8x8 at NASDAQ w/ CTO Bryan Martin

Before I answer that, I want to thank you for coming to the event. It's always great to spend time with you. We haven't been able to do this often enough in the last... it's been a while, always on video, and it is what it is. So, Communications for the customer obsessed. It's really talking about... it's not that we're only doing contact center. We still are a UCaaS company at our core; we've been doing it for more than 20 years. The last few years we talked about blending those two together, and we've been evangelizing that concept a lot more. But I think the change you're going to see going forward with our new CEO Sam, and what you heard today, is we're going to lead with contact center. Contact center is the tip of the spear, and then we bring the rest of the platform along. There was a wonderful slide, I forget who presented it, actually it wasn't you, but it was somebody else who presented that 50% of the customer conversation is not in the contact center. Amazing piece of data. It's things like account managers, customer success people, billing, collections, and department people. You have all parts of your organization talking to your customers all the time, and it's important that those people have the right tools just like the people in the contact center have the right tools. So Communications for the customer obsessed is really more of a continuation of the UCaaS concept that you were doing before. But as you know, most of the innovation in our industry is happening in contact center applications. We're seeing the same thing with our R&D efforts. So it's really just a follow-through on that.

Look, multi-year, many, many years effort that we feel we've gotten to a place where we're very happy. We're out there with a five nines SLA service level agreement with our customers across the entire platform. We weren't able to do that in the old days. I said 20 years, so we go back to pre-public cloud, pre-iPhone. When you guys rang the bell, when you closed the market, it said something like 25. You guys are 25 years. '97 is when we went public. Business is in our sector, and so if you're a tech company, you don't re-platform yourself every four years. You get tech debt like no one's business. I'm not saying we had a lot, but we are at a point, and to deliver the things we're going to talk about in the contact center applications, you have to be modern. You can't do this stuff on outdated. So again, we went from hosted data centers when we started, started going into the public cloud in 2015. When you started 25 years ago, you were a hardware company. You've gone through this before, a few transformations. But from a delivery standpoint, instead of doing four contact center releases a year, which is not that long ago, that's what we were doing. We're literally doing thousands per month. We put up another slide, it's one of my favorite ones, which said zero customer-found defects. That's something our CEO Sam looks at every day: how many defects did our customers find? And when we do find a defect, because they are there, we're able to push it to a customer in minutes. That was really impressive when you're talking about that.

No, and we fell into the same bear trap. It wasn't that long ago I was hiring data scientists out of the Watson group at IBM, and we started down that path of 'oh, we can build it better.' But I think Sam shared some data which was amazing: the amount of R&D investment, venture capitalists, startups, really smart people. I like to say we employ the smartest people on the planet in communications, but it's hard to compete against the smartest people that are out there doing AI. So we came to the realization this had to be a partner ecosystem that we would build. We chose a launch partner with the product we announced today to go deep on an integration that's out of the box. Come on, let's say the name: Cogniti. Yes. And when you call that... interactive intelligence, intelligent customer... what was it called? ICA: Intelligent Customer Assistance. Thank you. Sorry, sorry. But the important thing is we're not just working with Cogniti. We announced we had 14 other ecosystems. No, it was 15. It's changed already. We had one sign overnight. Well, you know, stuff goes stale pretty quick in this industry. But yeah, the world will change again. So much ChatGPT. No one had heard of OpenAI. I'd heard of it because we were working with them, but no one had heard of it. They changed the world in a really strange way. It was fascinating to see how that went viral. It'll happen again. And so to protect our customers' investment, they don't want to change vendors again. They want to be on a platform that just adapts. The only way to do that is to open up that ecosystem, have the APIs, have the integration points. We'll be doing the contact center heavy lifting, we'll be the ones keeping the service up, making sure it works. But these partners, and it won't just be AI, it's going to be in other adjunct areas in the contact center.

It makes the experience better. We actually started working with OpenAI on a product they call Whisper, which is their transcription translation service. When we saw that in the performance, we were like, 'Yeah, we want this,' because the data you get out of a spoken conversation is only as good as the transcript.

I get chills. I nearly cheered today listening to the customer panel. When I hear the stories, and I knew all four of those customers. We weren't allowed to talk about this, by the way. If you were following this on Twitter, we were asked not to disclose a lot of this information. But they had a very compelling customer panel. I sold, I partnered with all of them, knew their stories. But each one of them told me something I had not heard before. And it just makes the whole thing worth it. It's like we're building stuff that is helping people run their business better, helping them be customer obsessed. And that, to me, is the most exciting part of the job.