8×8 has added AI-powered video meeting features to its XCaaS communications, collaboration and contact centre platform to enhance productivity and efficiency.
The new capabilities allow users to leverage AI-boosted real-time transcriptions, smart summaries, and follow-up action items for improved collaboration during and after meetings. These latest features underscore 8×8’s commitment to platform innovation, emphasizing the company’s dedication to providing an AI-driven contact centre and unified communications service.
Hunter Middleton, Chief Product Officer at 8×8, commented:
Our continued AI-led innovations are motivated by our desire to provide organizations with the technology and solutions that make their customer engagement, communication and collaboration efforts more effective and efficient. These AI enhancements to the 8×8 XCaaS platform underpin exactly what we’re striving to achieve – superior employee and customer experiences – and we are deeply committed to bringing to market features that add value to our customers.”
The list of new features includes smarter meeting summaries that enable asynchronous information sharing and easy follow-ups by suggesting next steps and action items, as well as meeting highlights and snapshots.
Meanwhile, meeting participants can experience more enriched and meaningful conversations as well as productive meetings facilitated by intelligent and seamless meeting transcriptions. These transcriptions can distinguish between speakers and suggest actionable insights, reducing the need for redundant and time-consuming tasks like manual note-taking.
Lastly, improved tracking is introduced, meaning users can link meeting artefacts directly to CRMs, such as Salesforce, for simple and centralized access, tracking, and reporting.
What Was The End of 2023 Like for 8×8?
October saw 8×8 introducing a wave of innovations to its XCaaS platform, including Microsoft Teams integrations and new meeting capabilities.
Perhaps the most notable was the release of the 8×8 Phone App for Microsoft Teams, which allows PSTN calling without requiring per-user Teams Phone licences, desktop plugins, or additional software outside Teams. Using 8×8’s direct routing service, it provides native calling within Teams.
8×8 also launched video enhancements in a meeting solution for up to 10,000 participants at events such as town halls, auctions, and other large audience events. Meanwhile, work usability and interface enhancements encompassed new call recording filters, the potential of importing personal or business contacts from Office 365 and Outlook into 8×8 Work for desktop, an improved microphone Automatic Gain Control (AGC), and embedded call quality alerts for the status of connections.
In November, CCaaS and CPaaS took centre stage for 8×8 in its latest earnings call, as it signalled it was “migrating” away from being “UC-led”.
8×8 met or exceeded estimates for total revenue for FY24 Q2 ($185 million), with Samuel Wilson, CEO at 8×8, saying that 8×8’s CPaaS business was “a significant driver of the quarter-on-quarter growth” for the company, while the adoption of 8×8’s recently launched CCaaS product portfolio continued to accelerate. However, the impact of its CCaaS and CPaaS arms towards 8×8’s Q2 results also reflected the changing contributions of its UCaaS services as the company sought to move away from UC as its business nucleus.
“We are transforming our organization as our go-to-market motions, migrating from UC-led to contact centre-led, and from a single product focus to a portfolio of products,” affirmed Lisa Martin, Chief Revenue Officer at 8×8.
