Chief Executive Officer & Director, 8X8 INC
8x8 CEO Samuel Wilson Reveals the Future for Voice AI
In this CXF Executive Spotlight interview, Katherine Stone sits down with @8x8Inc CEO Samuel C. Wilson to discuss the future of Voice AI, live translation, agent-to-agent communication, AI Studio, and how 8x8 is building unified infrastructure for the next era of customer experience.
Sam shares how his background in the military shaped his leadership style, why the walls between UC, CC, and CPaaS are coming down, and how 8x8 is approaching pricing, product innovation, channel partnerships, and customer outcomes in a rapidly changing AI landscape.
The conversation also explores why voice re...
About Samuel Wilson
Samuel Wilson, CEO of 8x8, said during a June 2026 interview that the company is focusing on providing unified infrastructure for voice AI, live translation, and agent-to-agent communication. He stated that the traditional SaaS subscription model is "dying" and that the industry is moving toward consumption-based pricing. Wilson also said that 8x8 has increased its product release cadence fivefold over the past three years to keep pace with technological change. He described the company's role as providing the voice network and regulatory compliance infrastructure that AI agents require, noting that voice is not a "vib codable product" due to regulatory requirements such as STIR/SHAKEN and campaign registry. On the company's Q4 fiscal 2026 earnings call in May 2026, Wilson reported that 8x8 had delivered four consecutive quarters of year-over-year revenue growth and achieved its first GAAP-profitable full fiscal year since 2015. He noted that usage-based revenue, including CPaaS communications APIs, AI solutions, and digital channels, grew more than 70% year-over-year and represented approximately 23% of service revenue. Wilson said the company is increasing investment in partner recruitment and exploring new consumption-based pricing models to reduce decision risk for enterprise customers. He also stated that 8x8 had reduced its trailing 12-month cash interest paid by approximately 51% from fiscal 2024 to fiscal 2026.
Transcript (113 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Katherine Stone0:02
3-2-1, go. Hi everybody. My name is Katherine Stone. I'm the principal analyst at the CX Foundation based in beautiful New York City. And today I am thrilled to be joined by the CEO of 8x8, the one and only Samuel C. Wilson, aka
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Samuel Wilson0:20
Thank you.
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Katherine Stone0:20
Sam to his friends. We're going to chat about all things 8x8. There's a ton of new product announcements that have come out of the analyst summit. So, let's jump into it.
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Samuel Wilson0:31
Thank you. Thank you.
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Katherine Stone0:32
So, you've had and worn a lot of different hats throughout your 8 years at 8x8.
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Samuel Wilson0:38
As VP of small business and e-commerce.
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Katherine Stone0:41
Then you did CMO.
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Samuel Wilson0:43
No, chief customer officer.
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Katherine Stone0:45
Oh, CCO.
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Samuel Wilson0:45
CCO.
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Katherine Stone0:46
Then CFO, then interim CEO.
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Samuel Wilson0:49
And then real CEO. So, that's a lot. So, how did all of those positions inform each other? And then how did you decide, I want to go from interim CEO to permanent CEO. I want to stay there.
So, I was in the military. I worked in the semiconductor business and I worked on Wall Street. So, I came from a combination of operations and finance. And the funny part is what those jobs all had in common was the previous CEOs viewed me as a bit of there's a cleanup on aisle three and I was a Swiss Army knife. So, when I joined the business, small business was declining about 6% year over year and I had it growing 20 within about a year, year and a half.
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Katherine Stone1:27
Wow.
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Samuel Wilson1:29
Just a turnaround in the mechanics of the operations of running the business. And then we started to have a retention problem, so I became the chief customer officer. And then the CFO position became available and the CEO needed a good CFO, so I did that job. And then when the board wanted someone to take the company to the next level, they asked me to step up and throw my name in the hat. The reason I took the full CEO job was the people at 8x8. I love my coworkers. I love my coworkers and my coworkers came to me and said, 'Sam, we want you to take this job.' And I was like, 'I'm the CFO. Like, what do I know about this role?' And they're like, 'You have our trust. Please take this job.' And that was really the reason I threw my name in the hat. I didn't think I had the skills and capabilities to do it. My co-workers at 8x8 told me I did.
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Katherine Stone2:16
That's definitely the voice you should listen to. Like, don't listen to the negative voice in the back of your head. One, first of all, my father would kill me if I did not say thank you for your service. So, thank you for your service. And I want to talk about how your time in the military has, if it has, impacted the way that you lead and view things at 8x8 because you were in Blackhorse. So, you're doing all of the simulations. You're finding vulnerabilities everywhere.
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Samuel Wilson2:42
Yeah, so I served mainly in combat arms units. I was in the 11th ACR. I was a Ranger, etc. And so, more than anything that I think the military taught me and the military made me who I am. Like, I will tell this I will yell this to the top of my lungs. I am only in this job because the US military made me who I am and taught me how to lead and taught me how to plan and do all those things. It taught me that in the end business is a team sport. The military's a team sport. Business is a team sport. It's not the product. It's not anything. It's really the people that build the products, that to sell the products, deploy the products to other people. It's a lot about operational planning. And one of the big things that I took away from the military is the concept of an after-action review.
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Katherine Stone3:28
Exactly.
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Samuel Wilson3:28
The military learns all its mistakes by sitting down and saying, 'That didn't go right.' And it's weird because there's that whole, you know, I can get hurt in combat. And so, there's a well, we do a lot of that here. We're willing to sit down and say we lost this deal. Why did we lose this deal? Why is this customer upset? Why was there an escalation? And the military taught me to take the ego out of it. So, the military taught me to take the ego out of it. It's done in a way that's not confrontational. It's done in a way to say, 'Hey, this is a chance for us to learn.' And we learn so much more from the mistakes we make and the balls we drop than we ever learn from the deals we won.
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Katherine Stone4:12
See,
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Samuel Wilson4:13
And the number one thing the military taught me was that people, teams, have a plan, and when things go sideways, look at your plan and say, 'Okay, what are we doing now?'
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Katherine Stone4:24
Find an option B.
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Samuel Wilson4:25
Yeah.
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Katherine Stone4:26
Or C and D. You've always been very deliberate about 8x8 is going to be a unified platform. It's going to be a one-stop shopping center. And I feel like a lot of your competitors were frankly late to the party
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Samuel Wilson4:39
I agree.
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Katherine Stone4:40
on the problem of fragmentation and just
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Samuel Wilson4:42
I agree.
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Katherine Stone4:42
how much stress, not to mention added expense, with everybody so concerned about ROI, having dozens of different applications strewn about everywhere. So, how did you pinpoint that the real problem was fragmentation?
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Samuel Wilson4:56
Okay, so it was interesting and it wasn't my credit. It was previous CEO's credit. They had this vision. The issue they had was the implementation. So, if I go back to 8x8 7 years ago, they believed in a common platform. And look, it wasn't a big stretch. If you go back to Avaya or you go back to the past, right? You bought UC and CC from the same vendor.
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Katherine Stone5:17
Yes.
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Samuel Wilson5:17
It was when the move to cloud happened, it all fragmented apart. And we just said, 'Well, that's kind of dumb. It should come back together, right?' The problem was we underinvested. So, we had a situation where we were competing with point products that were investing as much or more than we were, but we were spreading across multiple products and they were on one point product. And so, we would go to our customers and say, they would say, 'Well, we want to buy you, but in UC, you're worse than competitor X or in CC, you're worse than the competitor. Why?' And so the deals we won were the total cost of ownership in the single story, the single vendor story was good enough relative to the position. Then when I became CEO, I invested heavily in innovation.
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Katherine Stone6:02
Mhm.
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Samuel Wilson6:03
Today, I think that trade-off is behind us.
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Katherine Stone6:06
Okay.
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Samuel Wilson6:06
Today, you get a product as good in each individual category and in some cases better in CPaaS and other places better than you get from others.
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Katherine Stone6:15
Mhm.
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Samuel Wilson6:16
And you can get it from a single vendor on a single platform with single analytics, single data foundation, etc. And so it's really bringing the vision that my predecessor CEOs had, making it come true, making it come reality.
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Katherine Stone6:31
So I think you said on the Q4 earnings call like the walls are coming down between UC, CCaaS, all of these different platforms.
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Samuel Wilson6:39
None of my customers really ever use those terms.
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Katherine Stone6:42
No.
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Samuel Wilson6:43
None of my prospects use those terms either. I believe those categories were invented by Wall Street analysts and industry analysts, maybe to sell magic quadrants or whatever, but they were invented by others to segment our market. The prospects and customers don't talk that way. The way they talk is I have a problem.
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Katherine Stone7:01
Mhm.
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Samuel Wilson7:02
I have a problem. That problem can be solved. I'll use an easy example. I think too frequently we in the industry drop a customer in the middle of a Home Depot and say, 'You can build any kind of house you want.' And they're like, 'But I need a three-bedroom house with two bathrooms.' And we're like, 'Not our problem. You can build any house you want.'
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Katherine Stone7:22
The tools are here. It's up to you.
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Samuel Wilson7:23
That's up to you, right? And I think that's the opportunity in the world we're in today. The opportunity we're in the world today is to have a customer go in and say, 'My problem is X.' Have us come back and say on a single platform, 'We can solve that problem. Here you go.' Not we're going to give you the tools and let you solve it. I believe in the world we're in with AI where software development cycles are collapsing, the world is much better like our advantage is they will pay us for integration. They will pay us for an outcome. They'll pay us for a result. Our customer advisory board was yesterday and I jokingly said to the customers, no one ever complains about paying their bill when I solve your problems. You only complain when I don't solve your problems. And everybody at break came up to me and went, 'Yeah, exactly.' And it's interesting because that's so apropos to me. No one ever complains about the bill at a restaurant when the meal and the service is fantastic. Right? Then we think, 'Great.' Everyone complains if the meal and the service is bad and we should learn that. We should learn that and live that and I think that's our advantage as a company.
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Katherine Stone8:35
And I want to touch on pricing because you just spoke about outcomes based and I watched the conversation you had with my girl Liz Milner. Shout out to Liz. She's amazing. And you talked about the difference between outcomes based pricing and output based pricing.
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Samuel Wilson8:49
Well, okay. So it gets a little wonky and this is okay, so let's start with the basics, right? The SaaS industry historically has been a subscription industry. Number of seats per year, blah blah blah blah. And I think that model is dying.
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Katherine Stone9:01
It is.
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Samuel Wilson9:02
Okay, good. I'm glad you agree because I think it's dying. And so I think we align the customer's interest with our interest as the vendor when we move to some sort of consumption based pricing. If it works for you, you use it, you pay us and if it doesn't work for you, you don't use it and you don't pay us. And now we're aligned from a business perspective. What some people have advocated for on a technical basis is an outcome based pricing.
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Katherine Stone9:26
Mhm.
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Samuel Wilson9:27
An outcome based pricing would be if the AI bot doesn't transfer to a live agent, you pay me and if the AI bot does transfer to a live agent, you don't have to pay me. The idea being, well, it solved their problem. But oh, by the way, if the customer just hangs up, you're now paying. And they charge a very high amount for these outcomes because they claim they, you know, instead of an agent spending 20 minutes, you should pay them $9.
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Katherine Stone9:52
Great.
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Samuel Wilson9:52
We've just simplified it much more to a straight usage-based system that says the more you use the product, the more compute cycles, whatever. And this is very analogous to how AWS works.
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Katherine Stone10:02
Mhm.
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Samuel Wilson10:03
AWS doesn't say, if the software runs, you pay us. It says, if you use X number of compute cycles, you pay us based on that. And so, to me, I steal a lot from AWS's pricing and packaging model because I think actually that's where software's going.
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Katherine Stone10:17
Okay. And also, another thing, if we're talking about a future-focused conversation, I think you've been pretty clear in your statements and your writings that we are going to be living in an agent-to-agent world very soon. So, how does 8x8 help customers prepare
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Samuel Wilson10:35
for that?
We produce the infrastructure to make that work.
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Katherine Stone10:38
Okay.
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Samuel Wilson10:39
So, we'll sell you the agent, but others will sell the agent, too. The thing is, the agents have to run across some infrastructure. And most likely, those agents are going to communicate by voice. Because you're going to want to use a same agent like we think in the future every single phone call, every single digital message, everything will run across an AI agent at some point.
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Katherine Stone10:59
Yeah.
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Samuel Wilson11:00
Okay? But you're going to need to run across a network, and voice is still this conversation we're having to me is so important in this sense. Human beings for millions of years have spoken to each other. The number one bet I'm willing to make is for another couple million years, we'll speak to each other.
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Katherine Stone11:17
Mhm.
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Samuel Wilson11:18
We type in paragraphs. And it's interesting to me that one of the most popular applications now is where you use the LLM to transpose your voice into type.
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Katherine Stone11:27
Yeah.
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Samuel Wilson11:28
Everyone's using them, right?
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Katherine Stone11:29
Too.
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Samuel Wilson11:30
But it's all about voice. And so, we provide a voice network. And voice is not a vibe codable product.
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Katherine Stone11:39
Mhm.
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Samuel Wilson11:39
You have to be regulatorily compliant. You have to be registered. You have to KYC. You have to have STIR/SHAKEN. You have to have campaign registry, campaign management, drift. All these things have to be done. And so I can't go to Claude and say, 'Give me a phone number in California and let me start sending SMS messages.' Nope, yet because Anthropic isn't registered to get you a phone number. You have to get it from somebody. They're STIR/SHAKEN. You can't use it for this. You can use it for that, whatever the case may be. And so that is a large part of the infrastructure we're providing. And we do it because we have our own network. We've invested heavily last couple of years upgrading our network massively so you get crystal clear voice. And all those let's say you have five different bot vendors or agent vendors and you have your own stuff, whatever. We can have common transcription, common fraud checks, common deep fake detection, etc. across all of those.
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Katherine Stone12:38
And that's amazing and a huge point of success for 8x8. And I wonder I was speaking with one of your colleagues this afternoon and he mentioned that when you first rolled out something like 8x8 Engage internally, there was a little bit of pushback because people felt like it was Big Brother, like that every keystroke was being logged. So what do you say to leadership that is concerned about that and how do you move the needle on that conversation?
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Samuel Wilson13:04
We started a year ago a record your meetings conversations culture a year ago. And there was immediate pushback.
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Katherine Stone13:12
Mhm.
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Samuel Wilson13:12
What's interesting is 8 months into it, 6 months into it, the pushback's gone.
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Katherine Stone13:17
Mhm.
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Samuel Wilson13:18
People as long as you're not malicious and we're not trying to be malicious. What we're trying to do is be smarter. And so we capture the transcripts, we capture that information, and we use it to better a situation. So, an example is I think I mentioned this earlier, sales simulators, right? We've been building sales simulators for our channel partners. And what's interesting is how we build them. And I huge credit to Joel Neeb, who works on my team. What we do is we take all the conversations from a given sales cycle. So, these are real conversations. All have been recorded. The discovery call, the follow-up call, the demo call, the follow-up demo call, the POC call, all those. We take all those and we put them in an LLM as a single stream and we say, 'Okay, now build a sales simulator based on this that then we can use with our channel team, our sales team, or our channel partners and say, 'There's your customer running a process.' Right? And so, that's the real power of providing that infrastructure of common infrastructure. If we didn't have a culture that said record all those meetings, we couldn't build a great sales simulator. We wouldn't have the data. And so, we're not making up a fake customer. We're not telling the LLM to make a fake customer. We're basing it off real sales cycles.
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Katherine Stone14:31
Okay. That makes total sense. Was that the impetus for 8x8 Pulse?
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Samuel Wilson14:36
Yes. That was the original impetus for 8x8 Pulse was exactly that. Then we realized, 'Well, wait a minute. We not only need the meetings, we really need the emails and we need any chat messages back and forth.' And so, Pulse became that. 'Oh, wait a minute. There's also some information inside Salesforce or the CRM system. We should get our hands on. Let's put it all together.' And now we have the pulse of the customer. And I should say, if you're ever discussing a personal matter or an HR matter or a sensitive matter, every employee has the right to turn off the recording. We don't stop them. And so, what Pulse really became is the manifestation, the first product of our vision of if you have all the conversations cataloged, tracked, complianced, so I can't pull HR's recordings, HR can't pull sales' recordings, right? It's all compliance managed, our back, etc. There's a tremendous amount of insight from that. Pulse is that.
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Katherine Stone15:34
I'm very excited to dive deeper into Pulse. I think we're doing a live demo tomorrow, so it'll be great. Another somewhat new announcement that I want to make sure we touch base on is AI Studio.
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Samuel Wilson15:45
Yes.
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Katherine Stone15:45
Which I just saw a demo of today. It
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Samuel Wilson15:47
What do you think?
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Katherine Stone15:48
It was fantastic, and it was easy, and I felt like I could do it. The most impressive thing that I found was the live translation with voice.
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Samuel Wilson15:56
It's getting announced on it'll be announced throughout the time that this runs, so talk about it.
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Katherine Stone16:01
Amazing.
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Samuel Wilson16:02
Thursday. He promised me Thursday, by the way. Notice he didn't say it.
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Katherine Stone16:04
Okay.
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Samuel Wilson16:05
He promised me Thursday. Notice he wiggled out of it?
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Katherine Stone16:07
Okay. Okay.
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Samuel Wilson16:08
Just right there. So, in the recording, Jason says it's coming out on Thursday.
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Katherine Stone16:11
Okay, so it will be out on Thursday. So, let's talk about how that came to be, because this was a guy that we heard in the demo. Man was speaking in French, the other gentleman on the end of the line was speaking in English, and the real-time translation of those two people speaking being spoken to in the language they understood was fascinating. I have not seen something that successful with voice yet, so I was very impressed by that. Can you talk about the architecture under that?
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Samuel Wilson16:40
Yeah. First generation AI products we partnered for, because we didn't think the first generation product was the right architecture.
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Katherine Stone16:46
Okay.
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Samuel Wilson16:46
Starting 9 months ago, when OpenAI launched real-time voice APIs, the world changed. And that's when we brought it in-house, and we started building it ourselves. A couple weeks ago, they launched version 1.5 of those real-time APIs. That's what enabled real-time translation. And it was interesting, because I was at a Cadel conference maybe a year ago, and someone was talking about how the next big so, the first big thing for AI was meeting summarization. A call summarization, just summarization in general. And they said the next big thing will be real-time translation. And it's so important and I'm just you're in New York, right? They speak Spanish, they speak English, they speak you're the local city government. How do you provide context for Vietnamese citizens?
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Katherine Stone17:33
Right.
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Samuel Wilson17:34
You're not going to hire agents across every possible language, every possible situation. And so there is these disenfranchised citizens. And I just picked an easy one, which is the government, right? And we wanted to build products that enable that. But it's the same for any business. Your customers speak multiple languages, whatever the case may be. And always balancing agent language capabilities and those things was a big deal. And so it's really a function of two things. It's a function of it's a vibe coded product, which means we can rapidly innovate on it. It's full CICD, continuous innovation, continuous deployment. And it was a pet project of mine.
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Katherine Stone18:09
Okay.
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Samuel Wilson18:10
Because I, bringing back to the government, I stood in front of the National Association of Contact Center Professionals for the government. And I gave a speech. And the speech I gave was how they could influence the view of citizens of the government through their performance. And I learned this, quick story, I learned this because there was a major city in the UK,
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Katherine Stone18:37
Like Spencer,
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Samuel Wilson18:38
who the mayor came down to see the head of contact center one time and said, 'I want to meet the head of contact center.' So you know, comes down the floor and walks on the floor and it was like, 'Oh my god, it's the mayor.' He's like, 'I'd like to meet this woman, Sarah Williams.' And goes and meets with her and it turns out that her name came up at a town hall because the work she'd been doing around sending out SMS messages to remind council taxes and changes in rubbish pick up and all these things made the citizens. The citizens were saying to the mayor, we love what you're doing with the city, we love the fact you're getting and his poll numbers were better. And so I gave that speech and I said one of the big areas that you guys should look at is this notion of language. And constituents, you work 8:00 to 5:00 and with the artificial intelligence on the marketplace and what's coming, you can offer multi-language assistance 24 hours a day, etc. etc. And think about it, to the most underserved classes.
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Katherine Stone19:40
Right.
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Samuel Wilson19:40
Right? The underserved classes are the ones who are working two jobs, don't speak the native language, all those other things. So this product came about for those reasons.
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Katherine Stone19:49
That's an incredible story. Thank you for sharing that with us. So where do you see 8x8 in 6 months from now and then a year from now? In terms of pricing, product development, customer base, what changes, what stays the same?
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Samuel Wilson20:03
We've increased the number of product releases we're doing per year five times in the last 3 years. And we did that intentionally. We think the pace of technology is changing. And so what we needed to do was not try to guess where the puck was going, where technology is going, but we needed to build a set of systems that allowed us to be incredibly agile. And so that's exactly what we built phase one. Phase two of that is really guessing where the North Star is in 6 or 12 months. Okay, where do we focus on? Pricing, we're going to you know, consumption's growing 70% year over year. It'll keep growing faster than the overall. So subscription flat to down, flat to up, whatever, but that consumption continuing to radically increase as we transition more and more to that adoption model. The biggest thing I think you hopefully if I've done my job right, one of the big corporate goals is more points of presence in the marketplace. So we're big channel company, we do about 75% of our bookings new bookings from channel partners and I like to see that number grow to 75 or sorry, 75 already, 85, 95, whatever the case may be, eventually 100%. Want to be a very channel-focused company, and so what you'll see a lot about us is working with channel partners to deliver our solutions. I believe in customer intimacy. I believe in customer outcomes. And I believe channel partners can do that better than us. We can build software better than them. They can deliver the outcomes that change the needle for customers better than we can.
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Katherine Stone21:30
Thank you. My final question before we wrap up here is and I don't ask this question to everybody. I only ask it to people that I feel like would have a good answer. So, it's a wild card. It's not on the approved question list, but it's okay. What kind of legacy do you want to leave personally at 8x8?
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Samuel Wilson21:46
That's funny. I rarely my wife thinks about this more than I do.
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Katherine Stone21:50
[laughter] That's good.
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Samuel Wilson21:52
Because she does a lot of charity work and those kinds of things. So, it's really important to her. The biggest thing I think about every day is the 1,815 to 1,900 employees at 8x8. And I think about our customers because if our customers are successful, they make our employees successful. And as CEO, I love when my employees have new children, get a dog, move to a new home, get a mortgage, those kinds of things. And so, the biggest legacy I want is not for me personally. The biggest legacy I want is two things. Number one is I want every one of my employees to be able to buy a house, and have a life, and take a vacation, and do all those other things, right? I mean, the world changes. It's a complex world, and I like them to be great people. Remember, 70% of my employees are international. So, it's not a US vision. This is a global vision.
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Katherine Stone22:49
Right.
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Samuel Wilson22:49
And the other thing is they have a great story to tell their grandkids. I was at 8x8, and we used to be a $1.60 stock, and I was there when we went and AI happened. I tell my son, because he's 21 about the internet coming about and before wireless phone existed. It's a little bit like Grandpa telling stories, but I would love nothing more than if my employees could tell their grandkids about their time at 8x8 and make it fun and exciting and adventurous. That would warm my heart forever.
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Katherine Stone23:23
Well, it certainly seems like you're well on your way of that Sam and thank you so much for your time today. Thank you all so much everybody for watching and
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Samuel Wilson23:30
Thank you.
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Katherine Stone23:30
One thing I want to plug before we leave is if you have not read Sam's executive insights on the 8x8 website, go do that now. It's not just Sam that's writing, a lot of other C-suite execs are writing too. It's really interesting stuff and it's very transparent. A lot of good insights to be had there. So thank you so much for watching. This was yet another CXF executive spotlight interview. I'm Katherine Stone. Thank you so much and hopefully we'll see each other again. Take care everybody. Thank you so much and hopefully we'll see each other again. Thank you. Definitely. Take care everybody.