Its reasoning ability allows it to analyze situations, make decisions based on rules, and determine priorities. Memory functionality enables it to learn from interaction history to match topics to people. Task Action capabilities mean it can execute tasks by sending messages or tracking documents with appropriate context. Finally, orchestration features allow it to manage AI skills and platforms, similar to how a manager delegates work. Hashim demonstrated these capabilities through real-world scenarios, showing how AI Companion can help users manage their day, handle follow-up actions, and work proactively with team members.

A new Custom AI Companion add-on, available in April for $12 per user per month, will offer custom meeting templates and dictionaries with vocabulary specific to each business, information incorporation from proprietary data sources and compatible third-party applications, a digital personal AI coach, and custom avatars for Zoom Clips. Zoom’s implementation uses a federated approach to AI that incorporates Small Language Models alongside third-party LLMs for optimized performance and cost-effectiveness.

Zoom unveiled several new features designed to boost productivity. Zoom Tasks with AI Companion, available end of March, will automatically detect and manage action items in meetings, chats, and emails. Meeting agendas with templates, timers, and AI-generated live notes are coming in May, as are live notes for Meetings and Phone providing real-time summaries. AI Companion for Zoom Phone will generate voicemail summaries and support the Zoom for Microsoft Teams app. A voice recorder for the Zoom Workplace mobile app, coming late March, will transcribe in-person conversations, summarize content, and capture action items.

Zoom Docs is receiving AI-powered enhancements. Advanced references and queries for creating writing plans and aggregating information are coming in June, while automatic creation of data tables from meeting summaries will follow in July. Zoom Drive, a central repository for meeting and productivity assets, is set to arrive in May.

For contact centres, Zoom is bringing agentic skills to its solutions with specialised AI agents that can handle complex, multi-part customer requests, take action on behalf of customers such as processing ticket changes, provide conversations across multiple channels, and continuously learn and improve from interactions. Additional contact centre improvements include AI-intent routing available end of March and Advanced Quality Management with automatic interaction scoring coming in May.

Zoom has also announced several industry-specific offerings: Zoom Workplace for Frontline workers coming in April, Zoom Workplace for Clinicians to streamline workflows and generate clinical notes coming end of March, and Zoom Workplace for Education with AI-generated lecture summaries coming in May. An expanded hardware certification program for education and healthcare will begin in April.

Mitel announced the general availability of Mitel CX, a comprehensive AI-powered customer experience management platform that adds to Mitel’s unified communications, collaboration, and contact centre portfolio.

Their CX features a hybrid architecture allowing deployment as a hosted solution, on-premise, or as a Contact-Centre-as-a-Service (CCaaS). This flexibility addresses findings from a recent Techaisle study that identified improving customer engagement as the top driver for enterprises modernising their communication platforms. The hybrid approach enables organisations to maintain control over security, ensure resiliency, and meet compliance requirements while still benefiting from AI-assisted experiences.

The platform integrates several advanced features. CX managers can design AI-enhanced workflows through Mitel’s Chatbot Builder and low-code/no-code Workflow Studio without specialized skills. GenAI virtual agents are capable of resolving up to 90% of customer inquiries autonomously. Agents receive real-time prompts, suggested responses, and intelligence-based coaching, while managers gain access to AI-enhanced insights to improve customer satisfaction and agent performance. The system supports seamless transitions across voice, chat, video, and social channels, and offers pre-built integrations with industry and business applications plus open APIs.

The platform extends customer engagement capabilities throughout the organisation, from frontline workers to back-office and IT teams, aiming to deliver personalised experiences while automating workflows and enabling team collaboration. This approach aligns with the broader industry trend of breaking down silos between contact centres and the rest of the organisation.

AudioCodes announced enhancements to its Meeting Insights solution, focusing on CRM integration and improved support for face-to-face interactions.

The most notable enhancement is the integration with leading CRM systems, beginning with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365. This integration addresses a common challenge for organisations: efficiently capturing and utilising customer interaction data across various communication channels. Direct updating of CRM records from Meeting Insights, automatic synchronisation of meeting data with corresponding CRM accounts, and support for meetings held on major UCaaS platforms as well as imported recordings are all part of the package. AI-powered analysis ensures CRM updates reflect actual meeting content rather than relying solely on manual notes.

A new mobile application for iOS and Android extends Meeting Insights beyond online meetings to face-to-face interactions. Users can record and summarise face-to-face meetings without UCaaS connectivity and upload video and audio recordings directly from their mobile devices, all with enterprise-grade security to ensure compliance and data integrity. The Salesforce CRM integration and mobile app will be generally available at the beginning of Q2 2025, with solutions currently available to selected customers.

AWS made several significant announcements, including the launch of the next-generation Amazon Connect.

The headline announcement is Amazon Connect, a comprehensive CCaaS solution with native AI capabilities across all channels—voice, chat, email, and tasks—with a simplified pricing model. Unlike solutions that rely on third-party AI integrations, Amazon Connect features first-party AI that’s built, owned, and directly integrated by AWS. The platform offers end-customer self-service with AI-powered experiences in over 25 languages, agent assistance through Amazon Q that detects customer issues and provides responses, screen recording for monitoring agent performance, conversational analytics to search transcripts and analyse sentiment, automated summaries of customer conversations, and tools to predict and allocate the right number of agents at the right time. Amazon notes that these capabilities are offered with unlimited use, allowing organisations to implement AI-enhanced customer experiences without usage-based cost constraints.

Building on its partnership with Salesforce, AWS announced the general availability of Salesforce Contact Centre with Amazon Connect. This integration provides a unified routing and workflow system across Amazon Connect and Salesforce channels, intelligently directing calls, chats, and cases to appropriate resources, eliminating siloed applications that force agents to switch between tools, and enhancing visibility into customer data and interaction history. The solution builds upon Service Cloud Voice with Amazon Connect, which has been adopted by over 1,000 customers and is used by more than 100,000 contact centre agents.

A new global integration allows Amazon Connect to leverage any commercial AWS region, significantly expanding its worldwide coverage. This integration offers access to phone numbers from top-tier carriers globally, optimized call routing for improved quality and reduced latency, and seamless worldwide operation from a single Amazon Connect instance. The solution includes a call routing optimizer that directs calls through the nearest AWS region, improving connection quality.

AWS also announced Amazon Connect on ChromeOS and new UI Pages for Q in Connect AI Agents, providing intuitive configuration tools for supervisors.

Several key trends are apparent from the announcements made at the conference.

AI is evolving from assistive to agentic across vendor platforms. Companies including Microsoft, Zoom, and Amazon are moving beyond AI assistants that simply respond to queries toward AI that can actively execute tasks and make decisions. This represents a significant evolution in how AI capabilities are being integrated into workplace tools.

The industry is breaking down traditional communication silos. Microsoft’s Teams Phone extensibility for contact centres, Mitel’s unified approach to customer experience, and Amazon’s integration of Connect with Salesforce CRM reflect a broader trend of eliminating barriers between previously separate systems.

Deployment flexibility has become essential, as demonstrated by Mitel’s hybrid architecture for CX deployment. This shows recognition that organisations have varying needs regarding cloud, on-premises, and hybrid deployments, particularly for customer experience solutions.

Business system integration is taking centres stage, with AudioCodes’ integration of Meeting Insights with CRM systems and Amazon’s native integration of Connect with Salesforce highlighting the growing importance of ensuring communications data flows seamlessly into core business systems.

Vendors are extending beyond traditional work environments. The introduction of mobile applications by AudioCodes and specialized solutions for frontline workers by Zoom indicates that communications tools must serve various work contexts beyond traditional desk-based environments.

AI-powered analytics have become standard, with all vendors emphasizing the use of AI to generate insights from communications data, whether through meeting recaps, conversation analytics, or performance evaluations.

Customer experience has emerged as a key competitive focus. The emphasis on contact centre enhancements by Microsoft, Mitel, and Amazon demonstrates that customer experience capabilities have become a central battlefield in the enterprise communications market.

Market segmentation with tailored solutions is increasing, as companies recognise that different market segments have unique needs, with solutions designed specifically for enterprises, SMBs, and vertical industries.

Knowledge management is undergoing transformation, with growing focus on using AI to automate and enhance knowledge management processes, turning unstructured conversation data into structured, actionable information.

Hardware-software integration continues to advance, as companies innovate in combining hardware and software to create more immersive and flexible collaboration experiences.

As Enterprise Connect 2025 continues, additional announcements from other industry players will likely build on these emerging trends while introducing differentiated approaches to address evolving customer requirements.