By integrating Microsoft 365 products into the software company’s platform, Zendesk customers can access Agent 365 capabilities for intelligent productivity. 

In turn, Microsoft has implemented Zendesk Agent within 365, allowing its customers to access tools to enhance service productivity and workflow efficiency. 

Craig Flower, Chief Information Officer at Zendesk, highlighted how the partnership expansion would improve Zendesk’s ability to deliver a superior customer experience. 

“Our collaboration with Microsoft on Agent 365 and Zendesk Agent for Microsoft 365 Copilot is a pivotal moment for Zendesk,” he explained. 

“This collaboration not only solidifies our position as a leader in enterprise AI automation but also ensures that Zendesk remains at the forefront of the evolving digital worker landscape.  

“By integrating with Agent 365 and Microsoft 365 Copilot, we are empowering our customers with both autonomous and streamlined support capabilities, optimizing operations, and ultimately delivering a more efficient and reliable employee experience within Microsoft 365.” 

Improving Service Experience 

This partnership aims to upgrade small business experiences by implementing both tools to generate tailored needs. 

By establishing Microsoft Agent 365 within Zendesk’s platform, the AI offers autonomous ticket management support for Zendesk’s customers for reduced human intervention. 

These capabilities include ticket creation, handling, status monitoring, and communication management within Microsoft’s environment to ensure data governance requirements are met. 

This allows human service agents to shift away from constantly reviewing routine queries and return to high-demand, complex tasks. 

In return, Zendesk Agent has been integrated into Microsoft 365 Copilot to support its core apps with ticketing capabilities, such as ticket submissions, status monitoring, and following up tasks without the need to switch tools. 

Similar to the first integration, this capability is managed within Microsoft’s environment, resulting in limited friction for tool management and deployment.  

As a result of the integration, agents can experience direct AI-assisted support in several routine task areas, resulting in higher responsiveness, resolution, and reduced waiting times. 

This AI integration allows smaller businesses to elevate their service demands to the level of any well-established company, including delivering higher productivity and service levels. 

By implementing these tools directly within a business, teams can manage their workflows effectively without agent intervention. 

Furthermore, both tools offer customers secure and compliance management for handling adoption risk within a governed ecosystem. 

Targeting The Small Business Market 

The integration follows a similar trend in recent months of larger vendors trying to dominate the small enterprise customer corner by offering tailored products and services to fit their needs. 

Earlier in November, Zoom had secured its commitment to providing service capabilities to companies of various sizes with simple, straightforward tools to enhance their businesses. 

The communications giant notes how businesses with smaller teams require different demands than larger ones, forcing some to juggle various workloads across the board to keep up with demand. 

This means vendors will need to personalize their tools and approaches to cover more ground and advance these smaller businesses to the industry standard. 

This has been a well-documented issue in the CX industry, as various companies have recently eliminated support for enterprise customers that don’t meet their size standards. 

Unfortunately, some customer enterprises that are unable to provide businesses with desirable profit results may be asked to cancel their subscription if the company can no longer provide the services needed or intend to solely focus on its largest customers. 

However, companies such as Microsoft and Zendesk have offered support for this neglected market, supplying these customers with both tools to elevate their teams while prioritizing their unique requirements. 

Srini Raghavan, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Copilot and Agent Ecosystem, explained how the tool collaboration will offer these enterprise customers support across a range of business needs, and allow them to elevate their issue resolutions even at their current capacity. 

He said, “AI is transforming how organizations deliver employee service, and Microsoft’s collaboration with Zendesk is leading that change by enabling a new era of intelligent support. 

“We’re combining the power of Microsoft 365 Copilot’s intelligence with Zendesk’s modern service platform, enabling employees to resolve IT, HR, and Finance issues seamlessly within the tools they use every day.” 

Digital sovereignty, the ability for an organization to maintain clear control over how its data is stored, accessed, and governed, has moved from a technical concern to a board-level priority. As organizations expand their digital footprints and accelerate cloud adoption, rising regulatory scrutiny and growing customer expectations are forcing businesses to rethink how they manage data.

Sovereignty means different things to different people, the panelists noted, but the common thread is the need to take control over customer data, which has become essential to maintaining trust. The pressure to demonstrate that control is now shaping transformation plans, vendor choices and long-term customer experience strategies.

Control of Critical Data Is Becoming a Strategic Must

The energy crisis following the invasion of Ukraine exposed the geopolitical dimension of critical infrastructure, reinforcing the need for systems that can operate independently in extreme circumstances.

“Digital sovereignty is about stability and resilience,” said Julia Weberberger, Head of Corporate Strategy at Energie AG Oberösterreich, describing it as a source of power. “[W]e have to make sure that we operate our critical data on our own. We operate our own data center, with emergency power supply, and rely on a multi-provider strategy to create redundancies… It’s also very important that we build expertise in digital sovereignty in Europe, but also within our company.”

Europe is developing a new mindset built on innovation and security, Weberberger said, shaping companies, knowledge, opinions and even social narratives. In this environment, European data sovereignty is becoming a key strategic concern that requires balance.

As Martina Saller, Public Sector Sales Lead at Microsoft Austria said:

“It’s not a black and white discussion. It’s not about choosing the path of sovereignty or choosing the path of innovation. It’s about balancing and orchestrating… a risk-based approach.”

That layered approach should separate highly sensitive workloads from those suited for cloud-based innovation.

Public administrators highlighted that sovereignty is multidimensional: technical, legal, economic and emotional. What customers want above all is visibility and choice. As one leader emphasized, beyond control over data processing and storage, true sovereignty also means being able to choose the parts of a technology package they need rather than being required to buy licenses for bundles, which drives up costs.

Procurement rules, however, are still playing catch-up. With different requirements scattered across the EU, organisations often end up doing the same work multiple times. A more unified approach that allows for shared certifications and tech that plays nicely across borders would make it easier for businesses and public bodies to build modern, sovereign digital systems. And to make sure those sovereignty rules help innovation instead of getting in the way, organizations say they need clear guidance and strong partnerships with their tech providers.

What Customers Need from Cloud Partners

A recurring message throughout the discussion was that sovereignty cannot be achieved in isolation. Customers expect their cloud partners to help them meet changing regulatory, security and operational demands.

As Norbert Parzer, Certified Public Accountant, Tax Advisor and Partner at EOS put it, “first find the companion before you start the journey.”

To address concerns around extraterritorial data access, Jeff Bullwinkel, VP and Deputy General Counsel, Corporate External and Legal Affairs at Microsoft EMEA, detailed the steps the vendor has taken to provide assurance and legal protection.

The tech giant has built the EU Data Boundary for the Microsoft Cloud to “mitigate the risk, or reduce the surface area of risk by just reducing situations in which data is transferring from one continent to another.”

Just as crucial is Microsoft’s assurance that it will resist demands from governments to divulge customer data, Bullwinkel said:

“When Microsoft gets a request or a demand in order for data from any government around the world, we have a contractual obligation to litigate against that order whenever there’s a lawful basis for doing so. And we have quite a history of doing that…with a view toward guarding against that kind of risk and so we will continue in the future as well.”

Microsoft has also expanded its sovereign controls and confidential computing to ensure that customers hold the keys to their data.

The vendor recently announced expanded capabilities for its Sovereign Public Cloud and Sovereign Private Cloud. By the end of this year, customers in four countries—Australia, the United Kingdom, India and Japan—will have the option to have their Microsoft 365 Copilot interactions processed in-country. This will be expanded to 11 more countries in 2026: Canada, Germany, Italy, Malaysia, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, and the U.S.

These capabilities directly address customer expectations for operational autonomy and regulatory compliance.

Partnerships help empower organizations to keep control over their processes and architecture, so that digital transformations are secure and interoperable. Organizations across sectors are embracing AI, but they need to be sure that the models they use preserve transparency and control.

“There are many areas we see it’s important to have a good collaboration. And for that, trust is… obligatory. It’s the absolutely necessary thing. And it cannot just be a marketing promise,” Weberberger said.

The use of large language models (LLMs) raises critical questions when it comes to maintaining control over customer data, Weberberger noted, highlighting the need for transparency around who trains the data, who defines which information AI models are allowed to use, how ethical principles are implemented and who has the control and influence over the models.

“We need answers in the future when it comes to… how these LLM models are trained. Many providers tell us ‘we don’t use the customer data to train our LLM.’ But for us, still, the question remains, but how do the providers develop their LLMs when they don’t use the customer data to train them? Here we need clear agreements that we all know how it works, and openness to trust.”

For critical sectors like energy, innovation must align with stringent risk-management requirements without compromising safety or resilience.

Data Sovereignty as a Shared European Project

Panelists underscored the need for different regulators in Europe to get on the same page when it comes to digital rules, to create a clearer, more unified set of standards that works in practice and gives organizations the confidence to keep innovating.

“Policy makers and industry representatives should work together on defining clear, understandable and practical frameworks, which has not always happened in the past,” Parzer said.

“It’s about establishing certainty for market participants at the end… They should understand that innovation is not a luxury. It is just an enabler for our economic growth and insurance for our future. So it is all about defining rules that are going to balance innovation with compliance.”

And when those standards line up, it doesn’t just cut down on compliance headaches — it makes it easier for governments and regulated industries to embrace AI and cloud tools, giving them the guardrails they need to move ahead with confidence.

The conversation made one point clear: sovereignty is no longer a static concept. It is a shared responsibility shaped by policy, technology, and partnership. Customers expect cloud providers not only to deliver secure platforms, but also to collaborate, openly and continuously, on the frameworks, tools, and governance models that will define Europe’s digital future.

As the panel demonstrated when customers, policymakers, and technology providers align around transparency, control and trust, Europe can innovate at the pace required to remain resilient and competitive.

“I think we cannot expect this topic is going to go away,” Bullwinkel said. “These things are front of mind, absolutely, for our customers, for our partners, for government leaders… Things we’ve been talking about… around data privacy, around data security, around resilience, around data residency, these are all things that will continue to inform the conversation.”

The cloud communications vendor revealed that it had taken significant measures to strengthen its service governance. 

This strategy will allow the company to expand its range of security and compliance frameworks, establishing itself as a trustworthy provider for customer enterprises. 

The implementation, better known as ISO/IEC 27018, is a well-established privacy standard used by enterprises worldwide to protect customer data in public cloud environments. 

And with security concerns now at an all-time high, vendors will need to consider how best to protect their customers’ data. 

Darren Remblence, Chief Information Security Officer at 8×8, highlighted how customer demand for security around data management is a bare minimum requirement. 

“Customers should never have to trade speed or innovation for security,” he explained.

“ISO/IEC 27018 gives organizations even stronger guarantees that their data is handled responsibly and transparently.  

“It means they can move faster, meet compliance requirements with confidence, and trust that privacy is built into every part of their communications experience.”

This privacy standard is a code of practice that protects personal data from public cloud providers and shields any private or personally identifiable information (PII) from falling into the hands of third parties. 

It contains core regulations for enterprises that choose to adopt this standard, such as data processing with customer consent, supporting customer data handling, transparency with data protection approaches, and implement strong security measures, including restrictions and encryption methods. 

This standard also includes controls for handling data access, use, transparency, and dealing with incident response. 

This assures customers that 8×8 is meeting the higher standards required for durable data handling. 

What This Means For 8×8 Customers

This implementation into 8×8’s security management system enhances privacy and security for 8×8 Platform for CX, a unified CX communications platform that includes multiple capabilities for customer-facing teams and customer interaction management. 

Customer enterprises can enhance their vendor onboarding routines with faster security evaluation, reduced data exposure risk, and transparency with data handling. 

It also enables 8×8 customers to feel secure in where they place their data, with constant review and improvement from the vendor’s security and compliance team to ensure these standards are kept, including privacy practices, data handling, and cloud architecture. 

And with the customer playing a significant role in its activity, data processing can only happen under customer instruction and is kept informed consistently about its storage whereabouts and who can access it. 

This highlights 8×8’s commitment to its customers’ privacy and security, assuring that data handling is less likely to be compromised or misused. 

Growing 8×8’s Security Portfolio

The privacy standard also allows 8×8 the chance to build up its security and compliance portfolio to meet the growing demands from customer expectations. 

This portfolio has also included similar frameworks, including ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27017, SOC 2, and HIPAA mapping, which involve building and assuring security controls and management within a system, as well as several other regulatory standards to assure 8×8’s commitment to security requirements. 

This decision also comes during a time when customer expectations have risen significantly in the last year, after a wave of cyberattacks that profoundly impacted the customer experience sector, including CX giants such as Salesforce, Zendesk, and Google. 

This places risk on data handling processes such as migration and storage methods, forcing vendors like 8×8 to stay ahead of cyberattack activities. 

The communications platform disclosed its Q3 earnings on Monday, highlighting a strong growth from its customer experience portfolio. 

Zoom has also revealed its plans to grow product revenue further by enhancing its existing products with additional AI capabilities to drive AI-first customer experiences. 

During the earnings call, Zoom announced that the platform would be evolving from its traditional customer experience platform to an AI-focused one, aiming to drive productivity and relationships. 

Eric Yuan, CEO and Founder of Zoom, revealed that after its strong quarterly results, Zoom would be able to move forward with this vision. 

He said: “This performance reflects the durability of our business driven by the growing value we are delivering for customers as we evolve from a communications leader to an AI-first platform for work and customer experience. 

“Our vision is to be the AI-first work platform for human connection.” 

Zoom expects to accomplish this transformation by following its three strategic priorities: enhancing its existing products with AI, driving growth in AI products, and scaling AI-first customer experiences. 

Enhancing Existing Products 

During Zoomtopia 2025, the communications platform unveiled AI Companion 3.0, an updated version of AI Companion that utilizes agentic AI not only to respond, but also to act, advising on tasks such as meeting preparations, freeing up time, and call follow-ups. 

Zoom has embedded various AI capabilities and tools, including AI Companion, across its platform foundation, including: 

• Zoom Meetings: Zoom’s AI Companion, a proactive AI assistant tool, offers meeting summaries, follow-ups for next steps, and drives work forward. 
• Team Chat: Rising by 20% in active monthly users year over year, AI Companion supports the messaging product by providing customers with chat summaries, composition tools, and simplified search options for higher productivity. 
• Zoom Phone: This tool now offers Voice Intelligence for call transcription, summaries, noise cancellation, call routing, and analytics and insights for customer data collection, with over 10 million users now paying for Zoom Phone as of early Q3. 
• Zoom Contact Center: Working as Zoom’s cloud-based contact center solution, this platform has adopted AI tools such as Virtual Agent, an agentic AI chatbot offering complex tasks and responses for customers, and AI Expert Assist, allowing agents to utilize AI support in real-time with summaries and translations and offer possible agent responses during customer interactions. 

In fact, AI Companion usage has grown four times year-on-year, revealing that these AI features are seeing value from user activity, resulting in rapid adoption. 

By adding AI to these already-established products, customers are more likely to accept these capabilities once they’ve been integrated into the software. 

Driving Growth in AI Products 

By moving beyond its core communication tools and investing in greater agentic abilities, Zoom offers its customers further access to its AI tools to personalize them to their needs. 

This allows Zoom the chance to drive AI product revenue with product monetization, generating financial growth rather than just adding tools to products. 

In fact, 90% of Zoom’s top CX deals involve paid AI features to contribute to product revenue, offering both subscription and consumption models to suit the customer. 

This includes the development of AI tools such as Custom AI Companion, a paid version of the standard AI Companion model targeted towards enterprise-tier customers, allowing businesses to customize the tool to meet specific demands and policies. 

This also includes similar products such as Virtual Agent and AI Expert Assist, as well as Zoom’s recent acquisition of BrightHire. 

Scaling AI-First Customer Experiences 

Through utilizing tools such as Virtual Agent and AI Expert Assist, Zoom is using AI to transform interactions between customers and enterprises by expanding these products across the platform for automated workflows. 

These tools will involve automating routine requests and advise agents during workflow automation, voice, chat, and video calls for faster results. 

Zoom has also implemented a feature that allows enterprises to install either Zoom’s or a third-party’s AI tool, encouraging them to become familiar with AI usage while tailoring it to their needs. 

This strategy will also involve Zoom working with its largest customers to move AI agents into deployment; however, this may prove difficult. 

During the earnings call, Zoom noted that despite this upsurge in AI tool adoption, its net dollar expansion rate stayed at 98%, 2% lower than expected, likely suggesting that large customers had not been spending as much as hoped on Zoom’s products, with renewals on larger accounts proving difficult to resume. 

Zoom Key Earnings Results 

Zoom’s earnings results showed some strong areas of performance across enterprise and cashflow revenue results 

• Zoom’s total revenue reached $1.23BN, up 4.4% year-on-year 

• Its enterprise revenue grew 6.1%, totalling 60% of Zoom’s total revenue 

• Average monthly churn increased by 2.7%, similar to Q3 2024 

• Its operating cash flow increased to $629MN, up 30% year-on-year 

As governments and enterprises deepen their reliance on cloud and AI technologies, control over where data is stored and how it is processed has become central to maintaining operational resilience and regulatory compliance, and most importantly, customer trust.

More than 80 percent of business leaders cite data sovereignty as a strategic business priority, according to research by German analyst firm BARC.

“We have to get a lot better at understanding that data is money, and we need to put the security that we’ve had in place around money for 1,000 years around data,” online privacy expert Ron Zayas, CEO of Ironwall by Incogni, told CX Today in an interview.

Companies are feeding their data to AI engines to train their models, but regulations like the EU Data Act, which creates rules for data sharing and access—not to mention growing cybersecurity threats—require them to tread carefully. As Zayas put it:

“We need to understand that the same way you wouldn’t let your employees interact with networks without a firewall, you can’t let companies interact with AI without having some type of firewall in between and understanding what data you can share.”

Recent moves by European and global technology leaders indicate that they are responding to accelerating demand for a sovereignty-driven approach to innovation.

The Rise of Europe-Built Cloud and CX Solutions

Odigo, a European CCaaS and CXaaS provider, recently acquired Akio, a French software vendor specialising in AI-powered CCaaS solutions for SMEs and mid-market firms. The merger brings together Odigo’s enterprise-scale CX offering with Akio’s capabilities in AI, voice of the customer analytics, and reputation management.

But beyond expanding product portfolios, the acquisition represents a strategic move to consolidate European technological capabilities and reduce dependence on non-European cloud providers. (Aside from data sovereignty that push is becoming more significant given recent cloud service outages.)

As Odigo stated in announcing the deal:

“[T]he merger of two complementary French vendors with a strong presence across Europe reinforces Odigo’s ambition to create a competitive European alternative to the American firms in the sector. This approach comes at a time when European companies are placing greater focus on data sovereignty and control over their technological environments.

Patrick Giudicelli, Founder and President of Akio, added: “Joining Odigo means joining a French company that shares our values of customer proximity and sovereignty.”

The newly combined company offers a customer engagement ecosystem designed and hosted within Europe, where data control and regulatory compliance are built into the architecture.

Global Platforms Are Localizing Data and AI Operations

The big tech players are also evolving their approaches to sovereignty. Last week, enterprise AI platform Workday announced the rollout of its Workday EU Sovereign Cloud in 2026, keeping its European customers’ data local and secure.

All operations, including AI processing, data center access, support, and maintenance, ensure customer data is managed by EU-based personnel and never leaves the region.

“Workday understands how quickly evolving data sovereignty requirements can make it difficult for organizations to keep pace,” Gerrit Kazmaier, President, Product and Technology at Workday, said in the announcement. “Workday EU Sovereign Cloud gives our customers the freedom to innovate and grow confidently—helping them harness the power of AI while knowing their data remains protected and compliant.”

EU Sovereign Cloud is built on AWS infrastructure and spans multiple, geographically separated data centers to provide redundancy for key systems. Hardware protections prevent unauthorized access, and end-to-end encryption safeguards data whether it is in use, in transit, or in storage. An EU advisory board provides oversight to strengthen transparency and adherence to European sovereignty and security standards, Workday said.

The vendor plans to extend the offering to other regions down the line, but there’s no surprise that it’s starting with Europe first, given the region’s strict data rules.

Tech giant Microsoft has added a new set of capabilities to its Sovereign Public Cloud and Sovereign Private Cloud offerings that build on its digital sovereignty controls to deliver AI and cloud services strengthened by its ecosystem of specialized in-country partners.

The update includes end-to-end AI data processing within the European Union’s Data Boundary, the general availability of Microsoft 365 Local, and localized versions of its Copilot AI assistant in four countries by the end of the year, with 11 more to follow in 2026. That ensures Copilot interactions are typically processed in data centers located within a nation’s borders, to give customers greater control over where their data goes.

Microsoft has also extended its Sovereign Landing Zones for Azure and introduced new infrastructure capabilities, such as support for external SAN storage and the latest NVIDIA GPUs, to help enhance the performance of local deployments. The company is expanding its ecosystem of regional experts through a Digital Sovereignty specialization.

Microsoft acknowledged that organizations in Europe and other jurisdictions face a complex slate of regulatory mandates, as well as heightened expectations for resilience. As Douglas Phillips, President and Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft Specialized Clouds, stated in the update:

“Sovereignty has become a core requirement for governments, public institutions, and enterprises seeking to harness the full power of the cloud while retaining control over their data and operations.”

The conversation around data sovereignty has also been amplified by Zoho, which raised the issue in releasing its latest Zoho One upgrade.

The vendor highlighted the value of controlling the full technology stack and emphasized that operating its own infrastructure through to applications allows it to offer deployment models that give customers the control they need to meet regulations and provide transparency to their end users.

“We are doing these on-premise deployments in some countries where your data center has to be set up in that country, because we own… the entire stack … we are able to do it particularly when dealing with governments,” Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist at Zoho, said during a media briefing.

This approach allows organizations to maintain national or regional control over critical communication systems, an increasingly common requirement for enterprises that need to guarantee uninterrupted access to essential services.

These initiatives reflect a broader market realignment and a recognition that sovereignty does not need to be a constraint on innovation but can be a selling point for vendors. European enterprises increasingly expect cloud and AI providers to deliver verifiable assurances of data control and jurisdictional compliance.

As regulatory demands tighten and put more pressure on enterprises, from the EU Data Act to AI rules and sector-specific cybersecurity requirements, cloud providers that can offer data sovereignty by design are likely to gain a competitive edge.

This comes after its annual report revealed that AI implementation had increased by 282% since 2024. 

These tools enable enterprises to deploy AI agents without worrying about the reliability and safety of their performance within a system. 

Salesforce’s observability tools provide AI agents with the capabilities to analyze performance, optimize interactions, and monetize stability. 

Agent Analytics

This capability allows enterprises to view how well an AI agent is operating through monitoring its movements, how it’s improving/declining, and where these pain points are coming from. 

This can be turned into performance data, trends, and insights to understand how efficiently these agents are performing and take actionable steps to improve their usage. 

This can also be done across all implemented agents, allowing enterprises to view their agents’ overall effectiveness on customer interaction and support their continuous improvement. 

Agent Optimization

As a key observable capability, Optimization offers customer enterprises full transparency with each agent interaction. 

Customers can uncover how agents make decisions and what led them to make those choices, highlighting performance gaps and session flows to diagnose any issues and deduce the steps needed to improve its performance. 

This can include prompt, rule, or data source adjustments to solve misinterpreted information, inconsistent results or agent hesitation. 

Salesforce provides access to end-to-end visibility for customers to view each agent’s response and action, even with larger, complicated action chains. 

For less varied issues, similar requests can be accumulated to uncover larger problems in patterns or trends. 

Customers can also identify an agent’s configuration issues to pinpoint how an agent’s behaviour is affecting its operation and uncover which areas need to be retrained or personalized further for improved performance. 

Agent Health Monitoring 

This capability can monitor an AI agent’s reliability and safety level to ensure that it is running as expected. 

It provides almost real-time visibility and alerts when the agent is performing unpredictably, notifying the company before any significant damage takes hold. 

It measures an agent’s ability to handle requests, time taken to respond, and tracks incidents such as failures, breaks in activity, or invalid responses. 

By leveraging the capability, teams can speedily detect and resolve issues to minimize agent downtime and continue productivity. 

This tool is formed by two of Agentforce’s components, acting as the foundation for the observability tool by supplying the data and governance structure needed to monitor agents: 

• Session Tracing Data Model: By logging every agent interaction, the data model can store all its data in Data 360 and provide the observability tool the means to generate reliable analytics, error identifiers, and support optimization for unified visibility.
• MuleSoft Agent Fabric: This enables enterprises to control, register, and review agents to justify how they function and interact. 

AI Implementation Report 

In a report published in November, Salesforce announced that AI implementations had increased to 282% since last year. 

This data reveals that companies are now at a far better position to deploy pilot projects at scale rather than risk the threat of experimentation. 

Despite this, data governance, security, and trust remain high priorities, requiring risk management across workflows. 

This means that more companies are going to require higher visibility and control across large-scale AI deployments, which is where Salesforce’s observability tools come in. 

By supporting enterprises with agent interactions, Salesforce’s observability tools can decrease operational risk by allowing teams to keep up to date with agent visibility and analytics to keep agent deployments stable. 

Reddit, a customer of Salesforce, highlighted how Salesforce has allowed the customer enterprise to scale agents securely through consistent visibility. 

John Thompson, VP of Sales Strategy and Operations at Reddit, stated: “By observing every Agentforce interaction, we can understand exactly how our AI navigates advertisers through even the most complex tools.  

“This insight helps us understand not just whether issues are resolved, but how decisions are made along the way. 

“Observability gives us the confidence to scale these agents, continuously monitor performance, and make improvements as we learn from their interactions.”

For many enterprises, the toughest part of navigating the agentic AI wave is determining whether the technology actually solves a real problem. Danny Gunn, Head of Workforce Planning at Bet365, put it candidly:

“Part of the understanding of AI is the use case. It may sound great from the sales pitch, but does it actually work? There are quite a few [solutions] where we tried them and they don’t actually work, whether that’s because we’re not ready and our backend processes can’t use all of that or the technology isn’t quite as good as the sales pitch that we get to see.”

For organizations operating under financial constraints, the hype can create tension to turn to AI as a cure-all to deliver cost savings. Kim Baker, Head of Operational Support Services at UK housing association L&Q, noted that leaders are under “huge pressure to not spend too much money and save as much as we can.”

“Everyone just says AI as if it’s now the answer to everything, but I don’t think people really fully understand what AI is and what it might be able to do for them.”

Baker added a critical reminder that any organization considering agentic AI for automation needs to address “simple truths” before jumping on the bandwagon:

“There’s no point launching AI if your data is not right in the first place, because where’s it going to look to answer these questions?”

Without reliable data, even the most advanced agentic AI implementation will deliver inconsistent results, and undermine trust in the technology.

Understanding Where AI Truly Adds Value

The pressure to “have AI” is evident across the industry, often overshadowing the need for alignment with real organizational challenges. Keith Griffin, Cisco Fellow VP, noted how easily organizations default to AI without planning or frameworks: “It is very much about ‘we need to have some AI capability’ but not think deeply about where there’s evidence of where it [gets results] and some of the reasons why AI adoption scores.”

“Mismatched use cases, expecting AI to do things that it’s not very good at, or assuming that it can do more than possible,” all result in failed implementations, Griffin added. “People are getting caught up with which AI models should be used, and it really doesn’t matter… as long as it’s safe to use and an appropriate use for the organization.”

Chris Rainsforth, Director of Learning & Innovation at contact center industry body The Forum, noted that AI has become “a catch all” for any operational challenge and highlighted the pitfall of rushed deployments:

“What we’ve seen a lot of examples of, unfortunately… people trying to deploy something without understanding the problem they’re trying to solve. In the first instance, they spend a lot of money, they spend a lot of time, spend a lot of effort doing something, and then it doesn’t get the results.”

Leadership often grows frustrated when a costly AI project fails to deliver results, questioning why the investment isn’t paying off. Untangling those underlying issues then becomes a difficult and time-consuming process.

But encouragingly, more organizations are beginning to pause and reassess, Rainsforth said.

“On the flip side, we are starting to see more people take a more considered approach, going, ‘what are the outcomes? What am I trying to solve? Let’s then work back from that to understand what technology can enable us to deliver it.’ And AI might not be the answer to every problem. It might be something else.”

“People are starting to have those conversations be a bit more kind of thoughtful about that approach, rather than just wasting time and effort and money,” Rainsforth said.

Putting the Customer First in Tech Decisions

Ultimately, when leaders pay close attention to what their customers need, rather than what the market is hyping, they gain a clearer sense of which tools will genuinely improve experiences and which investments aren’t worth pursuing, several speakers emphasized.

Listening to customers provides the grounding needed to make purposeful, informed choices about where and how to deploy new technology, whether that’s agentic AI or other systems.

Frontline experience shows that customers don’t tend to share the industry’s fixation on AI-driven speed and automation; they’re simply looking for problems to be solved efficiently. As David Holmes, Director of Sales at UK utility SSE observed:

“I don’t have customers tell me, ‘I hope you hurry up with that AI’. I don’t have customers saying, ‘I hope you handle my call quicker’; customers care about the resolution, they care about the time on the phone. They do care about simplicity and I think most sales could benefit from all of that, and that’s where technology can help.”

Across discussions on the show floor, that theme consistently resurfaced. The path to meaningful AI adoption starts with understanding customer needs. When enterprises anchor technology decisions in real-world pain points rather than hype cycles, they’re more likely to avoid missteps and deliver measurable improvements.

Speakers pointed to the widening gap between aspiration and execution, especially as AI exerts increasing pressure to demonstrate innovation.

As Natalie Higgins, Solutions Sales Executive at NiCE put it:

“There’s an overload of data and a very short amount of time… frontline team managers, supervisors, executives are spending hours trying to mix all of this information together, but by the time they’ve done that analysis the opportunity has passed.”

The manual approach of the past no longer matches the pace of the environment. “The speed to deliver has changed,” Higgins said, “Using the manual, time consuming process does not make it easy for you to drive continuous optimization.”

Too Much Data, Too Little Clarity

Speakers acknowledged a repeating cycle. Enterprises face the same issues year after year but struggle to move forward. As one speaker put it, “Even though we’ve had the same challenges and outcomes for the last 10 plus years, organizations are stuck,”

“And why is that? Because there’s too much data that we don’t make enough sense of.”

Describing the challenge as “super hard”, Higgins noted that “demands keep increasing and the challenges are rising… the speed to deliver has changed, and that’s what makes it difficult.”

In the rush to respond quickly, teams confront a wall of questions: “Where is my data? What data do I have? And how on earth do I go about it for any particular solution?” Higgins said.

The issue is not the lack of data but the lack of time, capability, and coherence to make it usable.

“There is a massive disconnect between the strategic direction that a business wants a company to go in and actually, how do you get to that insight?” said Andrew Tucker, Solution Engineer at NiCE.

“You know that the data exists for you to be able to make the decisions and roadmap these initiatives.”

Data silos make it difficult to move with agility. “There is a massive time lag between ‘I want to achieve a certain thing,’ and ‘here is a roadmap for how you achieve that,’” Tucker added.

To make matters worse, “we’re layering on an extra level of complexity… caused by every single vendor out there… pushing the AI narrative.”

Data Connection, Not Just Collection

When it comes to data management, teams often lack the ability to translate it into meaningful action. “How do we make a data-driven decision… to be able to influence that?” Tucker asked, describing organizations that spend “weeks and months worth of work… to say what is happening, why it’s happening, and how do I forecast outcomes?”

Building bigger datasets won’t solve the problem. What matters is linking information in a way that reveals what’s really happening.

“This isn’t about data collection. This is about data connection,” Higgins said.

There is much debate in the industry about the level of data organization needed to be able to roll out AI-based applications.

Kim Baker, Head of Operational Support Services at UK Housing Association L&Q warned: “There’s no point launching AI if your data is not right in the first place, because where’s it going to look to answer these questions?”

When enterprises can get a handle on their data, they can draw out actionable insights, and AI can be a tool to help manage and extract data, making it AI-ready.

“Data is becoming more readily available. It’s more insightful. We can make better data driven decisions as organizations,” said Chris Rainsforth, Director of Learning and Innovation at The Forum.

“Some people haven’t caught up with that data yet and are still sitting back in that old way of thinking. That change will continue, and it’ll continue to drive us.

Marco Ndrecaj, Director of Customer Experience Management at Shared Services Connected, described large-scale operations facing overwhelming customer segments and datasets: “You’re like, oh my god, what am I looking at first? And I think that’s where the strength of AI comes to play.”

“Let AI take care of the data, take unstructured data, the structured data, and then turn it into insight. Once that’s done… let the human with empathy and with care to take it from there.”

As the conversations made clear, it’s imperative that enterprises turn data “overload into clarity,” and strike the right balance between automation and human judgement.

At Microsoft Ignite 2025, the company announced that its innovations for AI transformation were being introduced to Microsoft’s Frontier – its preview program for customers to gain early access to newer products. 

This agent is just one of several products Microsoft has announced to address security and compliance issues in AI agents. 

Sales Development Agent 

The Sales Development Agent is designed to advise sales teams in increasing their selling capacity. 

As a fully automated agent, this tool can be used to research, authorize, and handle outreach even after business hours, supporting steady revenue growth. 

This tool can work independently of a human agent, utilizing personalization for seller outreach with automated follow-ups to maintain client-seller relationships that extend beyond a company’s working time zone, as well as hand off leads to human sellers when needed. 

The agent operates through Microsoft’s security and compliance rules, ensuring that the tool can be utilized safely and efficiently in Microsoft 365 without security gaps. 

Microsoft has launched further security and compliance-focused tools to address frequent concerns around AI agents and how they operate around sensitive data. 

These tools are designed to be manageable and to monitor any suspicious activity, risky behavior, or possible threat to data exposure or accidental leaks, helping enterprises to govern their agents reliably. 

Other Security and Compliance Tools 

Entra ID 

Microsoft has announced that Entra ID has expanded its secure identity and access to adapt to the AI era. 

The tool allows users to manage accounts and resources securely, including multi-factor authentication for extra security checks, activity monitoring, and secure cloud workloads. 

It can also help guide at-risk users away from data threats, detect unauthorized AI usage, and prevent overprivileged agents from accessing controls. 

Defender 

One core component of the tool is to govern and protect AI agents across Microsoft’s ecosystem. 

As a unified platform for governance and threat protection, Microsoft Defender can offer protection across all environments where AI agents are active, deploying AI-powered security bots to monitor newer zones to forecast potential criminal activity. 

This includes safeguarding against any potential threats and vulnerabilities to an agent, as well as resolving and investigating incidents where necessary. 

Microsoft Purview

Alongside Entra and Defender, Microsoft Purview is included in Microsoft Agent 365 to ensure compliance across Microsoft. 

It is an AI-enhanced control plane component, in charge of handling recently deployed AI agents to prevent agent-specific risks, rather than being focused on human data. 

The tool also allows customer enterprises to view an agent’s status, their typical tasks and interactions, as well as their current risk level to prevent data loss.  

Foundry Agent Service

This tool includes built-in features to support security, oversight, and policy alignment, such as agent controls that limit the amount of data an AI agent can access. 

Foundry also provides security and compliance teams with real-time tracing and full insight visibility to investigate and review activity. 

It also works with other Agent 365 tools to handle threat detection and prevent data loss, ensuring that all agents are screened properly. 

Edge for Business Security Features 

The browser environment allows companies to hide information with a watermark overlay and set boundaries on web apps to stop data from being copied. 

These features can be used by organizations to secure sensitive information and prevent data leakage by aligning company policies to the tool. 

This can be monitored from within the Microsoft 365 admin center across various devices. 

Microsoft Ignite 2025

Microsoft Ignite will run from Tuesday 18th November to Friday 21st November in San Francisco. 

The company has emphasized its commitment to agentic AI and is set to showcase this message throughout the conference, as well as further touching on issues such as Security and Governance, and Identity and Access. 

You can find out more about the biggest CX announcements from Ignite 2025 here.

X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Spotify and payment giant Square were among those caught up in the fallout.

The trouble began just before 11:48 GMT, when Cloudflare posted that it was dealing with an “internal service degradation” causing intermittent outages across its service network. Users saw error pages, stalled logins, broken APIs, and sites claiming connections were blocked. There were a few conflicting signals about the restoration progress, as at one stage the company reported that services were beginning to recover, but then around 15 minutes later reverted to “continuing to investigate this issue.”

By 13:04 GMT, Cloudflare admitted that one of its fixes involved disabling WARP access in London entirely, temporarily cutting off users from its WARP performance-boosting and VPN service that helps secure and accelerate internet connections:

“During our attempts to remediate, we have disabled WARP access in London. Users in London trying to access the Internet via WARP will see a failure to connect.”

Cloudflare announced a fix five minutes later, but continued to receive “reports of intermittent errors” until close to 17:00 GMT.

Untimely Outage Exposes Weak Spots in Online Payments

While the broken pages and error messages got the immediate attention, the real pain from such outages often comes from the disruption to payment flows. Failed transactions, repeated payment attempts, and unclear confirmations create a backlog of problems that merchants have to untangle later.

As Monica Eaton, Founder and CEO of Chargebacks911 and Fi911, said, “When major websites hiccup, users notice. When payment processors flicker, the ripple effects get messier—and much less visible.”

When customers are unable to complete payments, or worse, the system wobbles cause duplicate payments, the chaos continues beyond the initial outage.

“What actually happens during an outage like this is messy. Customers retry purchases, cards get hit twice, confirmation pages stall, and suddenly you have a wave of confusion that turns into disputes. By the time the dust settles, merchants are left cleaning up charges they never intended to send in the first place.”

And the timing of this particular outage, during the shopping days leading up to Black Friday, caused further headaches, as Charlie Jackson, Executive Director of Gumpo Digital Marketing, pointed out:

“This is not just a typical server blip, this is a multi-million pound algorithm disruption hitting the digital marketing world at the worst possible time. With major e-commerce brands down and around 80% of our clients relying on Cloudflare, we had no choice but to immediately hit the pause button on high-spending PPC and paid social campaigns.

That will not only affect revenue on the day, but will have a knock-on effect on retailers’ performance over the Black Friday period, Jackson said, because advertising platforms like Google and Meta use machine learning. “When you interrupt high-performing campaigns, you essentially disrupt the algorithms’ constant flow of data needed to optimize budgets and target audiences effectively.”

The hours-long outage could cost the retail sector millions in disrupted campaigns and lost momentum during the biggest shopping event of the year.

“We’re in the most critical 10-day scaling window before Black Friday and this outage has once again flagged the impact CDN outages can have and that though they bring benefits on the whole, they do leave sites vulnerable and at the mercy of Cloudflare to resolve these issues,” Jackson said.

Repeated Cloud Outages Are Exposing Systemic Weaknesses

Cloudflare’s stumble, coming shortly after massive outages in the past month at AWS and Microsoft Azure that caused their own waves of disruption, has given more fuel to warnings over the dependence on a small number of global infrastructure giants. As Eaton noted:

“Cloudflare going dark today should snap every merchant back to reality. We keep building bigger online businesses, yet so much of that growth depends on a few invisible services holding everything together. When one of them goes down, even for a moment, the internet feels like a house with loose wiring. Lights flicker everywhere. Payments included.”

Mike Hoy, CTO at Pulsant, has warned that the concentration of workloads in the hands of so few providers creates systemic risk. His concern is twofold: the technological fragility and the lack of practical recovery planning among businesses. “Encouragingly, many organizations are already moving away from dependence on a single public cloud provider. Recent research from Pulsant reveals that 87% of businesses plan to partially or fully repatriate workloads over the next two years—up from 43% in 2021, according to Barclays.”

But that shift isn’t simple, as regulatory constraints, data transfer costs and platform lock-in all slow the transition. These outages expose the vulnerabilities of the current model and why a more competitive and distributed cloud ecosystem is needed, Hoy said.

“True resilience requires workloads to span colocation, private infrastructure, and public cloud. Colocation sites provide critical support when primary facilities fail. They offer regional diversity, robust physical security, and the connectivity needed to bridge private systems with cloud platforms.”

But this only works if recovery strategies stay consistent and coordinated. Otherwise, the slowest backup system becomes the bottleneck, Hoy added. As enterprises plan for the year ahead and beyond, they need to build recovery into their digital architecture.

Eaton stressed that businesses shouldn’t view infrastructure faults as rare surprises that leave them scrambling. Instead they should account for them as operational realities that need structure and preparation.

“Treat outages like this as part of normal operations instead of strange one-offs.

Practical steps can prevent minor glitches from turning into major financial cleanups: “Track failed and duplicate transactions. Talk to customers before they start guessing what went wrong. Make a quick log of what happened today so you are not trying to piece it together weeks from now when chargebacks start landing.”

Financial services have been especially rattled by the repeated outages. After the recent AWS outage disrupted several major UK banks, the Financial Conduct Authority warned that the UK needs to “strengthen” its oversight of foreign tech providers.

“The FCA’s latest warning underlines how heavily the UK’s financial system now relies on a small number of foreign companies to deliver the core digital services it depends on,” Vivek Dodd, CEO at Skillcast, said.

“Such disruptions expose not just technical faults but broader challenges around operational resilience and business continuity in a hyperconnected economy.”

While many financial institutions have made progress in digital transformation, their contingency strategies often still assume the reliability of third-party partners, Dodd noted. But “even the most sophisticated global tech firms are not immune to outages or cyber-attacks, and the consequences for customers and markets can be significant.”

Enterprise continuity and recovery plans should map critical dependencies and identify single points of failure, Dodd said. They should include layered contingency measures such as multi-cloud or hybrid hosting strategies, and proactive communication.

“Ultimately, resilience isn’t just about protecting systems; it’s about preserving customer trust and safeguarding organizational reputation in an increasingly digital world,” Dodd said.

Indeed, the underlying concern is bigger than a single provider’s bad day. Between AWS, Azure, and now Cloudflare, outages are coming more often, and the consequences are hitting more critical services.

The goal is to stay grounded and tighten the parts of the process that businesses can actually influence, Eaton said.

“None of this is about panic. It is about owning the risks you can control. Cloudflare had an outage today. Another provider will have one tomorrow. What matters is whether businesses learn from these moments or keep hoping luck will cover the gaps.”

Businesses need to wake up to the fact that the internet’s backbone rests on fewer pillars than most customers realize, and those pillars are wobbling more often.