The strategic co-engineering alliance between Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) and Microsoft marks a watershed moment  for enterprise technology, customer experience (CX), and contact centre architecture in Australia. As the nation’s largest financial institution deepens its integration with Microsoft Azure and generative artificial intelligence capabilities, the deal offers a blueprint for how large enterprises intend …

AI agents are reshaping customer service, particularly across chat and messaging. But when something goes wrong, when stakes are high and time is short, Australians still turn to the tried and tested phone call to resolve their issue. Yet itʼs the channel most organisations have been slowest to bring into line with broader customer expectations. …

The Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) market is undergoing its most profound transformation since the initial migration from on-premise infrastructure to the cloud. While the initial wave of CCaaS adoption was driven by IT modernisation and hardware end-of-life cycles, the current landscape is defined by the rise of agentic AI, changing customer expectations, and …

For the last year or so, there’s been plenty of discussion around OutcomenBased Pricing (OBP) in CCaaS and CX. Rather than paying for user licences or token usage to add AI capability to existing software systems, organisations are charged based on the results achieved by AI agents. The pricing model has met with significant scepticism. …

Contact centres have traditionally trained people on the easy cases first. A new employee learns systems, product rules, tone, and escalation by handling routine interactions before taking on angry customers, complex exceptions, or high-stakes complaints. Agentic AI reverses that training sequence because the easiest cases are the first to disappear. CXFocus’s coverage of agentic AI …

The enterprise Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) market is undergoing its biggest structural shift in more than a decade. For years, traditional vendors have held a grip on customer experience (CX) budgets, charging, per-seat licensing fees for dedicated application suites. That model is now being dismantled. Hyperscalers, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google …

The contact centre market across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region is entering a new operational phase. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI), coupled with the expansion of hyperscalers and modern customer experience (CX) platforms, are accelerating a transition away from traditional telephony-first and interactive voice response (IVR) operating models. In their place, organisations are deploying AI-enabled …

In the past, mention AI to an executive, and they will likely picture a traditional rules-based chatbot or a standard text-completion copilot.The arrival of sophisticated, multi-modal AI frameworks and cognitive computing has shattered those old paradigms, shifting the conversation from simple automation to true operational autonomy.  In an insightful industry interview, David Russell, General Manager, …

The enterprise contact centre market is undergoing its biggest structural shift in more than a decade, according to the newly released 2026 APAC Contact Centre CX Platforms with AI Buyers Guide from independent research and advisory firm, CrayonIQ. The report finds organisations are no longer simply selecting contact centre platforms. Instead, procurement is increasingly driven …

Three decades ago, the contact centre industry was bound to physical facilities. In these bustling, centralised hubs, rows of agents sat side-by-side, handling simple, straightforward voice calls within rigid brick-and-mortar constraints.  Workforce management (WFM) was a rudimentary administrative task, largely limited to basic time-and-attendance tracking and simple shift allocations. The operational landscape was uncomplicated, as …