There are a number of pundits discussing CRM systems adding CCaaS and what that means for both CRM and CCaaS.

For my money, CRM systems are mainly crap. They are a closed environment with a lousy UX (user design). They are clunky and create resistance to use. CRM systems are closed for the benefit of the system. Your data is locked in their SaaS. Now you have to pay to access YOUR data in their system. Can you see how stupid that sounds?

To leverage AI, you have to have access to the data. The CRM data is rarely inside an open API environment, because Salesforce or Zoho or whatever want to keep that data inside their system. Now the CRM customers have to use marketplace partners to do anything with THEIR own data.

You want to have AI play with your CRM data? Good luck. Most CRM systems are designed so you have to use their AI Agents and GenAI on YOUR data in their system.

Now CRM providers wants to go to the contact center with their closed system. So now all of your customer data will be locked up. Make it make sense.

CRM software is just a user interface to your SQL data. Today, with Lovable, anyone can design their very own interface to that data. Why be forced to use a clunky interface to input and output your own data? Before the pandemic, SLINGR.io was designing UI’s for businesses to make customer CRM systems. All the customer data sat in an SQL database. Any business that did that would be so far ahead of the game today because all of their data would be in an easily accessible database.

I think for a while, maybe 3 years, SF will win this battle in the enterprise but when Millennials reach the C-suite, that will start to unwind. This generation grew up with the iPhone and don’t like the clunkiness of Windows nor do they like Android – mix that with the advancement of AI coupled with the significance of owning your own data – and this all falls apart.

With CCaaS, while the data is contained in a closed system, the analytics and wallboards allow people to see their data.

Call recording is mixing with AI for transcription, sentiment analysis and more. With the advent of vCons, businesses will be able to own their own call recordings as well as every conversation in a JSON format with metadata. This will be separated from the CCaaS platform, but available to all of the systems: UCaaS, CCaaS, AI and CRM.

Strolid uses vCons to capture omni-channel conversations, record it all, transcribe it all and dump it all into the CRM record (in Zoho). AI touches every conversation for insights and analysis – and ultimately for sales.

When I talked to companies that are Platinum partners with CCaaS vendors, vCons were a way for them to add great value to their customers by giving them their data back and allowing the AI of their choice to eat all the conversational data.

In many ways, the CRM providers are looking for anyway to add value and relevancy, but it is still a closed system.

Ticketing systems have expanded as well. Every software company bloats, making perhaps good-enough software that sits in one interface instead of making an easy open API in order for data to flow. Kind of like 8×8 and Nextiva adding a diet CRM to their CCaaS system.

When you think about it, the bloat doesn’t say much for the category leader, right? If Salesforce made a truly great product that was easy to use and people liked it, there wouldn’t be 1,600 CRM providers in the US alone as of 2025. But  it is the same with any software – there are 2000+ UCaaS providers, many of them also offering CCaaS and CPaaS and soon Agentic AI. There were over 2000 Agentic AI companies funded since 2024. It is a noisy environment for a Buyer to choose from.

I think when you consider the price for both CRM and CCaaS per user and yet the company doesn’t have access to the data. I think THAT will be the swinging point. Some companies have already figured this out and are in the process of extracting themselves from SaaS to Probase and their own LLMs. In a few years, this will be normalized.

All that said, Avaya and Mitel are still around because who would want to godfather the project to replace that rat’s nest of duct tape and bailing wire to move to a more streamlined and modern system? It will be the same with CRM. I remember when Siebel was the enterprise CRM choice. But in this case, Data will be the lifeblood of any organization. At some point all that data will be extracted from silos and SaaS systems and back to the org’s data lake.

From Dave on LinkedIn:

I saw another LinkedIn post about a vendor helping Partners sell to Enterprise.  It is exhausting to see this.

Historically, the Channel was built to handle SMB. Cisco and Microsoft had locked accounts – government, education, manufacturing, and  Enterprise. That left the certified partners 99.8% of the market to service and sell to.

When I started as a telecom agent in 1999 selling BellSouth, partners could not sell to Large Business because SMB funded the commissions. There were many businesses that Partners were locked out of.

Alternative vendors like CLECs opened it up for partners but even the alternative vendors had channel conflict come up with Education, Healthcare and Large business.

There is another part of this that most don’t grasp. Agents or Trusted Advisors are very small business. They typically sell to other small business. They like the transactional nature of telecom. Quick sales. Quick commissions. Not much pre-sales work or post-sales work. This goes for broadband, POTS, SIP Trunks, and the like.

One key point: they are Motivated by this activity of getting ink frequently.

Now go up the ladder to UCaaS. Pre-sale work, post-sale work, longer sales cycle, follow up required. SPIFFs with qualifiers. Commission or SPIFF clawbacks. Now this is getting complicated — and we are still selling to small business.

Note that more sales skills are required as you go up the ladder of products and services. Not every partner has those sales skills. Not every partner is going to remain motivated to sell those services.

To get to Enterprise, as a sales rep you have to like the long game. You have to enjoy the dance. The budget cycles, the networking, the follow up, the planning. In many cases, there are expense management projects that must be done in order to win the deal. Not every partner wants to handle TEM.

The sales cycle is longer, but so is the pay out… maybe.

Enterprises like to do pilots or POC (proof of concept) which largely are not commissionable. This is more time in the sales cycle. More effort. More follow up. More risk. All without getting paid.

I have done enterprise. I don’t enjoy it. Figuring out which project is real – or more precisely, which project the CTO or CIO or VP of Whatever is being bonused on. There isn’t much about selling to Enterprise I enjoyed. There are partners who do enjoy it. And the super-agencies like Bridgepointe, Upstack and Bluewave are built to support that kind of sales cycle and prospect. The smaller agencies may not be.

I have found that the larger clients require a lot of post-sales work. After the sale, I have had to track inventory for the client; handle all support tickets; maintain historical data for when the IT Admin cycles; and so much more. They also are slow payers. I spend more time chasing payments for large clients than I do for small ones. When they don’t pay, the partner doesn’t get paid.

Historically, partners were built for SMB and that is why about 85% still sell to SMB. When you consider that 99.8% of the market is SMB, someone has to service to that segment. Partners, especially smaller agencies, are motivated by quick hits. They aren’t looking for a home run or a touchdown. They like hitting singles or catching a 5 yard slant. SMB all day, every day.

When you have a large client, a lot of your revenue comes from one customer. That isn’t a great strategy.

 

We are almost done with Q1 in 2026. It went by fast. Most of the air in the room has been about AI. Let me take a stab at where opportunity lies with partners for Q2 and beyond.

There are 400M Office365/Microsoft Teams users globally. Maybe 30M are voice-enabled. That leaves a big opportunity to add voice and texting to Teams – even as small as a 9 person office!

Copper is going away. I know we have been hearing it for years, but by the end of 2029, AT&T is expecting it to all be retired. The FCC has approved this. POTS Replacement is hitting mainstream as ads are going to businesses about the retirement. That’s about 8M lines. Don’t forget FWA (fixed wireless access – 5G, satellite and mmWave.

MDU – dorms, apartments, condo complexes, senior housing and other multi-dwelling units. With the housing crisis, more and more apartments are being built. There is always an opportunity to sell internet, voice, managed wi-fi, physical security, and smart building.

Colocation is big right now. Moving IT infrastructure into data centers is still happening especially with businesses who are repatriating servers from the cloud due to cost, security or compliance. Smart businesses are using private LLMs. Best place for cooling, power and bandwidth = data center.

CX (Customer eXperience) – if you can do solution selling – is a large opportunity. Businesses are uplifting from UCaaS and CCaaS to CX and AI. There are a lot of moving parts to this: UC+CC, conversational CRM, chatbots and agents, and data projects. There are many experts at this; don’t feel like you can’t bring one in.

Compliance as a service might be something to consider.

Analytics and Data.

Payments, POS, PCI compliance – this arena is also hot.

Of course, cybersecurity, if you want to go that way. From Pen Testing for Cyber Insurance (SeCAP) all the ways to UTM and other acronyms. Just learning the vernacular takes some time.

Managed IT is also an something the SMB market is hot for.

So many avenues to help businesses with their technology needs.

 

AT&T Pledges $250 Billion for New Infrastructure Improvements.
The company says it’ll invest the money over five years to expand its networks, including a bigger push into rural satellite service.

“AT&T said it will expand its rural coverage through its AST SpaceMobile partnership,” which isn’t exactly expanding the 5G network.

AT&T is buying spectrum from Echostar for $23B. DISH was supposed to build the 4th cellco but Charlie crashed and burned. Now Charlie is selling off DISH/Echostar spectrum to pay down debt.

But AT&T will rely on satellite connectivity for rural according to the news.

“The company also said in its spending announcement that it’ll continue building out FirstNet, an emergency network built specifically for first responders that includes built-in security controls.”

AT&T already spends $6B on legacy and $20-22B on 5G and IP networks annually. So that is half the $250B total. Add in the $23B for spectrum and the $5.75B for Lumen’s FTTH business and we are more than halfway there. This announcement sounds great but when you boil it down, they expanded territory with the Lumen purchase and they still have a lot of copper to replace with fiber.

They are third in cellular behind VZW and T-Mo. They need to do some work shoring up the 5G network to compete.

In comparison of a different 5 year span, “AT&T invested more than $145 billion in its wireless and wireline networks between 2019 and ​2023 as ​telecom operators raced to expand high-speed connectivity.” [source]

With $136B in debt how does $125B more make sense over 5 years?

Also, “AT&T has secured the largest share of BEAD funding for fiber build‑outs, winning about $1.06 billion, according to New Street Research.” It will need to match 30% – or $300M not B.

AT&T operating income fell 7.25% to $6.1B in Q3 2025 despite fiber broadband revenue growing 16.8%. AT&T’s Advanced Connectivity segment produces 95% of EBITDA and grows at 6% annually versus 3% consolidated.

The FCC is about to rule that the ILECs can decommission copper faster. That certainly helps the POTS Replacement group – Granite, Ooma, Telcloud. It accelerates the amount of fiber AT&T has to deploy at a time when they are shutting off high-high margin customers on the copper network.

Side note: cellular, fiber and advanced services like VoIP are non-union. Traditional telco like copper was CWA union work. The faster they get rid of copper, the faster they get rid of the union.

Some AT&T stockholders are peeved because AT&T lost $47B on media assets sold in 2022. The Ellison family is now acquiring those assets for $111B. “AT&T acquired the bundle for $108.7 billion in 2018 and exited for roughly $43 billion in 2022, booking a $47 billion loss in the process. The Ellison family is now paying $111 billion for those same assets.”

AT&T (the LD carrier) bought cable companies in the late 1990s from TCI and MediaOne – names AT&T Broadband – before selling it to Comcast in 2002.

Tech Layoffs are on the rise. People are training their very replacements.

“They’ve been screen recording every senior engineer’s coding sessions since October. Building training data for the offshore team.”

“All the L5s and L6s who’ve been building the knowledge extraction systems. 1,200 engineers who documented their own workflows into training datasets”

“One L7 told me he spent his final two weeks creating detailed prompt libraries and workflow documentation. Thought he was being helpful for the transition. Turns out he was literally training the AI agent that replaced his entire org. The contractors offshore are using his exact prompts …”

Then the C-Suite off-shore it to Pakistan. (What happened to Made in the USA?)

We will wake up in Q3 and realize our economy is cratered. No matter what Layoff Tracker you use, the tech industry has lost 50K jobs in 2026. No new jobs are available because of AI right-sizing.

Profits are at an all-time high and rising, so the layoffs appear to be just to squeeze more juice from the lemon.

The thing I cannot wrap my head around: our economy is 66% of GDP. If layoffs are increasing and no (real) new hiring is occurring, what do you think happens to that 66%?

Entry-level jobs are in decline so college grads are not finding jobs either. People are unemployed longer than six months.

The employees who are remain post-layoff are told: if you can’t 10x productivity with Claude and Cursor, you’re already dead. They will burn out employees in no time, then fire them. Am I missing something?

Meanwhile, these 2 examples of AI burning companies: (1) at Amazon: “Amazon’s own AI coding agent Kiro reportedly “decided” the fastest way to fix a config error was to delete the entire production environment. Gone. A 6-hour outage. 6.3 million orders lost.”   and (2) at McKinsey: “Red-teamers used AI to gain full access to McKinsey’s chatbot in two hours. CodeWall accessed 46.5 million plaintext chat messages about strategy, mergers and acquisitions, and client engagements. The agent also obtained 728,000 confidential client data files, 57,000 user accounts, and 95 system prompts controlling the AI’s behavior.”

I am not entirely convinced that every document, file, prompt, data set entered into an LLM is walled off in the pay window. I believe it is all fed back into the Sentience and available for the right prompt. Think how many times Meta, Google, Amazon, et al ever stepped over the privacy line? Every. Single. Time.

There there are the surveys and studies about how enterprises are fed up with AI since the hype outpaces the reality. That may be due to (1) lack of available data due to silos and proprietary software; (2) lack of employee training on AI; and (3) employee fear of AI. But if the hype isn’t real, why are all these layoffs happening?

And again where does this go?

We will have another generation of college grads with huge loans and no way to pay them off.

When you consider how much advertising gambling does – and the Robinhood app is an addictive gambling app as well – maybe the whole point is to keep the populace broke. Can’t afford bullets if you are broke right?

But then how does the economy run?

When Amazon is laying off between 16,000 and 40,000. Oracle is laying off 20-30K. These employees had email, SMS, DID, tools, SaaS – so now the SaaS providers and the CSPs have to turn down at least 36K seats, at multiple providers. That will affect SF, Zendesk, Wiz, Microsoft, Atlassian. These companies are also announcing layoffs. And around and around we go. But the revenue will decline for all SaaS and monthly recurring revenue.

And if we are just using Lovable and REPLIT, why does anyone need to pay for CRM or any portal? That is outer edge thinking there.

Many developers are not going to be able to transition into AI operators. It is a different skill set. So what do they do?

I just don’t see a great short-term future here. What am I missing?