Unified Communications (UC) continues to transform how organizations connect, collaborate, and engage with both employees and customers. As we move toward 2026, the pressures of hybrid work, AI-driven automation, and digital-first customer expectations are reshaping UC strategies.
Companies are seeking platforms that not only support seamless internal collaboration but also directly enhance customer experiences across every channel.
The shift toward distributed, mobile, and hybrid workforces demands platforms that reduce friction and maintain context across devices, channels, and teams. Employees are increasingly stepping in and out of conversations, juggling asynchronous and synchronous workflows, and relying on UC to bridge gaps that previously slowed productivity.
For our latest UC Roundtable topic, “Preparing for the Future of Unified Communications in 2026,” we spoke with experts and executives from RingCentral, CallTower, Vonage, and Wildix about how evolving workforce models, AI, and integrated UC ecosystems are shaping customer experience strategies.
We explored the challenges of hybrid work, the opportunities presented by AI and digital transformation, and how companies can ensure their UC investments drive both productivity and measurable outcomes.
How will evolving workforce models influence UC and CX strategies heading into 2026?
As workforce models become increasingly hybrid, mobile, and distributed, UC strategies must evolve to support both employee collaboration and customer engagement. Leaders emphasized that a seamless experience across channels, devices, and touchpoints will be essential for competitive advantage in 2026.
Jason Uslan, Chief Commercial Officer, Wildix
“The shift to fragmented, mobile, hybrid workforces will push UC and CX strategies toward simplicity and consistency. When employees move between channels and devices all day, the platform must make their experience seamless. That means shared context, instant access to past interactions, and tools that work equally well for a store employee, a clinician, or a remote agent. UC will need to serve every worker who shapes the customer experience, not just office staff. In 2026, the competitive advantage will come from reducing the friction customers feel when your workforce is constantly in motion.”
William Rubio, Chief Revenue Officer, CallTower
“As we look toward 2026, the workforce is increasingly distributed and digital, but the critical shift isn’t simply about location, it’s about capability. AI is transitioning from an active daily collaborator, embedded directly into platforms like Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Webex. This intelligence summarizes meetings, surfaces insights, and connects workplace conversations to business systems, allowing employees to focus on strategic impact rather than administrative tasks. The most significant strategic implication is the convergence of UC and CX. Employee collaboration now directly shapes customer outcomes, which is why a quarter of UC investments are already being funded from CX budgets. Organizations that thrive will be those that create unified ecosystems where frontline, back office and contact center teams operate with shared context, tools and intelligence.”
Carson Hostetter, Executive Vice President and General Manager, CX & AI, RingCentral
“As workforce models continue to shift permanently toward hybrid, organisations are being forced to reconcile the widening gap between how employees work and how customers expect to engage. The real impact isn’t just on employee-to-employee collaboration—it’s on the fractured experiences customers feel when tools, channels, and teams don’t operate as one. In 2026, UC and CX strategies will converge around a single mandate: deliver continuity. That means every employee, no matter where they work, needs the same context-rich view of the customer, and every customer interaction—across voice, video, chat, or self-service—must move forward, not restart. The winners will be organisations that treat hybrid work not as a constraint, but as a catalyst for building unified, intelligence-driven communication ecosystems. These platforms must finally eliminate the seams customers notice most.”
Reggie Scales, President and Head of Applications, Vonage
“Heading into next year, organizations are primed for a reset driven by economic uncertainty, a softer labor market, and heavy AI adoption in 2025. While return-to-office mandates continue, hybrid and distributed work is still prevalent throughout industries. With businesses up against tighter budgets and more fluid team structures, this will, in turn, raise the stakes for every employee and customer interaction. In 2026, organizations should reassess their UC and CX strategies to counter these pressures by treating business communications as a programmable engagement layer rather than just “one system” for team calls and meetings. A unified environment for calling, messaging, video, and conferencing will continue to be important, but the real differentiation will stem from an organization’s ability to embed programmable capabilities via APIs into these existing applications to level up customer engagement with a personalized experience at every touchpoint.”
How should UC platforms adapt to support seamless hybrid and asynchronous collaboration?
UC platforms must move beyond communication tools to orchestrate workflows across hybrid and asynchronous environments. Leaders noted that platforms need to capture context, synchronize information, and integrate voice, messaging, tasks, and AI to enable employees to step in and out without losing productivity.
Jason Uslan, Wildix
“Hybrid and asynchronous work demand UC platforms that take responsibility for alignment. That means automatically capturing context, summarising what happened, surfacing the next steps, and syncing it across every channel and device. Platforms must make information follow the user, not the other way around. They should integrate voice, messaging, tasks, and AI assistance into one flow so people can step in and out without losing the thread. If UC platforms want to support modern work, they need to stop adding features and start orchestrating the work itself.”
William Rubio, CallTower
“UC platforms must evolve from simple communication tools into intelligent collaboration hubs that support both synchronous and asynchronous work patterns. The key is creating seamless, secure connections across voice, video, messaging and workflow tools that work regardless of when or where people engage. Modern platforms need to enable agentic workflows – systems that can anticipate priorities, trigger actions and guide teams through complex processes without requiring everyone to be online simultaneously. This means embedding AI capabilities that can capture meeting context, automatically assign follow-up tasks and ensure critical information flows to the right people at the right time.”
Carson Hostetter, RingCentral
“Hybrid teams rarely ask for more technology; they ask for less friction. That sets a clear direction for UC platforms. The old model of separate phone, video and messaging experiences is giving way to orchestration platforms where context persists across every interaction. Colleagues need to pick up work without replaying entire conversations. That is where AI comes in. With the right human oversight, AI is already delivering ROI twice as fast, driven by automatic summaries, next steps and intelligent handoffs. Asynchronous collaboration becomes far more natural when meetings are transcribed, key actions are highlighted and missed sessions are easy to catch up on. And with voice still the preferred interface for a large number of professionals, platforms must make speaking, capturing and acting on a single experience foundational.”
Reggie Scales, Vonage
“Successful UC platforms in 2026 will need to shift toward deeper, out-of-the-box integrations with CRMs and productivity suites so that every interaction automatically feeds into a shared system. Hybrid teams, especially, will expect to move fluidly between channels and devices while still operating from one interface and directory, with an instant awareness of who is available and an ability to transfer or escalate conversations without any friction. Implementing features like click-to-dial, click-to-SMS, screen pops, and automated logging will be standard to ensure that when someone picks up a customer or project later on, they’re confidently inheriting the full details. In that context, the UC platform becomes the connective tissue between live interactions and asynchronous work to keep hybrid teams aligned on the same customer journeys, even when they aren’t online at the same time. As these environments become more connected, AI-powered copilots are also poised to play a larger role in guiding customers through next best steps and tapping into unified data so teams can hyper-personalize interactions with much greater accuracy.”
What impact will AI and digital transformation have on the future of UC-driven customer experiences?
AI and digital transformation are reshaping UC-driven experiences by reducing administrative burdens and enabling employees to focus on high-value interactions. Leaders agreed that AI will not replace people in most cases but empower them, allowing organizations of all sizes to deliver speed, clarity, and consistency.
Jason Uslan, Wildix
“AI is changing UC in a very simple way: it is giving people their time back. Most of what slows customer experience today is not the conversation itself. It is everything around it. Taking notes, updating systems, passing information between teams. AI removes that weight and suddenly the human on the call can focus on the person, not the process. The surprising part is how much this levels the playing field. A three-person clinic or a small shop can offer the same speed and clarity as a big organisation because the system carries the workload for them. In some instances, sure, AI will replace people, but in most it empowers them, and works alongside them by letting them show up better.”
William Rubio, CallTower
“AI and digital transformation are fundamentally redefining UC-driven customer experiences by breaking down traditional barriers between internal collaboration and customer engagement. I think the convergence of UC and CX represents the most exciting trend shaping 2026, creating unified ecosystems where employee interactions directly enhance customer outcomes. This transformation manifests through AI-enhanced routing that connects customers to the right resources faster, real-time analytics that provide agents with instant context and recommendations, and integrated systems that ensure every team member has access to the same intelligence and tools. Organizations implementing these integrated UC and CCaaS solutions are seeing faster resolutions, more informed decisions and measurably better customer satisfaction.”
Carson Hostetter, RingCentral
“AI is reshaping the entire customer experience journey – before, during and after each interaction. Before contact, smarter call handling, forecasting and staffing are reducing missed calls, unmanaged demand and early-journey abandonment. During the interaction, AI is supporting agents in real time with guidance, summaries and coaching, while keeping the experience simple and human rather than bot-heavy or fragmented. Afterwards, conversations are increasingly treated as a strategic data set, feeding insights back into routing, scripts and workforce plans. Digital workers, or AI agents, sit at the centre of this shift: 57 percent of organisations are using or testing them, 96 percent of those call them essential, and adopters report 64 percent faster resolution and 58 percent higher satisfaction. With CX-led AI initiatives delivering returns around three times higher than IT-led programmes, AI is fast becoming the engine of orchestrated, unified customer journeys.”
Reggie Scales, Vonage
“Features like AI-enabled virtual receptionists and assistants will increasingly handle a large share of front-line customer interactions with enhanced ability to understand natural language, capturing intent, routing, and passing full context so customers never have to repeat themselves. These assistants will advance to resolve issues faster than ever before, offer more personalized recommendations, and continue to free live contact center agents to focus on complex, high-value conversations that require a human touch. As agentic AI becomes more prevalent, these interactions will shift even further away from scripted workflows toward more fluid, outcome-driven exchanges. Because of this, human agents can devote their time to the high-empathy moments that build trust and strengthen customer relationships. AI will also be closely paired with UC, CRM, and daily business applications as digital transformation deepens in 2026.”
How can organisations ensure UC investments deliver measurable productivity and customer outcomes?
Leaders emphasized that measuring the right metrics—beyond calls or meetings—is critical to demonstrating ROI. Success depends on tracking outcomes that reflect both employee efficiency and customer experience, and designing platforms around high-value workflows.
Jason Uslan, Wildix
“Most organisations look at the wrong metrics. They count calls and meetings as if activity equals value. It doesn’t. Real productivity shows up in the moments you never see on a dashboard: the time someone didn’t waste updating a system, the customer who didn’t have to repeat themselves, the problem that didn’t bounce between departments. UC investments pay off when they remove friction from daily life. If employees feel lighter and customers feel heard, the returns are already happening. If nothing about the experience changes, then the technology was never solving the right problem.”
William Rubio, CallTower
“Organizations should start by establishing baseline measurements for critical metrics: meeting efficiency, task completion rates, resolution times, first-contact resolution and customer satisfaction scores. Then implement UC solutions that embed intelligence directly into daily workflows, reducing administrative friction and enabling employees to focus on high-value activities. The integration of UC and CCaaS platforms is crucial as it creates visibility across the entire customer journey while providing teams with unified tools and shared context. Teams that leverage the real-time analytics and AI capabilities within modern UC platforms can continuously monitor performance, identify bottlenecks, and optimize processes. We are seeing a rising trend of CX budgets funding UC investments reflects that effective collaboration infrastructure directly drives customer outcomes, making ROI measurement more straightforward and strategic.”
Carson Hostetter, RingCentral
“UC investments become meaningful when they are tied directly to performance, not just connectivity. Recent findings show AI payback now outpacing deployment timescales: around 6.7 months to ROI versus 7.5 months to full rollout. Agile SMBs are realising ROI 1.6x faster than enterprises, often because they’re integrating AI and UC straight into frontline workflows without the legacy constraints and approval layers that slow larger organisations. When your customer service team can deploy an AI assistant in days rather than quarters, the productivity gains compound quickly. The most effective organisations treat UC as a unified platform that connects collaboration, customer interactions, data, and automation. Every call, message, and meeting becomes a source of insight into resolution times, first-contact resolution, agent efficiency, and even revenue impact. Teams that report higher trust in AI—meaning they’ve seen it handle edge cases well, provide accurate summaries, and improve rather than disrupt their workflows—are achieving ROI roughly twice as fast. This demonstrates that the real step change comes when human talent and digital workers operate with shared context, shared goals, and shared measures of success.”
Reggie Scales, Vonage
“The organizations getting true returns from UC will decide which CX and productivity metrics matter most and build their UC environment around capturing those moments in a consistent way. That might begin with picking a handful of high-impact journeys, for example, how a customer reaches support or how a lead is passed from the marketing team to the sales team, and then configuring the platform around those workflows so the handoffs become as smooth as possible and conversations move to the right people quickly, so each interaction contributes to productivity gains. Many organizations mistakenly focus on internal Microsoft Teams metrics like adoption rates or call volume. To measure real customer impact, the focus must shift to external CX metrics. The most critical indicator is First Contact Resolution (FCR). Is your Teams strategy—and its integration with other tools—empowering agents and knowledge workers to solve issues on the first try, or is it creating new silos? Another could be an Agent Effort Score i.e., are integrations making the agent’s job easier, allowing them to find experts and information faster? Lower agent effort directly translates to lower customer effort and higher satisfaction.”
How must security and compliance evolve to support increasingly integrated UC ecosystems?
As UC ecosystems become more integrated, security and compliance are no longer just about protecting data; they must protect identity and ensure trust across every interaction. Leaders emphasized that modern UC requires zero-trust architectures, end-to-end encryption, and verification mechanisms that extend to voice, video, messaging, and AI-driven workflows.
Jason Uslan, Wildix
“Security in UC is no longer just about protecting data. It is about protecting identity. Anyone can imitate your voice, your face, even your mannerisms, and that makes the old security model useless. UC platforms now have to verify not only who is allowed into a system but who is actually speaking on the other end. That means voice identification, behavioural checks, and cross-channel confirmation becoming part of the everyday experience. It also means keeping sensitive communication data away from large language models that were never designed with privacy in mind. Trust will define the next generation of UC. If a platform cannot guarantee authenticity, nothing else matters.”
William Rubio, CallTower
“As UC ecosystems become increasingly integrated—connecting collaboration tools, customer engagement platforms, business applications and AI capabilities—security and compliance must evolve from perimeter-based protection to comprehensive, intelligent governance. The convergence of UC and CX creates expanded attack surfaces and more complex regulatory requirements, as the same systems now handle both internal collaboration and sensitive customer data. Organizations need security frameworks that provide seamless, secure connections across all channels—voice, video, messaging, and workflows—while maintaining end-to-end compliance across the entire ecosystem. This requires unified identity and access management, intelligent monitoring that can detect anomalies across complex workflows, automated compliance controls that adapt to different regulatory requirements, and data governance that maintains consistent protection regardless of where information flows. Modern UC ecosystems need zero-trust architectures, encryption across all touchpoints, and compliance frameworks that can scale with organizational complexity—all while remaining invisible to users engaged in productive collaboration.”
Carson Hostetter, RingCentral
“As UC, CX, and AI are pulled onto the same platform, security and compliance must evolve from static controls to something living and more integrated. A single customer journey might span messaging, voice, video, and an AI assistant in minutes—and the security model has to follow that journey end to end. That means organisations need one identity and access layer, consistent policies for recordings and transcripts, strong encryption in transit and at rest, and clear rules on how AI-generated insights are stored and used. RingCentral’s direction is a good indicator of where the market is heading: deeper zero-trust principles, expanded end-to-end encryption across phone, video, and messaging, and a dedicated Trust Center that makes security and compliance fully transparent.”
Reggie Scales, Vonage
“Next year will demand a layered and proactive security posture across UC systems that span workforce collaboration, CRMs, and contact centers, with baseline expectations like full encryption and relevant certifications that will be non-negotiable. However, organizations will lean more heavily on role-based access controls so users can see and change only what they need for their unique role. As the cybersecurity landscape continues to advance in 2026, authentication models like two-factor authentication (2FA) or Single Sign On (SSO) will evolve to silent, unseen verification methods. When the necessary preventative measures are put in place, businesses can view UC security as a more ongoing discipline that limits the risk of fraud and protects loyal customer relationships that teams work hard to maintain.”
