16 01732 759725 CALL CENTRE AnywhereNow doubles down on AI with a new brand identity and expanded Agentic AI capability Catching the AI wave well as external service desks. And that hybrid work wave is dominated in the enterprise by Microsoft Teams. “Those two waves have got us to where we are today and will continue to propel us. Teams Phone System has probably 30 million users and the business voice endpoint market is 1.5 to 2 billion endpoints, so there’s a lot of opportunity left. “The more recent driver is the arrival of AI, which is quite an interesting disruptive force coming in two phases. First, AI Assist, which is the idea that an agent on a service desk can be helped in some way by ‘knowledge assist’ or by ‘next best action’ and things like that. We’re deploying that and are live with quite a few customers already. “The second part is Agentic AI, to provide intelligent support for agents and ultimately autonomous assistance. We have some very nice technology that allows us to deploy completely agentic CX assistance and, again, we’re seeing some uptake of that. The interesting thing is where this takes that whole customer experience management market in terms of automating away some of the drudgery. Where you have a human talking to somebody and then tapping away on a keyboard and interacting with some system, is there a way to automate some of that manual work, freeing people up to solve the more complex, more interesting problems and have more interesting jobs.” Investing in AI In the last 12 months, AnywhereNow has been strengthening its Agentic AI capabilities through a combination of M&A activity and ongoing product development. The former includes the acquisition of Deepdesk, an AI platform that enables commercial proposition and product development, alongside hybrid work and the transition from traditional communications platforms to cloud platforms. Kicking off a recent roundtable discussion with invited publications, including ManagedIT sister publication Technology Reseller, he explained the impact these trends have already had on the provider of SaaS communications for the Microsoft ecosystem, including the Dialogue Cloud contact centre solution. “AnywhereNow has been riding two waves. One is that transition from traditional communications platforms to cloud platforms. That’s the big shift that’s driven AnywhereNow from its inception and continues to drive the company today. We’ve reached the point where we are the market leader in Teams Phone System, in terms of total number of customers; none of the other players come close to us, including Microsoft actually. “Nobody knows how that ongoing shift away from the traditional voice players to hyperscaler communications, be it Microsoft Teams Phone System, Amazon Connect, Zoom, Google and others, will work out, but hyperscaler bets tend to be the ones that work out in the long run. There’s an economy of scale, there’s an efficiency, and there’s an opportunity to have more modern applications, different media channels, storage, analytics. All sorts of things open up from that. “The other big driver is obviously hybrid work. Our customers don’t just have classic contact centres, a big warehouse somewhere with rows of agents. Many have distributed workers. They might work at different times. They might work at home. They might be informal workers. They might be internal contact centres, as Fifteen years after it was established in 2010, Anywhere365, a leader in AI‑driven transformation for contact centre operations, is changing its name to AnywhereNow and adopting a new brand identity that references its AI-first strategy through typography and its Dutch heritage through use of the colour orange. Its new branding comes at a time when the call centre industry is expanding its use of AI from automated routing, transcription and sentiment analysis to Agentic AI, which uses Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) to generate content, such as call summaries, and empower virtual agents to make decisions autonomously. AnywhereNow CEO Will Blench highlights AI as the most recent of three trends driving AnywhereNow’s business strategy, Will Blench
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=