For a long time confined to the role of a channel, the voice now asserts itself as a critical source of data and intelligence. Driven by AI, it reshapes the balance between platforms, restarts competition among CRM, contact centers, and unified communications solutions, and allows new players to position themselves.
The end of a myth: voice has never disappeared
The narrative of a “voice comeback” has dominated vendor discourse for months. Yet it is misleading. In 2024, more than half of contacts are still handled by inbound voice calls, far ahead of email or chat. In contact centers, voice still accounts for about two-thirds of interactions, a remarkably stable share for more than a decade. In other words, voice has never ceased to be central; it was simply underutilized.
What changes today is its status. Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, every conversation can be transcribed, analyzed, and enriched in real time: intent detection, sentiment analysis, automatic generation of summaries. Voice no longer merely carries an interaction. It becomes a strategic asset, directly exploitable by information systems.
An asset built on a critical infrastructure
This transformation must not obscure an essential reality: the value of voice still depends on a complex infrastructure: call routing, queue management, service quality, recording and regulatory compliance remain at the heart of UCaaS and CCaaS platforms. They condition the ability to capture and exploit interactions under good conditions.
Voice thus presents a double nature: it is at once a strategic asset, by the wealth of data it generates; but also a strategic infrastructure, by the systems required to produce it. This duality fuels the current market reshaping.
CRM lying in wait to capture the value
Historically, vocal interactions fed CRMs retroactively.
AI changes the game. The major CRMs now natively integrate transcription, automatic summarization, and scoring of conversations, rather than treating voice as a simple follow-up note. Salesforce, Microsoft, and HubSpot are aiming to turn voice into native data, activatable in real time. Salesforce’s recent pivot toward the CCaaS Agentforce Contact Center perfectly illustrates this reshaping: the battle is no longer about features, but about control of conversational data.
A new generation of solutions that extends CRM by strengthening its ability to capture and activate conversational data is accelerating this evolution. AI voice agent solutions — PolyAI, Retell AI, Sierra, Bland AI, or Synthflow — connect directly to CRMs to qualify calls, generate summaries, and trigger actions without human intervention.
CRM thus evolves into a system of orchestration and decision-making, capable of capturing the value associated with this asset.
CCaaS: defending control of the interaction
In the face of the rising power of CRMs, contact center platforms defend their territory.
Players like Genesys, NICE, Talkdesk, Five9, 8×8, Cisco, and Vonage dominate market analyses. But in Europe, a core group of local players — Odigo, Eloquant, Diabolocom, Axialys, Content Guru, Puzzel — maintains a solid position, notably in critical environments and regulatory compliance requirements.
Their argument is clear: the value of voice cannot be dissociated from its operational management. The emerging conflict goes beyond technology. It raises a central question: who truly controls the customer interaction and the data that results from it?
UCaaS: bypassing through collaboration
A third player is also attempting to redraw the map: unified communications platforms.
In 2024, IDC estimates the global market for unified communications and collaboration at nearly $70 billion, with Microsoft alone representing almost 46% of market share. The installed base would reach 130 million UCaaS seats by 2028 according to Cavell, led by the American Teams, Zoom, and RingCentral. By comparison, Europe weighed just under 50 million seats in 2024, projected to nearly 80 million by 2030 according to Frost & Sullivan.
This critical mass makes it a powerful lever for diffusing advanced features: ACD, automation, conversational analytics — historically associated with CCaaS. Without necessarily claiming this positioning.
In Europe, this dynamic comes with strong fragmentation. Actors like Enreach, Dstny, NFON, or Gamma — which exceeds a million cloud seats in the UK — rely on partner networks to diffuse these usages.
UCaaS thus becomes a Trojan horse for introducing intelligent voice at scale, bypassing the traditional contact center circuits.
A new layer of AI players stepping in
Above the traditional platforms, a new category of players is emerging: specialists in conversational intelligence. Companies like Gong or Chorus have already built multi-hundred-million-dollar annual revenues solely on their ability to transform conversations into actionable data.
About a dozen players — Revenue.io, CallRail, Observe.AI, Verint, VoiceOps — compete in this segment, hooking into CRMs, dialers, or collaboration tools. By 2035, some analysts project a conversational intelligence market exceeding $90 billion, driven notably by use cases tied to commercial performance.
This dynamic is also visible in the emergence of European initiatives, often quieter but with differentiated approaches. Solutions like Fairwai — connecting to both collaboration tools and telephony systems — aim to structure all conversations into an exploitable knowledge base.
This evolution introduces a risk of disintermediation. If value concentrates in data analysis and activation, the traditional platforms could be relegated to mere infrastructure roles.
A global market, local realities
If these transformations are global, their implementation varies greatly by region. According to Accenture, in Europe only about 36% of AI and data projects require truly sovereign treatment, though this share concerns critical sectors like finance or the public sector.
Meanwhile, 65% of European organizations acknowledge they cannot stay competitive without resorting to non-European suppliers. This tension between sovereignty and performance structurally shapes the market. It results in greater fragmentation, a central role for partners and integrators, and high requirements for compliance and data hosting.
This configuration slows certain evolutions but also limits rapid value capture by a small number of global players. One certainty remains: the reshaping of the market remains open, between traditional actors (CRM, contact centers, and UC) and the new entrants of conversational intelligence.
Voice does not come back. It changes its nature.
It becomes a strategic asset, at the heart of information systems, operational decisions, and the value chain. But this asset has value only for those able to master its infrastructure, its transformation, and its activation.
In this new landscape, the question is not only technological. It is economic: who will capture the value of voice, and who will simply carry it? It is along this fault line that the market for enterprise communications is being redrawn today.
* Didier Lambert is the founder of the platform HubTic
