It’s a fascinating concept. The idea isn’t to replace the human on the phone but to give them a teammate that actually does things.

Before we get into the details, if you are trying to keep track of everything happening this week, you can find our full AWS re:Invent 2025 Event Guide here and our full re:Invent hub of news here.

The headline news centers on ‘Agentic AI’—a term you are likely familiar with by now. Amazon Connect is rolling out 29 new capabilities designed to show it’s more than just a buzzword. Unlike the rather rigid chatbots that would get confused if you phrased a question the wrong way, these agents can reason, look up accounts, and process requests. The goal is to handle the drudgery, the notes, the summaries, the form-filling, so the human agent can focus on being, well, human.

“We’re now entering an era of agentic AI in Connect.” — Pasquale DeMaio

Here is what that actually looks like for the people doing the work.

Agents Get Instant Access to Enterprise Knowledge

There is nothing worse than being on the phone and not knowing the answer. It’s awkward for everyone.

To fix this, Amazon Connect is connecting its AI agents directly to enterprise knowledge bases via Amazon Bedrock. It means the AI can pull accurate answers instantly during a conversation.

They have also added support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It sounds technical, but it essentially means the AI can talk to other systems—like inventory databases or order management platforms—without a fuss. And for those already invested in the ecosystem, these AI features now extend seamlessly into the Salesforce Contact Center.

Amazon Connect Just Made Proactive Outreach Easier for Service Teams

Ideally, you fix the problem before the customer has to call you.

The new “Journeys” feature allows businesses to design multi-step experiences that adapt based on what the customer does. Combined with new predictive insights, the system can spot churn risks or purchasing interests and suggest reaching out proactively.

They have also added WhatsApp support for outbound campaigns. Given how much of the world lives on that app, it feels like a necessary addition.

Amazon Connect Delivers Complete Visibility for Teams Trusting Autonomous AI

Handing control over to an AI can feel a bit risky. To calm those nerves, Amazon Connect has introduced “enhanced observability.”

You can now see exactly why the AI made a decision, what tools it used, and how it got there. It provides a level of transparency that has been missing. They have also added tools to simulate thousands of interactions, so you can test how the AI behaves before you let it loose on real customers.

Global Brands Get Genuinely Human Voice Interactions

Robotic voices are usually a bit odd. They kill the mood.

Amazon Connect is launching “Nova Sonic” voices. These are designed to sound genuinely human, with the ability to handle interruptions gracefully and understand different accents.

If you prefer other flavors, they have also opened the platform to third-party speech tools like ElevenLabs and Deepgram. It gives businesses a choice, which is always nice.

• Read Amazon Nova Sonic: The End of the “Robot Pause” in CX?

Amazon Connect Removes Analytics Headaches for Managers with Natural Language Queries

If you have ever stared at a complex dashboard wondering why call volumes are spiking, this might appeal to you.

Amazon Connect is introducing an AI assistant for managers that lets you ask questions in plain English. You can simply ask, “Which agents need coaching on product knowledge?” or “What is causing the spike in call volume today?”

The AI digs through the data and gives you an answer. It removes the friction of needing to be a data scientist just to run a contact center, which seems like a rather sensible move.

What’s Next?

I began to wonder if we are moving toward a world where the “superhuman” agent is the standard, not the exception. It is a lot to digest.

We will be digging into this all week. Stay tuned for exclusive video interviews and a few more scoops from the event floor here on CX Today.

At AWS re:Invent 2025, the team introduced Amazon Nova Sonic, and it feels like they might have finally bridged that gap. It’s a new speech-to-speech foundation model designed specifically to make conversational AI feel, well, conversational.

Rather than just transcribing what you say and reading back a script, it listens, understands, and responds in real-time—much like a person would. It’s rather impressive, if a bit eerie at first.

The “Under the Hood” Bit

To understand why this is different, you have to look at how we used to build voice bots. The old way was a bit of a relay race: your voice was turned into text, sent to an LLM, processed, turned back into text, and then synthesized into speech. That relay race created lag.

Amazon Nova Sonic uses a unified speech-to-speech architecture. It processes audio input and generates audio output directly. Because it doesn’t have to constantly translate speech into text and back again, it cuts out the latency. It uses a bidirectional streaming API, which is a fancy way of saying it can listen and talk at the same time—just like a telephone call.

The “Vibe Check”: Why Audio-First Matters

There is a subtle but critical technical shift here. By moving to a native speech-to-speech model, we aren’t just stripping out latency; we are keeping the “data” that usually gets lost in translation.

In the old “Speech-to-Text” method, if a customer sighed heavily or sounded sarcastic, that emotional data was often stripped away when it was converted to plain text for the LLM. The bot read the words, but missed the mood.

Nova Sonic processes the audio directly. It hears the sigh. It detects the hesitation. It allows the AI to respond to the mood of the conversation, not just the transcript. In the contact center, that is the difference between solving a problem and losing a customer.

Where this actually changes the game (Use Cases)

It’s easy to get lost in the specs, but the real question is: where does this actually fix a broken experience? I’ve been looking at a few scenarios where that ultra-low latency is non-negotiable.

1. The “Panic” Call (Banking & Insurance)

When a customer calls because they’ve lost their credit card or had a car accident, they are already stressed. The old three-second “robot pause” between sentences spikes that anxiety. It feels like the machine is failing.

Nova Sonic’s ability to match the customer’s pace and tone—calm, efficient, and immediate—can de-escalate a situation before a human agent even needs to intervene. It’s not just about efficiency; it’s about digital bedside manner.

2. The “Messy” Booking (Travel & Hospitality)

Have you ever tried to change a flight with a voice bot? It’s usually a disaster because humans don’t speak in linear commands. We say things like, “I need to fly to London on Tuesday… actually, make that Wednesday morning, oh, and I need an aisle seat.”

Because Nova Sonic handles “barge-ins” (interruptions), the customer can correct themselves mid-sentence without breaking the bot’s logic. It mimics the fluid, messy nature of real human planning.

3. The Patient Tutor (Education & Training)

AWS highlighted Education First as an early adopter, and it makes perfect sense. In language learning, “latency” kills the flow. If you’re practicing French pronunciation, you need instant feedback, not a delayed grade.

The model’s ability to detect non-verbal cues—like a hesitant pause before a word—allows it to offer encouragement (“Take your time”) rather than just staring blankly into the digital void.

For the Builders: Getting Started is Surprisingly Simple

For the developers and architects reading this, you might expect a nightmare of integration. Usually, stitching together speech recognition, an LLM, and text-to-speech engines is a fragile “Frankenstein’s monster” of plumbing.

AWS has simplified this rather elegantly. Because it’s all one model, you don’t need to manage the hand-offs. You simply toggle access in the Amazon Bedrock console and use their new bidirectional streaming API. It handles the input and output streams for you, much like a standard phone connection.

The most refreshing part? Defining the bot’s personality doesn’t require complex code. You just set a system prompt—something as simple as “You are a friend, keep responses short”—and the model handles the nuance. It lowers the barrier to entry from “PhD in Linguistics” to “Standard Developer,” which is exactly what the industry needs to scale this tech.

Why this matters for CX Leaders

We often talk about “empathy” in CX, but it’s hard to be empathetic when there’s a delay after every sentence. Amazon Nova Sonic removes the friction that makes automated service feel like a chore.

It allows brands to build agents that can handle complex, multi-turn conversations without making the customer want to hang up. And in an industry obsessed with efficiency, making the robot sound a little less like a robot might be the most efficient move of all.

Sources: Amazon Nova Sonic, AWS News Blog

• Just posted: Amazon Connect Delivers “Superhuman” Powers for Frontline Teams
• Explainer: Amazon Nova Sonic: The End of the “Robot Pause” in CX?

Why This Year Is Different

Forget everything you know about chatbots and IVRs. Agentic AI represents autonomous agents that reason, make decisions, and take action independently—while seamlessly collaborating with human agents. The proof? Companies like Zepz are deflecting 30% of contacts while processing $16 billion in transactions. TUI Group migrated 10,000 agents across 12 European markets and cut operating costs by 10%. UC San Diego Health integrated Epic EHR for self-service patient authentication. These are full production deployments, and they are already delivering measurable ROI.

“We’re in that ‘teach a person to fish’ mode, so you’re empowered to not just get some near-term benefit and then get left behind.” – Pasquale DeMaio

The Stakes: Early adopters are gaining significant competitive advantages. By the time you read about their success in case studies, they’ll be two years ahead. Re:Invent 2025 is your chance to close that gap.

Your Three-Track Amazon Connect Focused Strategy

Here are our recommended sessions across the five-day event, one things for sure, you need a plan. Choose your track:

Track 1 – Breakout Sessions led by Amazon Connect Customers and AWS Experts

Other sessions:

• BIZ211 | So Energy streamlines customer service with AI-powered automation
• BIZ212 | Anthology boosts contact center efficiency with AI
• BIZ213 | Petco unlocks agentic AI-powered customer service with Amazon Connect
• BIZ214 | Traeger accelerates contact center agent productivity with agentic AI
• BIZ215 | Cochlear enhances contact center observability with Amazon Connect
• BIZ216 | Redefining service excellence: Canada Life’s AI-powered contact center
• BIZ217 | Global tourism brand transforms customer service with Amazon Connect
• BIZ218 | UC San Diego Health modernizes patient engagement with Amazon Connect
• BIZ219 | Personalize Customer Experiences at scale with AI-powered Amazon Connect
• BIZ220 | Transforming contact centers in financial services with Amazon Connect

Outcome: Business case validation, ROI metrics, peer testimonials, strategic roadmap.

Track 2 – Business applications technical sessions Led by Amazon Connect Experts

Must-attend sessions include:

• BIZ302 | Create advanced self-service experiences with Amazon Connect
• BIZ308 | Modernize your contact center agent workspace with Amazon Connect
• BIZ310 | Optimize contact center staffing using AI-powered assistants
• BIZ311 | Optimize customer conversations in your IVR with Amazon Connect
• BIZ316 | Streamline Amazon Connect management with agentic AI-powered controls
• BIZ318 | Transform data into insights with AI-powered Amazon Connect
• BIZ320 | Unlock intelligent generative AI-powered email with Amazon Connect

Outcome: Production-ready skills, architectural patterns, implementation blueprints.

Track 3 – CX Leaders Take Note: Three Keynotes You Cannot Miss

Your Day-by-Day Navigation Plan

Monday

Arrive early, get your badge, attend foundational sessions.

PQ sessions:

• Biz 221 | Agentic AI advancements in customer experience with Amazon Connect 10:00-11:00am, Las Vegas | Wynn | Latour 2
• INV203 | Innovation Talk | The agent-enabled workplace: Transforming businesses 12:00pm-1:00pm Venetian | Level 5 | Palazzo Ballroom B

Other sessions:

• BIZ215 | Breakout session | Cochlear enhances contact center observability with Amazon Connect 11:30 AM-12:30 PM, Las Vegas | Wynn | [Silent Session] Lafite 7 (Pink Theater)
• BIZ211 | Breakout session | So Energy streamlines customer service with AI-powered automation 1:00pm-2:00pm Las Vegas | MGM | Grand 123
• BIZ214 | Breakout session | Traeger accelerates contact center agent productivity with agentic AI 2:30-3:30, Las Vegas | Venetian | Lido 3106

Hit the Welcome Reception (4:00-7:00 PM) to orient yourself and network.

Tuesday

Matt Garman’s keynote at 8:00 AM-10:30AM sets the agenda.

• BIZ213 | Breakout session | Petco unlocks agentic AI-powered customer service with Amazon Connect 1:00-2:00pm, Las Vegas | Venetian | Lido 3106
• BIZ219 | Breakout session | Personalize customer experiences at scale with AI-powered Amazon Connect 4:00-5:00pm Las Vegas | Wynn | [Silent Session] Lafit 7 (Turquoise Theater)

Connect Customer Event 6:00pm-8:00pm at the Cromwell. Customers are encouraged to attend!

Attend post-keynote sessions on new announcements. Explore the Expo (10:00 AM-6:00 PM). Evening networking receptions (6:00-8:00 PM).

Wednesday (Busiest Day)

Agentic AI keynote (8:30 AM), hands-on workshops midday, Partnership keynote (3:00 PM), Expo Happy Hour (4:30 PM), networking receptions (6:00 PM).

• Swami Sivasubramanian Keynote 8:30am-10:30am Venetian
• BIZ220 | Breakout session | Transforming contact centers in financial services with Amazon Connect 10:00-11:00am Las Vegas | MGM | Grand 123
• BIZ217 | Breakout session | Global tourism brand transforms customer service with Amazon Connect 12:00pm-1:00 Las Vegas | MGM | Grand 119
• BIZ212 | Breakout session | Anthology boosts contact center efficiency with AI 4:30pm-5:30pm, Las Vegas | Wynn | [Silent Session] Lafite 7 (Orange Theater)

Thursday

Infrastructure keynote (9:00 AM), choose between ACQUIRED event or sessions (11:00 AM), Werner Vogels closing keynote (3:30 PM), re:Play party (7:30 PM).

• BIZ216 | Breakout session | Redefining service excellence: Canada Life’s AI-powered contact center 12:30-1:30pm Las Vegas | Wynn | Latour 2
• BIZ218 | Breakout session | UC San Diego Health modernizes patient engagement with Amazon Connect 3:30pm-4:30pm Las Vegas | Wynn | [Silent Session] Lafite 7 (Pink Theater)

Friday

Final sessions wrap at 12:30 PM. Plan departures accordingly.

Insider Tips for Maximum ROI

1. Book Repeat Sessions Strategically Popular workshops like BIZ302 (self-service AI) and BIZ312 (AI agents) have repeat offerings marked “-R” or “-R1”. If your first choice is full, grab the repeat. Some sessions, like BIZ221 and BIZ219 will be Simulcast into a content hub. If you can’t get into a room, check out a content hub!
2. Leverage the Guided Expo Tours AWS experts lead 60-minute tours at specific times (Tuesday-Thursday at 11 AM and 3 PM). First-come, first-served but invaluable for navigating 400+ sponsors.
3. Download Session Content Early Presentations and code samples often appear in the mobile app during or immediately after sessions. Download before WiFi gets congested.
4. Use Multi-Venue Travel Time Wisely Allow 20-30 minutes between The Venetian, Caesars Forum, MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay, and Wynn. Use this time for informal networking or catching up on notes.
5. Attend Chalk Talks for Peer Learning Unlike lectures, chalk talks are interactive discussions where you can ask specific questions and whiteboard solutions with AWS experts and peers.
6. Visit the Certification Lounge Open Monday-Thursday (7:30 AM-5:00 PM) at The Venetian. Get certified, verify existing certifications, or access study materials. Sponsored by Accenture.
7. Balance Keynotes with Hands-On Time Don’t just collect slide decks. Workshops provide production-ready skills you can implement within 30 days of returning.

What to Bring

• Laptop (essential for workshops)
• Comfortable shoes (10,000+ steps daily)
• Business cards (old school, still effective)
• External battery (charging stations get crowded)
• Light jacket (venues vary in temperature)

The Bottom Line

AWS re:Invent 2025 isn’t just announcing the future of customer experience—it’s demonstrating it with production deployments, real ROI metrics, and hands-on workshops that give you the skills to implement immediately.

The companies presenting their success stories aren’t waiting for AI to mature. They’re already deflecting 30% of contacts, reducing costs by 10%, and serving customers across 130+ countries with AI agents that reason, decide, and act autonomously.

Your competition is in those sessions. The question is: will you be there too?

With trends and product forecasts rapidly changing, businesses can showcase and seek out the latest technology innovations and strategies at this year’s expo. 

Through various seminars, booths, panel debates, and live technology demonstrations, visitors will receive an invaluable insight into the latest era of customer experience technology. 

And with thousands of CX leaders and professionals from across the continent in attendance, visitors can gain practical insights and guidance from well-recognised experts at industry-leading enterprises. 

Check out the upcoming, cannot-miss exhibitors, speakers, themes, and more below. 

Exhibitors and Speakers

With 116 company exhibitors expecting to be in attendance, some of the top CX companies are scheduled to attend, with a list of where to find them, who will be speaking, and at which seminar. 

Five9 – Stand CC-L20 

Speakers: 

Steve Blood, VP of Market Intelligence & Evangelism: Rise of the Machines: The Dawn of Agentic CX 

Ty Stephens, Director of Channel Sales, EMEA: CX is Still Human – Agentic AI Just Makes it Smarter 

Microsoft – CC-J60 

Speaker: 

Sebastian Reeve, Director of Strategy, Customer Experience Applications: Become an Agent Boss: Human + AI Collaboration with Microsoft 

AWS – CC-J30 

Speakers: 

Shameem Smillie, GTM Specialist Leader at Amazon Connect: Transforming Customer Experience with Amazon Connect 

Soumya Unni, Solution Architecture Leader at Amazon Connect: Transforming Customer Experience with Amazon Connect 

Salesforce – CC-H20 

Speaker: 

David Brown, SVP & Chief Customer Officer: The Agentic Contact Center: A Salesforce Vision for AI & Confident Agents 

8×8 – CC-F40 

Speakers: 

Chris Angus, VP CPaaS & CX Expansion: Frictionless by Design: Modernising Customer Experience with CPaaS 

Maxine Eunson, Head of Public Sector: Transforming Public Sector CX with Purpose-Driven Communications 

Cisco Webex – CC-G30 

Speakers: 

Joseph Pratten, CX Sales Specialist: See It, Test It, Trust It: AI Agents in the Contact Center 

Keith Griffin, Cisco Fellow VP: Agentic AI: From Hype to Reality 

Vonage – CC-F20 

Speaker: 

Tara Aldridge, Head of Product Enablement: Inclusive CX: Designing Journeys That Leave No Customer Behind 

Dialpad – CC-L10 

Speaker: 

Michele Sama, Director of Engineering: Future-Proof Your CX: The Practical Agentic AI Roadmap 

Genesys – VIP Lounge 

Speaker: 

Keith Fulford, Director of Business Value Engagement at Genesys: CX Trends 2026: Agentic AI and the Future of Orchestrated Experiences 

NiCE – CC-M30 

Speakers: 

Andrew Tucker, Solution Engineer: Cut Through the Complexity: Turning Your Data Chaos into Clarity 

Natalee Wiggins, Solution Sales Executive: Cut Through the Complexity: Turning Your Data Chaos into Clarity 

Talkdesk – CC-K40 

Speaker: 

Gary Ovenall, Regional Vice President, EMEA Solution Engineering: Beyond CCaaS: Enter the Era of Customer Experience Automation 

Verint – CC-N20 

Speakers: 

Huw Jones, Director, Solutions Consulting: Turning Strategy into ROI: What High-Performing Contact Centres Do Differently 

Keith Barrow, Director, Solutions Consulting: Turning Strategy into ROI: What High-Performing Contact Centres Do Differently 

Zendesk – CC-G50 

Speaker:

Kathryn Simons Porter, Principal Contact Center Sales Specialist: CCaaS, CEC, or CRM? AI-powered Resolutions for Every Call and Channel 

Content Guru – CC-M10

Speakers:

Sean Taylor, CEO: AI Winners and Losers – Building a Winning CX Strategy with AI

Martin Taylor, Deputy CEO: From Talk to Action: Real-World AI Transformation Today

Themes

Contact Center Expo has provided a list of content themes in CX, Tech, and Business for visitors to look forward to hearing about this year: 

Customer Experience 

• Supporting vulnerable customers 
• Issue resolution 
• Fostering trust 
• Personalisation 
• Creating efficiency for the customer 
• The ideal customer journey 

Tech Innovation 

• AI 
• Omnichannel integration 
• Data Analytics 
• VR 
• Cloud-based solutions 
• Workforce management 

Business Strategies 

• Leadership and Culture 
• Workforce Management 
• Recruitment & Training 
• Employee engagement 
• Operational efficiency 
• Agent support 

Agenda 

Contact Center Expo is expected to run from 9.30am – 4.30pm GMT Wednesday November 19th to 9.30am – 4pm GMT Thursday November 20th, located at London’s ExCel venue. 

You can obtain the full two-day seminar agenda list here. 

The 23^rd annual conference is Salesforce’s chance to showcase its latest innovations, share success stories, and enable customers to network.

In the run-up to the event, the CRM leader has made several massive announcements.

For starters, it pushed into the ITSM space, converging IT, customer, and HR service on one platform.

Additionally, it launched MuleSoft Agent Fabric, a solution where brands can register each AI agent the business utilizes, orchestrate them, and monitor performance. With this, Salesforce hopes to tackle “agent sprawl”, an issue where AI agents – disconnected across the enterprise – drive compliance risks and operational inefficiencies.

Meanwhile, Salesforce also renamed Service Cloud, an app used by 60,000 businesses, embedding native AI agents. Now, it’s called: “Agentforce Service”.

That was all before the event. However, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, will share several other massive announcements during his keynote.

CX Today was lucky enough to receive a sneak preview beforehand and can share the biggest news ahead of Dreamforce 2025 kick-off this week.

1. Salesforce Introduces the Agentic Enterprise

Salesforce set out its vision for the enterprise of tomorrow, which it’s calling the “Agentic Enterprise”.

According to Salesforce, the Agentic Enterprise signals a new model for work where AI helps elevate people, as opposed to replacing them.

In such an enterprise, a team operates with “24/7 intelligence”, so every employee has an “AI partner” that completes role-based tasks on their behalf and augments others.

Don’t think of a copilot that supports, partners that act, aided by the broader Salesforce platform. Most notably, Data Cloud and Slack (more on this later!).

As part of this vision, Salesforce touts sales leads that are “never missed” and service that “never sleeps”, as customer-facing functions become semi-autonomous.

To realize that vision, businesses must bridge the gap between CRM and the broader business.

Recognizing this, Martin Schneider, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, observed:

Salesforce’s Agentic Enterprise vision makes a lot of sense when you consider how much vibe coding, and AI in general is going to further commoditize the CRM application/pricing model.

“Also, as agentic AI blurs the lines between applications and data silos as well as jobs to be done, it simply makes sense to start thinking in broader terms of how we optimize end-to-end processes with agentic flows and tools.”

Schneider’s perspective of the Agentic Enterprise set the stalls for the next major announcement…

2. The Agentforce 360 Platform Takes Salesforce “Beyond CRM”

The Agentforce 360 Platform is the next evolution of Agentforce. At last year’s Dreamforce event, came the first Agentforce solution. Since then, the solution has had three new iterations, culminating in June’s launch of Agentforce 3.

Now, the Agentforce 360 Platform is the next iteration, taking Salesforce “beyond CRM”.

As such, the Agentforce 360 Platform is supporting customer-facing teams in automating longer-tail tasks, which cross enterprise platforms.

Moreover, it’s supporting other departments – like IT and HR teams – in creating, operationalizing, and optimizing AI agents. These can also complete tasks on their behalf, simplify workflows, and collaborate.

Yet, the Agentforce 360 Platform is just one part of the Agentforce 360 portfolio, which also includes Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud), its Customer 360 apps, and Slack.

According to Salesforce, these are the “four ingredients of an Agentic Enterprise”, connecting AI agents, data, apps, and – of course – humans.

To underscore the significance of its Agentforce 360 announcement, Salesforce has also renamed its Customer 360 apps. So, it’s not only Service Cloud becoming Agentforce Service. Sales Cloud is now Agentic Sales, Marketing Cloud is Agent Marketing, and so forth, with each app including embedded Agentforce agents.

Summarizing the offering, Srini Tallapragada, President & Chief Engineering, & Customer Success Officer at Salesforce, said:

[Agentforce 360] will help you connect with your customers, employees, and partners in a completely new, trusted way… And it’s tightly integrated with Slack, where most of the work gets done.

That leads on to the big Slack news…

3. Slack and Salesforce Collide

Slack is not only becoming the front end of Agentforce, but the agentic operating system, where employees – AI and human – can search, collaborate, and act across their organizations.

Indeed, Salesforce now refers to Slack as the “Agentic OS” for the enterprise.

As part of this vision, employees may trigger actions within and share critical data from enterprise apps without leaving Slack. Instead, they can ask their AI partners to complete the actions for them.

Salesforce refers to these as “conversations in the flow of work”, which will become the foundation of Slack, per Rebecca Wetteman, CEO & Principal Analyst at Valoir.

“What Salesforce is doing with the Slack announcements is embracing the Slack community, which is really important, but also making the Slack-Salesforce-Agentforce connections much more explicit,” noted Wetteman.

The idea of Slack as the conversational interface where humans and agents interact – without the need to ever go to Salesforce or any other application – is about frictionless productivity.

As Wetteman suggests, Slack provides for Salesforce a great middle ground for bringing AI into the flow of work and CRM insights into a much more fluid and well-adapted user experience.

4. Salesforce Acquires Apromore

Salesforce has agreed to acquire Apromore, a prominent provider of process intelligence tech.

Indeed, its tech aspires to offer “full-spectrum process intelligence visibility”, from front-line task execution to enterprise-wide process flows.

To do so, it monitors everything – across disparate systems – from clicks and keystrokes to system logs, models, and simulations to provide “end-to-end intelligence”.

As such, the acquisition appears to be a significant addition to the Agentforce 360 Platform, as it may allow Salesforce customers to map out, standardize, and simplify employee workflows.

From there, they may deploy custom Agentforce agents to multiply efficiencies, which could handle entire end-to-end processes. Alternatively, the agents may become available on Slack to collaborate with human employees as they complete tasks.

Celebrating such a possibility, Steve Fisher, President and Chief Product Officer, said:

As our teams integrate Apromore into Salesforce, that insight will be critical to enabling our customers to unlock opportunities to measure, optimize, and automate through agentic process automation.

Here, Fisher recognizes the importance of customers being able to trust AI, especially as Salesforce moves to its Agentic Enterprise vision.

“Early failures with AI experiments have pushed many from FOMO to FOMU (fear of messing up),” said Wetteman, building on this point. “Management, testing, and monitoring capabilities like Salesforce have developed and are continuing to announce are a key part of building that trust.”

5. Salesforce & OpenAI Team Up on Agentforce 360

Salesforce and OpenAI have expanded their partnership to allow Agentforce 360 customers to pull customer conversations, sales records, and even Tableau visualizations into ChatGPT, where they can query them.

To support this, both tech giants announced a ChatGPT app for Slack, pulling the AI engine into the collaboration platform.

Alongside the new app, Codex will also become available in Slack, which is an OpenAI agent that writes and edits code based on natural language prompts. Users can tag this inside a Slack channel or thread.

Additionally, the partnership means Agentforce 360 Platform users may leverage OpenAI’s latest frontier models, including GPT-5, to develop new Agentforce agents.

Celebrating the announcement, Sam Altman, Co-founder and CEO at OpenAI, said:

Our partnership with Salesforce is about making the tools people use every day work better together, so work feels more natural and connected.

Finally, Salesforce and OpenAI announced that Agentforce Commerce (formerly Commerce Cloud) will integrate with OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol, a new standard that powers Instant Checkout in ChatGPT.

In doing so, Salesforce promises to give “merchants a new way to reach hundreds of millions of potential customers.”

6. Salesforce & Anothropic Partner on AI for Regulated Industries

Salesforce has established a milestone partnership with another AI leader: Anthropic.

This collaboration has three key elements. First, Anthropic’s Claude AI models will serve as a “preferred option” for businesses in regulated industries – including finance, healthcare, and life sciences – building AI agents on Agentforce while keeping sensitive data securely within Salesforce’s systems.

Second is a commitment to co-delivering “industry-specific AI solutions” for those industries, starting with financial services. These will be available via the Agentforce 360 Platform.

Finally, Claude will become “deeply” integrated with Slack, with the two companies also sharing plans to bring Agentforce 360 into Claude.

Sharing more on this final announcement, Benioff stated: “By bringing Salesforce directly into Claude — and Claude’s intelligence into Salesforce and Slack — we’re giving every company the power to work in entirely new ways.

Together, we’re making trusted, agentic AI real for every industry — combining Anthropic’s world-class models with the trust, reliability, accuracy, and scale of Agentforce 360, helping customers achieve new levels of productivity, innovation, and growth.

Already, Claude and Slack bi-directional integrations are available, with the industry-specific solutions still under development.

7. PWC Launches an “Agentic AI-Powered Contact Center” with Salesforce

PWC is a global professional services company that usually helps businesses procure, deploy, and manage third-party CCaaS solutions from the likes of AWS, Genesys, and NiCE.

However, it stole the Dreamforce spotlight to launch its “Agentic AI-Powered contact center offering”, built in collaboration with Salesforce.

Indeed, PWC’s offering layers over Agentforce Service (formerly Service Cloud), integrating conversational AI, predictive ordering, and a data layer that ensures all service data collected by its solution filters into the CRM.

PWC celebrated the launch as an opportunity to “reimagine customer engagement”, claiming to already be working with a “large, multinational company” as an early adopter.

According to the service provider, that company is already transforming how it engages with “millions of customers” globally.

Now, it will drive to bring the solution to its “vast global network of call centers”, promising “measurable outcomes”.

Celebrating the announcement, Kishan Chetan, EVP & GM of Agentforce Service at Salesforce, said: “With Agentforce Service, we’re empowering service representatives with conversational AI and unified customer data, significantly boosting their productivity and elevating assisted service to the next level of engagement.

Together with PwC, we’re creating a repeatable model for customer transformation that any enterprise can scale.

Alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, and PWC, Dreamforce will offer many other high-profile partners the chance to add exciting innovations to the Salesforce ecosystem.

Another excellent example is Vonage, which announced a fraud detection tool for mutual Salesforce customers, amid surging attacks on Agentforce Service.

More announcements will follow as Dreamforce 2025 rolls on. Stay tuned!

So how can brands reverse this trend? An array of CX practicioners and tech leaders told CX Today that success now depends on strategic AI adoption, trust-building, and a unified approach to digital engagement.

More Tools, But Falling Standards

“CX Day shines a light on the importance of delivering exceptional experiences — and in 2025, businesses have more tools than ever to achieve this,” said Sanjay Salunkhe, President and Global Head of Digital and Software Services at Hexaware.

Since the debut of generative AI (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT, AI has dominated CX conversations. From hyper-personalized interactions to the emergence of intelligent agents that free up human support staff, the potential of AI to improve customer interactions is vast.

“By analyzing customer behavior, anticipating needs, and responding with empathy, today’s AI agents free service teams to focus on high-value interactions while ensuring customers feel heard and supported,” Salunkhe said.

But as Salunkhe warned, potential is not enough. “To succeed, businesses must think strategically — for all the recent advances in technology, Forrester says that the quality of CX is eroding year on year.”

The issue? Disjointed tech stacks and rushed AI rollouts.

When it comes to adopting AI, bolting on endless point solutions risks making CX more difficult, not easier. Complex technology stacks can make orchestration, context-passing and personalization more elusive.

The answer is to integrate technology in smart ways to deliver exceptional experiences.

“That’s why it’s crucial to build a unified foundation — where data and systems are connected, and AI can act with context, rather than in silos. This will ensure every new capability enhances CX, instead of adding complexity,” Salunkhe said. “In turn, businesses will be able to move forward confident they can unlock AI’s full potential to drive customer experience to new heights.”

Without this foundation, even the most sophisticated AI can degrade rather than improve experiences.

“Digital transformation should be measured not just by what it changes but by how it improves the customer experience. The real impact lies in outcomes: faster resolutions, deeper engagement, and smarter service,” said Simon Hayward, VP of Sales EMEA at Freshworks. “But to get there, enterprises need to move beyond outdated metrics (such as rigid NPS scores) and embrace a more dynamic, AI-powered measurement framework.”

The Trust Gap: Why Customers Are Walking Away

In a world of instant digital interactions, trust is the new currency, and it’s in short supply.

“Today’s customers demand instant answers, personalised experiences, and round-the-clock support across all channels. They expect service to be seamless, proactive, and emotionally intelligent. And they expect it within an instant,” Hayward said. “It’s not just about automation — it’s about improving human agents so they can focus on complex, high-value conversations that build loyalty and trust.”

Twilio’s latest State of Customer Engagement Report found that only 15% of consumers “absolutely” trust brands with their data, even though 90% trust some brands to a degree. As Sam Richardson, Director of Executive Engagement at Twilio, explained:

“Trust is the bedrock of customer experience… This World CX Day is the moment for brands to evaluate their approach and strengthen that vital connection.”

Personalization may be powerful, but consumers are increasingly wary. They want relevance, but not at the cost of privacy. Although AI can help brands unlock powerful new levels of personalization, the technology must be guided by a clear strategy, Richardson said.

Customers want interactions that are relevant, but also respectful of their preferences and transparent about how their data is being captured and used. The same research shows the stakes clearly: 71% of consumers will walk away if an experience feels irrelevant.

AI must be deployed with empathy and intention. The brands that see results from their investments will be those that combine technology with authentic, customer-centric values.

Reinforcing that point, the 2025 Thales Digital Trust Index reveals global trust is sliding backwards as 82% of consumers have abandoned a brand in the past year due to clunky, insecure, or intrusive experiences.

As Simon McNally, Cybersecurity Expert at Thales, explained, “trust and experience are inseparable.”

“The problem? Too much of the burden sits with the customer. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of people believe brands force them to take responsibility for protecting their own data.”

From managing complex consent forms to resetting forgotten passwords, consumers are being asked to do the heavy lifting in the digital relationship. That’s not a recipe for loyalty, it’s a fast track to frustration.

In other words, poor customer experience often stems from poorly executed security and privacy practices. Customers expect seamless, secure journeys that don’t interrupt or frustrate.

“Customers aren’t rejecting security, they’re demanding seamless, invisible security that fits into the flow of their lives,” McNally said. “Every poor login, every excessive data grab, every glitch that makes people feel unsafe is a CX failure — and a trust failure. On the flip side, companies that design privacy, security, and usability into every interaction can turn trust into a competitive advantage.

The Path Forward: Unified, Human-Centered, AI-Powered

So, where do businesses go from here? Across the board, the experts agree that CX must be built on trust, driven by intelligent design, and fueled by AI that enhances rather than complicates the customer journey.

“Introducing new technology shouldn’t interrupt that flow; it should instead enhance it,” Hayward said. “Rather than overhauling entire systems, businesses can start small by automating routine tasks, syncing data across platforms, and gradually expanding capabilities.”

That means creating connected systems that give AI the context it needs, prioritizing transparent and respectful data practices, designing experiences where security is invisible but effective, and treating every interaction as a chance to earn loyalty.

“Success is no longer just about closing tickets — it’s about evolving the experience. Ultimately, the goal is to move from passive measurement to continuous signal detection — using AI to anticipate dissatisfaction, prescribe next steps, and personalise every interaction. That’s how digital transformation becomes a driver of loyalty, not just efficiency,” Hayward said. “Digital transformation should be a co-operative journey, not a top-down one. The most successful transformations are those that start with listening — because when customers feel heard, then they feel a valued contributor to the transformation process.”

When brands treat their customers as active participants rather than passive recipients, it creates a sense of ownership and connection that strengthens loyalty. As businesses roll out AI and other advanced tools, they need to be grounded in human insight.

“The message is clear: brands can’t afford to get it wrong. The organizations that will thrive are those that combine the intelligence of AI with authenticity and customer-centric values,” Richardson said. “Every interaction is an opportunity to build or break loyalty. The future of customer experience will belong to those who consistently work to earn trust at every touchpoint.”

CX Day 2025: A Time to Reflect and Act

“On World CX Day, the winners won’t be the ones with the flashiest interfaces or cleverest chatbots. They’ll be the ones that prove, every day, that they respect customer data, reduce friction, and make digital trust a lived experience,” McNally said.

The key is to adopt strategies that demonstrate empathy to make customers feel seen, safe, and supported, and in that way, earn trust.

“Customer expectations have never been higher. World CX Day is an opportunity for brands to reflect on how well they’re meeting these expectations and ensure trust remains at the centre of every interaction,” Richardson said.

For CX leaders, that means a new generation of agentic AI—intelligent systems that don’t just assist employees but anticipate customer needs and take meaningful action. Welcome to the age of Connected Intelligence.

1) Webex AI Quality Management: One Console for Human and AI Performance

Cisco unveiled Webex AI Quality Management (QM), a supervisor tool that unifies coaching and improvement across both human agents and AI agents in a single platform. It combines AI-assisted scoring, real-time insights, and personalized coaching for humans with actionable recommendations and optimization for AI agents—all natively in Webex Contact Center. Planned GA: Q1 2026.

Why it matters: Moves beyond compliance checklists to continuous experience improvement and de-risks AI adoption with a single supervisory view.

Related coverage: Agentic AI in the Contact Center: How Cisco Is Redefining Service

2) Webex AI Agent & Cisco AI Assistant: From Assistive to Agentic

Webex AI Agent enables autonomous and guided self-service, tapping tools, systems, and experts as needed—created and tuned in the new AI Agent Studio. Cisco AI Assistant boosts live-agent productivity with suggested responses, real-time transcription, and summaries mid-call and at wrap-up. These are available for cloud and on-prem customers, with a beta for 50 + languages targeted for Q4 2025.

Starting in Q1 2026, Webex plans support for multi-agent collaboration via A2A and Model Context Protocol (MCP)—so Webex AI Agents can interoperate with third-party agents and external data sources under enterprise controls.

Why it matters: Faster, more accurate resolutions with AI that can act, not just advise—while preserving governance.

Related coverage: How Enterprises Are Using Webex AI to Drive Real CX Results

3) Salesforce: Orchestrating Journeys Inside Service Cloud

As part of Salesforce’s BYO CCaaS program, Webex Contact Center for Salesforce deepens the integration so organizations can orchestrate experiences using combined Webex and CRM data. Interactions can be managed inside Salesforce via Service Cloud Voice and Bring Your Own Channel, powered by Webex AI and Agentforce. Early access now; planned GA Q1 2026.

Why it matters: Reduces swivel-chair workflows and gives agents contextual, AI-enriched insights where they already work.

Watch: Webex and Salesforce Redefine CX Integration

4) AWS Lex: Smarter Virtual Agents, Available Now

Integration with Amazon Lex (the same tech behind Alexa) lets teams build natural voice and chat interfaces for Webex Contact Center and Contact Center Enterprise. Use cases include AI receptionist capabilities to deflect / route calls, improved intent recognition, and acceleration of live-agent resolutions. Available now.

Why it matters: Accelerates self-service design and improves containment while maintaining a natural customer experience.

See also: Cisco Expands AI Integrations with Amazon Lex and AWS

5) Epic: Connecting EHR Context to the Contact Center

Epic integration brings EHR context into customer interactions so care teams and agents can deliver tailored, compliant support inside Epic. Available now.

Why it matters: Reduces handoffs and rework in healthcare journeys where context, compliance, and empathy are critical.

Read: How Cisco and Epic Are Transforming Patient Engagement

6) Webex AI Quality Management in Context

For those tracking the broader AI strategy across Cisco’s collaboration and customer experience stack, UC Today’s coverage dives deeper into the company’s Connected Intelligence theme and agentic vision.

Read more: WebexOne 2025: Cisco Bets Big on Agentic Collaboration

7) Market Expansion: India and KSA on the Roadmap

Cisco plans to expand the Webex ecosystem with locally hosted solutions for performance and compliance. In Q2 2026, Cisco targets Webex Calling data centers in Mumbai and Chennai and the launch of Webex Contact Center services in India, with future expansion planned for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Why it matters: Local hosting improves latency, call quality, and regulatory alignment for global CX programs.

More coverage: WebexOne 2025: Connected Intelligence Takes Centre Stage

Leadership Perspective

“You win or lose your customers every single day through the quality of the experiences you deliver. AI is the key to delivering amazing customer experiences at scale.” — Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco

Bottom Line for CX Leaders

• Unify oversight: Manage human and AI performance in one supervisory plane with Webex AI QM.
• Operationalize agentic AI: Deploy AI Agent and AI Assistant to act, summarize, and follow up securely.
• Integrate the journey: Use Salesforce, AWS Lex, and Epic to collapse data silos and remove friction.
• Prove value fast: Target containment, cycle times, and CSAT with production-grade use cases.
• Plan for scale: Leverage multi-agent interoperability (A2A, MCP) and regional hosting to grow responsibly.

In addition to the annual SAP Sapphire, it has rebranded and expanded its SuccessConnect event, so practitioners, partners, and execs can keep their finger on the pulse.

At this year’s event, that pulse raced, with many massive announcements including AI agent advancements, a new engagement platform, and much more.

Celebrating the event’s many headlines, Muhammad Alam, Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, SAP Product & Engineering, said:

Our announcements today demonstrate the power of SAP Business Suite, where AI, data, and applications come together in an experience to propel smarter decisions, faster execution, and scalable transformation.

That suite envelops the enterprise, yet its customer experience portfolio is a key cornerstone.

Given that, here’s a rundown of the event’s biggest news, with extra emphasis on CX.

1. SAP Introduces “Role-Aware” AI Assistants

SAP has announced the next step in its Joule and AI agent journey: role-aware AI assistants.

These assistants partner with a person in a specific business role to support them in fulfilling tasks across the SAP Business Suite.

In doing so, they spot tasks the employee needs to accomplish and tap AI agents to get the job done, configuring, orchestrating, and managing them.

SAP also unveiled an array of new Joule Agents to support these Assistants in getting those role-specific tasks done.

For instance, it gave the example of a People Manager Assistant, which may evoke a People Intelligence Agent to isolate and solve compensation anomalies and similar issues.

Critically, the assistants complete tasks that cross various SAP systems, breaking down silos.

The company’s next move is likely to have them operate across SAP and third-party systems that customers often integrate with.

In the future, the Assistants in Joule may even perform new tasks based on specific brand goals and engage in self-reflection. After all, that’s the future for AI agent technology.

2. SAP Launches Business Data Cloud Connect

The SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) Connect is the next big launch from the event. It links with third-party, partner platforms to “enable a bidirectional flow of business-ready data products”.

In other words, the tech giant will work with adjacent tech providers to build bridges from their platforms to the SAP Business Data Cloud, enabling better data sharing and cross-platform AI agent applications.

With zero-copy sharing, SAO ensures data stays securely in its systems, yet is accessible from other tech solutions, to preserve business context with copies.

Databricks and Google Cloud are the first big-name brands to partner on SAP BDC Connect. However, the tech giant promises that more will soon follow.

3. SAP Engagement Cloud Is the Big Customer Experience News

The big customer experience news from SAP Connect 2025 is the debut of the SAP Engagement Cloud, which the company describes as a “unified system of engagement”.

Aligned with the SAP Business Data Cloud, it aims to unify data from customer-facing departments and orchestrate communications that cross marketing, sales, and service.

While it’s likely to sit in the marketing department, who may use it to run cross-channel campaigns, service teams may – for example – use it to trigger proactive messages based on data signals that indicate the customer has an issue. They may even employ the platform’s native Joule Agents to turn these insights into such actions.

In this sense, SAP aims to unify departments with the SAP Engagement Cloud, helping them share technologies, align CX initiatives, and think further beyond their functional domain.

Brands can now register to participate in a limited beta and get early access to the solution, which will become generally available in 2026.

4. SAP Customer Loyalty Management Expands Its CX Portfolio

SAP Customer Loyalty Management is another significant addition to the SAP CX portfolio, targeting retailers and consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies.

Teased in June, the solution centers on a “loyalty profile”, which empowers end-customers with a place to track rewards, view entitlements, and redeem personalized offers.

Businesses may run analytics initiatives across these profiles, with embedded metrics that allow them to track the performance of loyalty promotions, programs, and activities.

They may also create new loyalty initiatives on the platform, share gifts with customers across channels, and develop shared loyalty programs with partners.

Now, SAP does already offer a loyalty management solution: Emarsys Loyalty. Yet, by spinning up a new solution, SAP makes its capabilities more accessible to brands that don’t want all the bells and whistles of a full-scale customer experience platform.

The solution is set to reach general availability next month.

5. Another New Solution: SAP Supply Chain Orchestration

Before getting into the other major CX announcements, SAP notably announced yet another solution: SAP Supply Chain Orchestration.

With embedded Joule agents, working with a live knowledge graph, it detects real-time risks to supply chains and orchestrates an appropriate, coordinated response, with prioritized actions.

The solution takes data from SAP Business Network and the SAP Business Data Cloud to monitor “every tier of the supply chain”.

Indeed, it links closely to SAP Business Network to contextualize detected risks and notify the relevant parties – across planning, procurement, logistics, and manufacturing – which may be impacted.

Interestingly, Supply Chain Orchestration may also boost customer experience, helping increase visibility into stock and when goods may become available.

SAP expects the solution to become generally available in the first half of next year.

6. New Joule Agents for Service, Sales, and Commerce Teams

SAP has unleashed many new Joule agents across its portfolio. However, three of the most notable impact service and sales teams.

First is the Digital Service Agent. It offers conversational customer service across digital channels, business portals, and e-commerce platforms. It interacts by leveraging customer conversation context, history, and knowledge base data without needing to pre-configure intents.

Interestingly, it integrates with SAP workflows, which stretch beyond the front-office and into back- and middle-office SAP systems for more expansive resolution flows. That’s its differentiation.

For sales, a new Quote Creation Agent transforms email quote requests into “ready-to-send” quotes and orders, which sales and order management teams can review, edit, and pass on.

Finally, a Catalog Optimization Agent updates and optimizes product data to enhance the “accuracy and agility” of merchandising.

Other new Joule agents span finance, spend management, and HR.

7. SAP Unveils a Customer Self-Service Agent for Utilities

Alongside the Digital Service Agent, SAP has announced a Utilities Customer Self-Service Agent.

The solution integrates directly with SAP Cloud ERP Private solutions, so it utilizes data not only in a CRM or CDP, but broader customer context. That may include contract, tariff, product details, consumption data, etc.

Moreover, the Utilities Customer Self-Service Agent, which comes part-and-parcel with SAP for Utilities solutions, hopes to address specific industry pain points, including market regulations, prosumers, and beyond.

The Agent acts like a Joule agent – so can shift between systems – will reach general availability later this quarter.

8. SAP Integrates Its CX Portfolio with WalkMe

SAP proved ahead of the observability trend when it acquired WalkMe for $1.5MN last year.

The solution overlays an enterprise’s tech stack and offers visibility into how applications are performing and the workflows that run between them.

In doing so, it surfaces inefficiencies, suggests fixes, and recommends where businesses can build better workflows. On this last point, it may also spotlight opportunities for AI agent deployments.

Since the acquisition, SAP has integrated WalkMe with its broad suite. Its latest move is integrating it with SAP CX, allowing customer-facing teams to leverage the solution without IT involvement and disrupting current business flows.

Ultimately, SAP hopes to provide its CX customers with more guidance on using its solutions more effectively and automating new processes.

As such, they may recognize new opportunities to better automate support requests, accelerate onboarding, boost data accuracy, and more.

The integration will be generally available this quarter, and businesses can leverage an embedded version for free. However, a full, customizable WalkMe Premium solution will come at a cost.

9. SAP Jumps on the Revenue Intelligence Bandwagon

Many analytics platforms, like Gong, have shifted to become revenue intelligence solutions, emphasizing their capability to help decipher what drives a business’s revenue.

SAP has embraced this shift, announcing a Revenue Intelligence application in SAP Business Data Cloud, so that sales teams can better understand their sales pipeline and customer health. That comes not only in the form of static insight but also recommendations that help manage deal risk, accelerate the deal cycle, and uncover new opportunities.

This underscores a much more significant shift in business reporting. Analytics tools no longer surfacing insight; they’re prescribing actions on the back of those data points.

10. Meet the New-Look SAP Ariba

To finish, let’s step back from CX and consider SAP Ariba. It has a long history, dating back to the 1990s, yet SAP is rolling out the next generation of Ariba solutions for source-to-pay.

These solutions include many new capabilities, such as a simplified user interface with a central SAP Ariba launchpad that provides clear navigation, surfaces to-do items, and spotlights insight.

There are also new AI tools to assist users with tasks like reviewing contracts, analyzing bids, and generating supplier summaries.

Additionally, SAP Ariba now includes automated sourcing, enhanced 360-degree supplier profiles, and a new central intake management feature.

However, perhaps the most significant move is that SAP Ariba now sits on the SAP Business Technology Platform, enabling simpler integrations with SAP apps and third-party ERP systems.

What Else Did SAP Announce?

Onlookers outside the customer experience space may have added several other announcements to their top ten list.

For instance, there is a new skills-based hiring feature for SAP Fieldglass and a SAP Signavio Process Transformation Manager. That’s alongside all the other Joule agents and capabilities shared in the new SAP Cloud ERP Private release.

To learn more about all these, head over to the SAP website. However, for more on SAP’s CX journey and ambitions, check out our article: SAP Is Building a “Modern and Composable” Customer Experience Suite

Instead, the reality customers feel is the result of promises made by sales, marketing, and product, and whether the organization actually delivers on them.  

While customers may not like previous-generation bots, doom loops, and long holds, their frustration doesn’t often originate at the helpdesk or contact center. It begins upstream, where misaligned teams, blind spots, and broken commitments quietly set the stage for failure.   

For those working in customer experience, ignoring the connections to sales, marketing, and product means only seeing part of the picture. True customer experience emerges when every part of the organization aligns and delivers together.   

CXUnifiers 2025 is the event that brings together CX teams to do precisely that.  

Welcome to CXUnifiers 2025  

Attendees will converge on Nashville, Tennessee, over three days from September 29 to October 1, 2025.   

The theme, “Reimagine Extraordinary,” calls on leaders from across the CX space to work together, challenge the status quo, eliminate silos, and raise the standard for every customer interaction.  

The agenda for Sprinklr’s CXUnifiers 2025 aims to present the strategies, insights, and innovations that enterprise leaders need to unify disconnected functions and succeed in the next era of customer experience.​  

Participants can expect access to:  

• Sprinklr’s latest customer experience innovations  

• Hands-on workshops and executive roundtables  

• Real-world case studies from global brands  

The speaker lineup features thought leaders, tech innovators, and CX trailblazers from the world’s most recognized brands, including:  

• Rory Read, President & CEO at Sprinklr  

• Heather Garboden, Chief Customer Officer at American Airlines  

• Chris Gantenbein, Senior Director Digital Experience Capabilities at Coca-Cola  

• Madison Leupp, Sr. Manager, Care Engagement at Adobe  

• Kristina Prickett, Director of Community Management & Engagement at Ogilvy  

Why Attend CXUnifiers 2025?  

Keynote presentations will cover the most pressing concerns for industry professionals, such as converging the CX ecosystem, human-AI collaboration, and the future of customer engagement.  

Meanwhile, fireside chats will offer behind-the-scenes insights from leading organizations on breaking down barriers between teams, aligning them around customer outcomes, and building resilient strategies that earn and maintain trust.  

There’s no need to miss out entirely for professionals who can’t make the event in person, as the keynotes and fireside chats will be livestreamed.  

But for on-site attendees, breakout tracks cross various other areas, ensuring something for everyone, including those already going the extra mile to improve cross-functional collaboration and accelerate unified strategies.  

Deep Dives for Every CX Leader  

Tailored sessions help service, marketing, and insights leaders take critical learnings from the event, with breakout tracks for each. Here’s a quick rundown of the deep dives available across each. 

• Marketing Track: Explore how social media has become the frontline of customer experience. Leaders from BMO, Coca-Cola, and AT&T will share strategies for integrating social and care teams to create connected storytelling across every channel. 

• Service Track: Learn how to unify speed, personalization, and scale to deliver seamless AI-augmented experiences. Speakers from Caesars, Adobe, The Home Depot, and others will show how service can shift from a cost center to a growth driver. 

• Insights Track: Discover how to activate real-time customer feedback and transform data into enterprise-wide intelligence. Executives from Amazon, Walmart, and other global brands will demonstrate how to unify performance metrics and build scalable governance frameworks that support agility. 

More Than Just Keynotes & Deep Dives 

Pre-conference training and a post-event workshop will support attendees to deepen their expertise in an interactive environment and return to their teams with tried-and-tested strategies in hand. 

It’s not all work and no play, however, as CX Unifiers 2025 features a rooftop welcome reception, an evening offsite for music, food, and fun in Nashville on the second day and a final lunch and music reception.  

The 18:00 welcome reception will give out-of-town attendees time to refresh themselves after arrival. And the lunchtime finish on the final day allows plenty of time to make afternoon or evening departures.  

Meanwhile, on September 30, the Sprinklr team will recognize and celebrate outstanding brands and individuals who push the boundaries of innovation in CX with the CXUnifier Awards. It will announce winners in nine categories, including Unifier of the Year, AI Innovator of the Year, and many more.  

At its core, Spinklr’s flagship event is about coming together. When CX teams are unified, everyone wins, with customer experience going beyond a business function and becoming a competitive advantage.  

Learn more and register for CXUnifiers 2025 here!  

Hosted by Salesforce, the annual conference has become more than a showcase of CRM innovations; it’s a pulse check on the future of enterprise AI, data management, and customer experience across industries.

Salesforce has teased a slate of high-profile keynotes, new product updates, and partnerships, so all eyes are on what the CRM giant will unveil at the event.

From agentic AI advancements to ecosystem shifts, here are the five key things to watch out for at Dreamforce 2025.

1. All Salesforce Apps Are Going Agentic

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, said in a recent interview on the Logan Bartlett Show, that the company is making all its apps “agentic”.

In other words, each will likely come with embedded AI agents that act on behalf of users, instead of simply assisting them by providing insights or recommendations.

By doing so, these agents may take real-time data and, on command, use it to perform actions and automate new workflows.

Already, some Salesforce customers got a tease of this with “agentic analytics” at its Tableau Conference. Yet, this appears to be just the start.

Indeed, on the podcast, Benioff said the company is moving towards “a different kind of architecture” in which these agentic apps are the norm, promising a sneak peek at Dreamforce. He stated:

All of our products, so our Sales Cloud, which we’ve talked about for decades, it’s becoming agentic sales, our Service Cloud is agentic service, even our Marketing Cloud where we do 11 trillion emails every single year. Those are all one-way conversations today. You’re going to see at Dreamforce those are all going to become two-way conversations. And it’s because you’re going to have an agent on the end of that having a conversation with those customers.

In line with this change, Benioff also teased his vision for how Salesforce’s products will work in the future, pledging to expand on this at the event.

“The data foundation, the application layer, and the agentic layer are the three core layers of how applications are working going forward,” Benioff said. “In every category, we’re going to transform that function, and we’ve had to rebuild every single one of our products to not only be the application layer where you’re creating, reading, updating, and deleting the data, but also working hand-in-hand with the agents as well.”

He continued: “Every company is on a path to become an agentic enterprise.”

“When you get to Dreamforce and see my keynote, I’m going to have 12 Fortune 100 companies there all showing you how to build an agentic enterprise, different shapes and sizes, different ways to do it, ranging from Pfizer to FedEx to OpenAI, Anthropic… that I think will be, probably my greatest pleasure at Dreamforce — to see customers show other customers how they’re doing it.”

2. See Salesforce’s New ITSM Solution in Action

Salesforce is officially entering the ITSM space with the launch of Agentic IT Service, which will go out to the masses at Dreamforce.

The company is taking on the market leader, ServiceNow, with its combination of Slack and Agentforce to deliver a conversational, agentic IT support application.

Shortly before an official announcement, Benioff teased the ITSM product in the podcast, stating:

Come to Dreamforce and you’ll see. We’ve never been in the ITSM market before, but now we’re entering, and we’re building it on Slack.

The release of Agentic IT Service reflects a closing of the gap between ITSM and customer support.

ITSM solutions help IT teams efficiently manage the services they deliver across an organization, from configuring devices to granting app access. In the process, they resolve tickets much like customer service teams, which is an overlap many IT teams may seek to bridge.

Additionally, as IT plays a bigger role in making contact center buying decisions, developing customer experiences, and leveraging service insights, it must collaborate with contact center leaders more and more.

As such, Salesforce’s collaborative ITSM solution may meet many needs.

3. A Big Google Partnership Announcement Seems Likely

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, is on the attendee list for Dreamforce, which might foreshadow a Salesforce-Google partnership announcement.

That’s what happened when Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, showed up last year. The companies announced a partnership to bring capabilities from the NVIDIA AI Enterprise platform to boost the development of Salesforce Data Cloud and Agentforce.

Any new announcement would build on the revitalized partnership Salesforce and Google detailed earlier this year, which not only enabled mutual customers to access Google’s Gemini large language model (LLM) family from within the Agentforce platform but also expanded Salesforce customers’ choice of hyperscaler.

As the vendors teased more announcements throughout the year, such as a Tableau, Looker, and BigQuery integration and standardized business logic and data definitions, Dreamforce is a logical place to unveil more ways in which their products can interact.

Yet, they may go beyond the initial announcements. For instance, preconfigured AI agents that run between their enterprise applications are one possibility.

4. The New Agentforce Builder & Industry-Specific Offerings

As it teases new updates and features before the big event, Salesforce recently announced that a new beta version of Agentforce Builder is coming. The update came as part of its Winter 2026 Release, which will roll out the day before Dreamforce begins.

Agentforce Builder provides users with a no-/low-code interface to design, test, and deploy AI agents. But with the new version, the company promises admins and developers a unified workspace to collaborate and deploy agents much faster. Expect to see more of this at Dreamforce.

As part of its Winter 2026 update, the CRM leader will also release a number of other tools and features. These include Agentforce Observability, which, aligned with the Command Center Salesforce announced at the launch of Agentforce 3, aims to provide enterprises with more control over all their autonomous AI agents, built on Salesforce’s AI agent solution or a third-party alternative. That control includes tools to monitor, optimize, and scale AI agent deployments, and help leaders quantify their ROI.

Agentforce Grid is another new tool with a spreadsheet-like interface, designed to bring together CRM data, AI prompts, and actions in one place to prototype new Agentforce-powered workflows.

Expect a closer look at these new Agentforce innovations and tailored Agentforce offerings for specific industry applications, such as the new Agentforce for Financial Services, at Dreamforce.

On these industry-specific offerings, Rebecca Wetteman, CEO & Principal Analyst at Valoir, recently told CX Today:

“Salesforce’s industry AI is a natural extension of what Salesforce has been doing with its industry clouds, providing more prebuilt capabilities and data models that accelerate time to value and reduce ongoing TCO (total cost of ownership) with fewer custom objects and code to manage.

“When it comes to AI, both Salesforce and customers are recognizing that a DIY approach is both expensive and risky,” continued Wetteman. “Leveraging a platform with more prebuilt, pretested components and agents drives faster time to value and more predictable results.

“We found that building agents with Agentforce enables companies to deliver agents 16x faster than DIY approaches; more prebuilt industry capabilities will further accelerate that.”

5. More on Salesforce’s Own Agentforce Story

Salesforce has become the testing ground for its own agentic AI offering, rolling out AI agents for customer support, marketing, and sales.

“I’ve articulated us as customer zero,” Benioff said on the podcast before drawing attention and criticism for claiming that his internal deployment of Agentforce had helped him cut 4,000 service workers.

Joe Sirianni, a former Enterprise Account Executive at Salesforce, was one of many to call out the idea that AI has enabled the company to replace thousands of customer support jobs in a viral LinkedIn post:

Let me be clear: that’s not the truth. I spent years inside Salesforce. I know firsthand that Salesforce AI is not ready for primetime. Like every other ‘AI Agent’ being hyped right now… Now those teams have been cut in half and AI isn’t filling the gap.

Benioff will likely address and push back on the debate around replacing employees with AI at Dreamforce. Get the popcorn ready.

Aside from Benioff, several major brands and leaders will take to the Dreamforce stage to share their Agentforce stories. They include the founders and CEOs of Starbucks, Waymo, ElevenLabs, PointFive, Vercel, and WRITER.