Providing a service isn’t easy. Success often depends on single choices that cascade and scale. Commit too much or to the wrong thing and you can’t stop a GTM motion even if you wanted to. Commit too little and you’re stuck being the one that delivers the plumbing for pennies on the dollar. In either case you’re often left depending on someone else in ways that leave you exposed or stuck with growing list of self-build consequences in the medium-long term.
Industries continue to collide, capability and complexity continue to spiral upwards together in parallel and AI is gaining. more of the spotlight. All of this makes building an accurate service story which looks 1, 3, 5 or 10 years into the future all incredibly difficult. And currently where providers want the pages of their story to read ‘Boosted revenue, simplicity, automation, success’, they are in fact headlined with ‘Disruption, ownership confusion, worrying politics, rising uncertainty, cost’ as they jump into the deep-end of AI deployment.
Every provider has an AI story, whether the ink is still wet or not…But a lot of those stories are still unfinished, or even worse are unwittingly doomed to become a tragedy.
So what choices can you make as a provider to ensure success with intelligent communications? What should you avoid to ensure that your story has a happy ending?
Great news! The UCaaS market is still growing. In fact, it grew around 7% globally last year with installed UC seats expected to reach nearly 80 million in the next four years with a market size CAGR of 7.8% from 2024 through to 2030.
If that wasn’t enough numbers for you, here’s the downside - Per-seat economics are rapidly deteriorating. That seat growth is combined with a worrying margin attrition which already has around 36% of CSPs citing a reduction in UCaaS ARPU in more mature geographies and are seeing a decline of 5-6% per year in the business telephony market.
The answer to restoring margin then isn’t in the seat, it’s in everything you wrap around it, because intelligent value-adding services are soon going to outpace the returns you get from core offer. But ‘just add more stuff’ isn’t a good enough answer to the question of how you survive, so here’s a little more nuance to consider when it comes to adding AI to what you already have.
Above all, any functionality that you wind into your stack should work around everything you’ve spent years building and improving. After all, you’re already enabling all of the data, all of the information, all of the conversations that voice AI depends on to function – You just have to unlock it.
Anything that has been built with service providers as an afterthought will never function how you want it to. Yes, the front end may work and keep your customers happy but anything that isn’t fully fit for provider purposes is going to cost you more and more in deployment, billing, integration, upkeep and engineering.
It’s hard to see over the current wave of exploratory AI, but you should also consider how you also want to evolve after the goldrush period is over. How you want to evolve your services in your ‘next after next’ steps also rely on your AI functions being part of your DNA rather than a bolt on.
The intelligence you deploy also needs to function perfectly where your base already lives. Even if you can get your hands on an AI function that does everything you want it to, if it doesn’t perform for your current customers then it may not be fit for purpose.
Anybody that’s been around the communications block knows that if you want to be resilient, you’re going to have to stay ahead of the whims of external forces. Whether that means having to keep up with changes in the platforms you integrate into or the politics and governance of the countries you reside in, you will have to remain compliant with the rulebook that someone else is writing.
Most notably, European sovereignty has quickly become a major selling point. This isn’t because of a sudden surge in continental patriotism, it’s because sovereign solutions can safely say “We are resilient against foreign policy influence”. Sovereignty is now a moat that European providers can use to defend themselves against even the most aggressive hyper-scalers coming out of the US, so it makes sense that it has to be baked into your intelligent services.
Communications Service Providers that have taken a running jump into the AI pool have been able to deploy rapidly and get seats filled. What they’ve also done is pinned themselves into a corner where they’re yet to make any money or really move the customer satisfaction needle in any meaningful way. Will they start generating revenue in time? Of course they will. Will they probably regret not getting it right the first time? Almost certainly.
But getting it right from the start isn’t nearly as important as getting it right every financial year from here on out. Your success plan shouldn’t be measured in quarters. Any intelligent solutions you add need to be matching you till the final letter of your final page.
The Dstny Intelligence suite ticks all the boxes for providers looking to build next-gen voice services.
Comprised of Call Intelligence, CRM Intelligence, Conversational Intelligence and Call Recording Intelligence, providers can now maximise value from every conversation. Ensuring that every interaction is captured, structured and put to work.
With it, you can:
If you’re looking to add intelligence to what you deliver to the market, make sure you get in touch.