The recent Enterprise Connect 2025 event covered trends in team collaboration and communications as well as product and service announcements from a variety of competitors. As in recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) dominated the discussion, demonstrating that the technology continues to play an oversized role on competitors’ platforms, according to GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.
Gregg Willsky, Principal Analyst, Enterprise Technology & Services at GlobalData, comments: “The COVID-19 pandemic drove the ascent of team collaboration and communications platforms, and competitors responded with successive rounds of feature wars. Cooler heads eventually prevailed, and a ‘truce’ was issued in the form of interoperability between rival platforms. Now, things have come full circle with competitors reaching deep into the AI ‘treasure trove’ and circulating AI features platform-wide.”
At this year’s event, agentic AI was the hottest topic. Agentic AI is an advanced form of AI that stretches beyond merely generating content, featuring agents that perform tasks independently on behalf of users ranging from the mundane to the complex.
Willsky continues: “Agentic AI debuted in the second half of 2024 and is already considered to be the next big phase of AI. Agentic AI can act autonomously, make decisions, and take actions without human intervention. It can adjust its approach based upon new information or changing circumstances. It seems that every competitor is leveraging agentic AI in some shape or form.”
Pondering competitors’ overall AI initiatives yields a couple of interesting lessons.
Willsky concludes: “First, competitors have been busy loading their platforms with AI capabilities but have failed to articulate what differentiates their AI from the pack; they each need to formulate a compelling message that makes clear why customers should choose their respective platform.
“Second, competitors make a lot of noise touting the dizzying variety of AI features they provide but are far quieter when it comes to discussing customer support. Competitors need to do a far better job of articulating what programs and resources they have in place to facilitate customer adoption.”
