When GenAI arrived on team collaboration platforms, widespread fear was generated that hard-earned skills – along with the employees that cultivated them – would be displaced.
Those fears continue to soften as GenAI increasingly earns recognition as a tool that makes workers more productive. Productivity enhancements have been delivered largely through a proliferation of virtual assistants involving every major competitor. These assistants represent the centrepiece of a ‘permeate the platform’ approach that has competitors sprinkling GenAI features across their full portfolios. With team collaboration platforms increasingly becoming saturated with GenAI in 2024, the stage is set for noteworthy developments in 2025.
Agentic AI next in the collaboration line
Agentic AI, which debuted in the latter half of 2024, is an advanced form of AI featuring agents that perform tasks independently on behalf of users. 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. Agentic AI can also learn from experience.
As with GenAI, vendors will introduce Agentic AI capabilities rapidly in 2025, climbing from its current, nascent state to appearing platform-wide seemingly overnight. Workers will initially feel trepidation that the power of Agentic AI will make their skills – and themselves – obsolete. However, they will soon discover that, as with GenAI, Agentic AI makes them far more productive and will thus fully embrace the technology.
Contact centres are pivoting
The contact centre space is transforming with a greater focus on customer experience. Contact centres are pivoting from agent-centric to self-service, from transaction-based to relationship-based, from generic to personalised, and from multichannel to omnichannel.
GenAI lies at the heart of this transformation providing self-service capabilities and proactive recognition of customer needs, equipping agents with knowledge required to fulfil complex inquiries, and offering supervisors with insight regarding interactions between customers and agents. In 2025, the concept of a ‘contact centre’ will continue to yield to the broader concept of ‘customer experience’.
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By GlobalDataRivals in the team collaboration space are aligned in stuffing their platforms full of GenAI features. But when it comes to affixing a price tag to those features, they either charge a monthly per-user fee or include features as part of established subscriptions at no additional cost.
With GenAI quickly being woven into the fabric of society, in 2025 GenAI features will become regarded as ‘standard issue’ on team collaboration platforms and no longer worthy of commanding a premium. Because the costs incurred in providing these features will remain, a ‘bait and switch’ will occur with additional fees for GenAI evaporating only to be baked into a higher platform subscription price.
A growing need for collaboration solutions
The part-time, return-to-work policies issued by many companies has necessitated a mobile workforce with a mix of employees in the office and remote locations and others oscillating between the two.
Employees desire a single phone number with the ability to make and receive calls through their smartphone native dialer or desk phone. They also want to ‘escalate’ a call to a meeting held in an app or on a device such as a laptop or tablet. In 2025, there will be a growing need for collaboration solutions that enable workers to seamlessly communicate between mobile and landline devices as well as pivot between calls and meetings.
