Opening Keynote: The Next Horizon of Unified Communications

Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. And I want to do a shout out to Good Day for those of you that might be in Asia. Morning A to my Canadian friends. And hia to anyone in Europe.

I'm Dom Marie Elder. I'm COO of Cypio. You all have probably seen me before if you've been around for a while. Uh, if not, u welcome. And I wanted to take you through what we're going to be um kicking off this week with. So, first, you'll have me and a little bit later, Steve Forcom will be joining us to go through the week's agenda. And this is really designed to be a learning opportunity for anyone that's interested in voice collaboration. And today, we're going to have partners, customers, carriers, and strategic partners joining us today.

So, this is our second annual fleet week. And I want to thank you for joining us at our digital conference. I also want to give a shout out to Microsoft, my elma mater, um, Zoom, Cisco, and a couple of my favorites, and Channel Playbook, who will be joining us for different sessions um this week.

So, if you already know CPIO, thank you so much for your support. If you're new here, I'm going to spend a little bit time telling you who SPO is and why we're dedicated to helping you um succeed. I'm going to go and bring up our slide deck. Hopefully, it's in large mode or can get in large mode because those words look a little little small. Thank you.

So, this is a little bit about us and our history. Cypio was founded in Annapolis, Maryland. It was originally uh an AAA shop. And back in 2019, Adam Cole, our CEO and original founder, and a couple of others of us came together to look at where voice was going and where it was going in the world of collaboration. So, we brought to market a new company called Cypio.

If you look at our um O in the Cypio there, that's based of off of a port hole of the four founders because we came from Annapolis. We've got a little bit of an undercurrent of a nautical theme with calling this fleet week. And um also, if you've followed us and you have met beacon, which is our AI, that's also based on a little bit of nautical theme.

What our mission was and what we've set out to do is first and foremost, empower our partners and um our customers and our carriers to really self-initiate themselves into the new world of voice collaboration. We saw a big shift of this during COVID and we sat down and thought, how can we make this easy for everybody and less cumbersome and less like what it was in the old days of of PBX's? So, we sought to automate everything, create GUI design presentation screens to make it intuitive. Our CEO likes to say, so intuitive that your CEO or your mother um could use it.

And then, as we went along a couple of these early years, we expanded with Zoom, who you'll hear from a little bit later today. And we also became a Microsoft um Operator Connect Accelerator. You'll hear from Microsoft uh today as well.

Some of the proof points that I'll provide to you in what we're doing. Um, in addition to building, you know, solutions that are designed to be innovative and intuitive for your usage, is also the growth that we've had. The first few years, we were in triple digits just because it was easy to to grow that fast during those times. And recently, in our uh 2024, we closed out the year with almost 25% growth, which I think was a little uncanny compared to how some of the others uh wound up last year.

As we move forward, um, 2023 was a big year for awards. I just found this one sitting on my desk. This is our Frost and Sullivan um award that they gave us for the innovation that we have around our partner portal and our voice um panel.

And then the thing that I was most excited about in 2024 was introducing our Calling and Beyond partners. Calling and Beyond was really designed to bring in more opportunity and options for you to expand your voice practice or your voice footprint with things that are adjacent. So, Clerk Chat for text messaging, Analytics 365 which comes from Tollring for call recording and analytics, Tango which extends into the mobile world, Mutari who is a great solution for anybody that is looking to kind of monitor their their traffic and cut down on those pesky robo dialers that seem to to keep cropping up. And then we also have uh Solgari and Akixie also playing in that contact center uh space. So, we have done a few deals with each of these folks and are really really impressed with their capabilities and are hoping to see more of that launch um in the forthcoming year.

We also rolled out our Partner Exchange and that is where MSPs, resellers, and carriers can connect with CPIO opportunities, whitelabeled those, and bring them ready to go in the marketplace. So, as simple as ordering Netflix and watching movies a couple minutes later after you have um put in your credit card number and signed up your account.

Our H1 this year is shaping up to be fantastic. Our Q1 this year over last year uh was absolutely phenomenal, back into triple-digit um growth. And then what you're going to see come a little bit later this year with our AI tool uh Beacon, which you'll hear about along the way this week, is some maturity with it. Right now, it's uh kind of like a chatbot where you ask it questions and you have to know what you're asking it, and it'll give you an answer. Later this year, uh, Beacon will be able to actually place your quotes and activate your orders just at a simple touch of the screen. And then we're also bringing in text-to-speech and speech-to-text so that it's omni-present and will also help you with helpful suggestions. We promise not to make it like Clippy, but to allow you to opt in.

Those of you that are paying attention to the news today, you'll see that we're putting out a uh press release with our launch of Cisco Webex. We've been waiting for this for a really long time. So, we're super excited and we're really happy to bring the Cisco uh team to the Cisco family and make those offerings available to our partners because I know a lot of you have been clamoring for it for a number of years.

So, that's a little bit um about us on where we've came and came from and where we're we're going to. And in the spirit of being fun, it's our sixth birthday on Wednesday. And every year, we do a little virtual birthday cake. Um, no calories in it, and it's gluten-free, vegan-free, whatever. Uh, so, these are some look-backs at the past one. And then this year, we asked Beacon, our own Beacon, to create us our new birthday cake. And he went a little bit above and beyond with not only the birthday cake, but the balloon backdrop and mentioning uh Team Zoom and WebEx talking about celebrating our partner success. If any of you um have been partners with us for a long time, you might remember that my poor little doggy who passed away used to be our mascot. Beacon figured that out, put him there in the uh the serving truck for you.

So, I want to thank again all of our partners, customers, people that are on the Partner Exchange, our carriers. We couldn't do this with without you and we're here to serve you each and every day. That's what we wake up thinking about. Zoom, uh, Microsoft, and Cisco WebEx, we're what you're what we serve up. And then, um, all of our partners that I just mentioned a couple slides ago for Calling and Beyond. And then welcome to Cavell Group and Channel Playbook as well as you see today.

And with that, I would like to invite to the stage with me, Steve Orkham. Uh, Steve's been with Cypio now for two years. He and I previously worked at another uh company together and I am excited. If you haven't seen the press release, to tell you a couple months ago, we promoted Steve into the role of channel chief. We're growing by leaps and bounds and expanding and he is going to be key and pivotal in this role as we are bringing on more resources to support our channel. So, with that, Steve, looking excited to the whole week. Why don't you tell us what we have to look forward to?

Yeah, thanks Anie. I'm really excited to share with our customers and our partners and everyone else that's uh watching this live on LinkedIn and have joined our bridge uh for our virtual conference. You know, at Cypio, we exist to create solutions that are fast to get going, that are easy to manage, and that are reliable forever. Um, the way that we've done this is we've modernized telecommunications to operate at SAS speeds. Uh, we built a cloud-based platform in modern compute. Uh, we're built in Azure. This gives us the ability to scale to scale to support customers of any size all the way up, but also all the way down. Um, you know, we really see the value in helping customers at any size uh enable communications inside of their chosen collaboration platform. That's why we're so excited today to announce that we've expanded support uh to include not just Microsoft and Zoom, but also now Cisco with the WebEx platform. That gives more customers the ability to instantly add calling, text messaging, WhatsApp Business, uh, and customer engagement tools and a whole lot more into the platform that they already use.

And throughout this week during Fleet Week, you're going to hear all sorts of great sessions that are designed to give you the information that can help you understand how to best harness these tools, how to best, if you're a channel partner, introduce these subjects to your customers, and help them see the outcomes that these modern uh platforms can deliver to their telecom budgets, to their productivity needs, and to ultimately help them harness the amazing amount of information in uh innovation that's happening on all of these platforms.

So, to just walk you through what you're going to experience this week during Fleet Week, we've got our opening keynote here. Uh, you're going to be hearing from uh our friends at Cisco, at Zoom, and then Microsoft. We've got some really exciting speakers that I can't wait to share with you. Uh, we've got three customer sessions this afternoon. So, at 2:00, there's a customer success session talking about how you modernize your communications to transform your uh business communications needs by leveraging these platforms, by treating uh communications, voice and digital, as a feature to turn on instead of a standalone platform to purchase. Uh, we're going to be talking specifically to uh a couple of key verticals after that. At 3:00, we've got a great session talking about how to uh leverage these platforms in a higher education setting. And then at 4 p.m. Eastern, we're going to talk to our friends in the legal vertical about how they can better enhance their client uh and interfirm communications by leveraging these platforms.

As well as we look to tomorrow, tomorrow is partner day. Uh, so we're going to be talking to our partners in the morning. We've got another great keynote set up with a ton of information that will help you understand market trends, where the white space is in the market, how to talk to and and to get information from industry experts and also peers on how people are succeeding in this marketplace to help you understand how to better serve your customers. And then we're giving you a treat in the afternoon. Uh, we've brought in uh Peter Rosinski from Channel Playbook. He's going to operate a full training session to talk to you about these uh impacts in the market, these these momentum points in the market, how to get your customers excited about what's happening in this space, how to uh create that demand to help you grow your businesses.

And then Wednesday, as we close out Fleet Week this week, uh, we're going to be hearing from our partners. So, at 9 in the morning, Eastern time, uh, we're going to be joined by Aixie. They're going to be talking about driving visibility and performance in voice communications with their platform. Uh, they're going to be followed by Solgari, who will be talking about enabling anybody in the organization to be an AI-powered customer champion using their pre-integrated with Teams contact center as a service offering. Uh, Analytics 365 is going to join us to talk about analytics and real-time uh call recording and using AI to deliver sentiment analysis and keyword spotting to drive more enhanced business outcomes without the need to go to a full-blown contact center as a service offering if you don't need that. And then we're going to close the uh afternoon session out with our partners uh with a session at noon Eastern from our friends at Clerk Chat. We're going to be talking about leveraging digital communications, text messaging, SMS, MMS, all new RCS, the Rich Communication Service, uh as well as WhatsApp Business and others inside of these platforms to deliver a more complete communication solution to customers.

And then we close out Fleet Week. We send the ships off into the virtual harbor with a final fireside chat with my friends over at Cavell Research. Uh, we're going to be joined by Patrick Watson, who is going to uh share some of the research that Cavevel sees in the market and talk about some of the opportunities for customers and partners to um take advantage of this inflection point in the market as more and more organizations are seeking the cost savings, the productivity gains, and the innovation uh applications inside of these platforms.

So, we've got a really a fun, action-packed agenda for you. Uh, Don Reed, I don't know about you, but I've got a couple of sessions that I've got penciled in that have been uh must-see for me in a in a while. I can't wait. I'll listen to them all eventually, but today I'm very excited about the verticals for sure. And then I'm also looking forward to see what Peter has to say because I think we'll learn something there. Certainly, um, our sales team will be in attendance so that they're, uh, getting brushed up on on how to help our partners and our carriers. And then, you know, Patrick Watson's like my all-time favorite, so I can't not call him out. Hi, Patrick. Um, you sit nowhere to send the check.

Yeah, I'm really excited for Peter's workshop tomorrow. I'm also really excited to have that discussion with Peter uh with uh Patrick on Wednesday afternoon. Our prep session, we were going through different ideas. It just turns into, you know, a really exciting discussion when we start brainstorming and thinking about things. So, I'm really excited to close out Fleet Week with that session as well.

So, Don Re, thank you for uh kicking us off this uh morning. I'm really excited to uh keep us moving on this keynote and I'm really really excited about this next thing. Um, so today we announced that we were supported by DOMY. Uh, today we announced that we uh have expanded our platform to support now Cisco Webex. Uh, so we've been empowering communications for customers in Microsoft Teams and Zoom, and we see a ton of opportunity in the market there, but we don't want to force customers to choose a new platform when they're already using something that works for their business. And for a long time, there's been a large slice of the market of customers that have been leveraging Cisco WebEx that have just been out of reach uh for us to be able to support. I'm really excited now that we're fully certified with the platform. I'm also really excited to share with you this discussion because it brings back somebody who has played a giant role in my career. He's a friend of mine. He's been a role model of mine as I've grown my career. He was the uh the the template for how I built my career and what I wanted to be so to speak when I grew up. Uh, I'm going to introduce Jason Randazzo. He's a collaboration specialist with Cisco. Uh, we pre-recorded this interview. Uh, Jason was tied up with customers today. He was at uh tied up watching Cisco WebEx live last week. So, we snuck in a discussion to talk about Cisco WebEx and what you can expect. So, we're going to play the recording now. Uh, hopefully, you get as much out of this as we did and then when we come back, we'll uh pick up the uh rest of the show.

Hey Jason, thanks for joining us here at Fleet Week. Really excited to uh expand our partnership with Cisco and frankly, I'm really excited to get to work with you again. It's been almost a decade since uh we worked together. So, this is really a treat.

Yeah. Good morning, Steve. It's great to see you. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah. I uh love the F1 vest, by the way. Although McLaren's not my team, but you know, it's okay.

Yep. Yeah. It's actually Yeah. So, F1 McLaren, we sponsor those guys. So, they're on, you'll see the WebEx logo and the Cisco logo on the car. So, that's uh that's one of the things we love about that. But they're a great customer.

Yeah. I had a uh discussion with Zas Carvala. You guys had given him a tour of the the whole factory. It's amazing how much data and infrastructure that they deploy at the race, but then also back to their mission control in uh in the UK. It's it's incredible. It's incredible stuff.

Yeah. It's amazing how that whole series moves around, too. It's unbelievable.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we announced today that we've added WebEx support to our platform. We're really excited to expand um the number of options that customers can use to um modernize their communications infrastructure. Um, you know, more and more customers are looking at their legacy, you know, on-premise phone system and realizing, I don't need a standalone phone system. It's not a it's not a thing that you buy. It's a feature that you turn on. And with the world really being familiar with Cisco and WebEx, I think there's a tremendous opportunity to help serve more customers as they're thinking about transitioning from that legacy premise-based environment to a modern cloud solution, and you guys are a great fit for that. So, why don't we start with the kind of the the the origin story, so to speak, right? The best, you know, movie trilogy starts that way. What was the genesis of the WebEx platform and um, you know, what have you guys kind of started with and where have you gone with it?

Yeah. Yeah. So, thanks for asking, Steve. Yeah. The um, the genesis of that the WebEx platform, the calling platform as we know it today, started in 2018. Cisco bought a company called Broadsoft, which had a carrier-based engine and a smaller SMB, but also a full-size enterprise suite engine to run calling. So, a cloud-based calling PBX. Um, at that point, Cisco had tried getting into the game with something called Cisco Spark, if you probably remember that back in the day. Yep. It was uh instead of trying to leverage what we had already with Call Manager, which everybody knew and loved and had deployed, they decided to try to uh create an engine from scratch, which was uh which was a mistake. So, looking back at it now, back in 2015 is when Spark came out. Then they said, you know what, 2018 came and we said, we have to get in the cloud-based business. So, we bought Broadsoft. Um, at the time, Broadsoft had coverage for over 60 countries, and now we're at the point where we've expanded it to over a 100 countries um globally and uh, yeah, it's been a it's been a great engine. It's been in the last 24 months, we've had zero interruptions. So, we're talking, you know, better than 59's reliability at this point.

That's awesome. That's awesome. So, you know, the origin story obviously is one thing, but you know, Cisco with its Call Manager software, um, you know, we both worked at a competitor during the time and, you know, we that was our biggest competition. You ended up joining the competition at one point. You guys know how businesses operate, you know, in a communications environment. You've built or and then bought Broadsoft. You've obviously done a ton of innovation work along the way to continue adding the features and capabilities that not only your customers on Call Manager, which is substantial. You guys really dominated the pre-market towards the, you know, the tail end of it, but also, you know, customers that are coming from competitor legacy phone systems are going to have a lot of the same needs. What are some of the things that you guys have done on, you know, the WebEx platform that has really helped customers facilitate that transition from the phone system and enterprise voice being a thing that you buy and turn it into a feature that you turn on?

Yeah, it's a great question. So, the um, the early days in 2018 were a little bit tough in the fact that we had two disparate platforms, right? So, we had a CUCM platform, a Call Manager platform on-premise. Most of our customers were there. We had a whole tangent of customers that were already on the Broadsoft engine and frankly, the endpoints that connected the the good thing about Broadsoft is that they were an open SIP-based platform right from the start, which was great. So, that enabled us to essentially take a our load of software, which was standards-based anyhow, do a couple tweaks, make sure it was open, and then able to bolt it up to the Broadsoft engine. Now, just being open to connect to the Broadsoft engine doesn't mean it's got the features that we needed from our on-prem calling platform, like you said, had 500 plus features um, which, oh, by the way, we're chasing a via features at the time and uh finally chewed that up and then said, oh shoot, we got to get the Broadsoft engine to have all the features that the Call Manager engine had. So, we um, we quickly ramped up all the features and functionality in Broadsoft uh, but realized that we had a lot more features and functionality than we ever could in Call Manager. So, for instance, the Broadsoft engine could do standards-based phones. So, we were able to bolt up to Polycom phones, Yealink phones, um, Grandstream phones. So, all the standards-based stuff that was out there was working great on the platform already. And then for us to migrate and allow customers to take the existing phones that were on the Call Manager platform, a couple tweaks, couple years of innovation, you know, making sure the the cake was baked properly, and then um, we were able to really provide a a a migration path for these customers. So, a lot of customers have taken, lifted and shifted their existing devices over to the Broadsoft engine. They've changed over from what we used to call Jabber on the Call Manager platform, which was a softphone essentially, IP-based, SIP-based softphone, and then changed that over to the WebEx engine, which, you know, looks and feels similar, not completely disparate or different, so it makes it a little bit easier. Um, but we've gotten smarter since then. So, we've made kind of an easy button. Uh, you press a couple buttons in your Call Manager platform, it exports everything, imports it into the new cloud-based engine, and uh, yeah, and we can have a hybrid approach. So, it gives us the ability to connect up the two engines, um, let them talk seamlessly between each other, and then allow customers to migrate and evolve at their at their pace and as they see fit.

So, yeah, I mean, that's crucial is helping those customers with the transition period, you know, and and allowing them to operate in that hybrid model because some folks may need to be on-prem for a while, you know, it could be contractual reasons. There there's a million different uh reasons why somebody may need that that hybrid model, but the the fact that you guys can take the transcription or the translations out of the UCM and bring that up to the cloud um really does make for that kind of seamless transition. And I love how you guys have taken advantage of the the the WebEx user interface and said, "Let me just add a capability to it." We've we've heard this from other customers on different platforms at the time that, you know, part of what makes this moment so different, whether you you know, transition to, you know, Teams Phone or in this case WebEx Calling, is it's not like the old days where, you know, when we would deploy a new phone system, we'd have to get a conference room and set up a a you know, a table full of phones. It's like, "All right, let me teach you how to transfer. Uh, let me teach you how to park a call." You know, those days are gone because the users are already in these platforms. Um, you know, we like to say that, you know, you've probably already bought your next phone system. You just haven't turned it on yet. Um, and the the uplift is almost instant because, hey, now you just have a dial pad. Now you can make those outbound calls on this platform. You don't have to relearn how to use something. And it doesn't it's not as disruptive to the business operations uh as transitions used to be. Those those used to, I remember those weekend cutovers and trying to kind of lead up to it was was such an orchestrated event, and now it's just kind of like a a non-event. You can do this, you know, in an hour instead of over a weekend.

Yeah, totally agree. I think the other thing too that made it easier was when we first started, customers had to pick and choose whether they were going to do phone calls, PSTN out the Broadsoft engine with one provider, or they were to stick with their Call Manager PSTN that they already were in a contract for. So, for a while, it was, hey, Mr. Mrs. Customer, if you want to migrate to the cloud, you got to flip all your phone numbers over in a weekend, which was crazy, very, very challenging. Um, with the with our ability to connect those two platforms and make them talk seamlessly, we made it so customers can just ride out their PSTN on-premise if they can't get out the contract. Um, calls flow seamlessly from the premise to the cloud and vice versa. And it makes customers able to just kind of like stick their toe in the water, get to the cloud as they're as they see fit and what what makes sense for them, makes it easier.

You know, you mentioned um, you know, PSTN and and I think one of the really interesting things that where we line up really nicely with you guys, you know, we've built a very very elegant platform where Azure native, fully automated, same platform supports all three collaboration platforms that we in uh have in support for. So, Teams, Zoom, and now WebEx. Uh, we're deployed in nine different Azure regions, highly available failover between three different zones in each region. I think that pairs really nicely with what you guys have built. Uh, you know, it's a very elegant solution on you guys' side where there's no infrastructure required. And to your point, if a customer needs service right away, it happens instantly. But that's not magic. It's because of engineering. You know, what have you guys done uh to to help providers like us make this such a seamless uh plug-in for customers that are looking to kind of transition to WebEx calling?

Yeah, that is crucial. Totally. Totally crucial. I mean, key just to go back um a few years when we were doing that Spark platform. Our biggest challenge was having the platform open so that we could have providers come in. We couldn't do it. We had to we were trying to write our own calling platform and our own outbound PSTN public switch telephone network platform from the ground up from the start. And it failed miserably trying to get into all these different countries, South America, you know, Africa, places like that where Broadsoft already had a uh, you know, a PSTN authorization with other local partners like you guys. Um, we just were trying to build that from scratch. So, you know, hindsight's 2020 when we looked back at it and then bought Broadsoft. Um, Broadsoft already had the ability to snap in uh certified partners that had like you guys had the ability to connect to a a cloud-based engine with Azure and with a standards-based PSTN handoff. Um, that wasn't the case for a lot of these other providers. So, it is not everyone that can plug into WebEx, but you guys can. Now, we've done, we've got about 35 partners um for PSTN, and part of that frankly, it's not 35 in the United States. Part of that is uh Europe has certain partners that are dominant and own that that geography, you know, Africa, South America, um, even Asia PAC. So, we have certain areas where we work with certain partners like Tata Telecom over in Asia PAC and stuff. So um, in the US, we've got a handful of partners, you guys are one of them. And um, the the way that we're able to do that is like you said, it's not magic. It's a lot of hard work. You guys have taken the time to build that, and that allows you to snap into that WebEx engine. So um, that's where we went with that Broadsoft engine is to connect in all those partners um, and if customers decide that, hey, they want to keep the Broadsoft engine, they want to migrate to the cloud, but they just can't and they don't want Call Manager anymore, but they can't get out of that contract, they can even put um a local SBC, whether it be AudioCodes or Cisco CUBE router, um, either on-premise in the US or anywhere they like. So, for instance, places like um, you know, India, where we can't bring in, we can't send VoIP calls out over from India over to the US and vice versa. We got to keep those calls local, or there'll be a big fine. Um, we can easily drop one of those little SBCs out to that location and and bolster up the customer's PSTN calling needs.

Awesome. So, you know, obviously AI is top of everyone's mind. It's it's it's inescapable, frankly. Um, you know, we know our friends at Microsoft and Zoom have their AI stories. What's what's Cisco's AI story? How do you guys leverage AI, especially in communications, to help increase productivity, to help really kind of streamline, and frankly, just how do you help use AI to make work less work for end users?

Yeah, it's a very good question. So, I think in the calling platform, really focusing on calling, um, Cisco's done a ton of work in AI. It started years ago. So, Cisco was buying AI companies um and, you know, recording companies, AI companies, um, speech-to-text kind of companies over the years. So, we've we've had seven different acquisitions around that AI model just for the WebEx platform alone. And what it's resulted us is so, for instance, the basics, right? What how do we make calling better than it was? How do we take a a legacy platform of what we know as Opus and make that an even better platform? So, we've done, we uh, we bought a company called Babble Labs, which was a um, you know, a a noise-canceling kind of sound-enhancing company, and we've infused that into every part of our audio video business. So, Babble Labs gives us the ability to not only uh mute background noise while you're on a call, but you can actually go and mute the background noise on someone else's phone. So, for instance, if someone's calling from a from their car on a flip phone, whatever they got, you know, they don't have background noise cancellation in their car. We actually have a little button inside the WebEx app where, and either an agent, because agent functionality is built into our platform. So, that's the those are the worst times, cuz agents get these calls from customers and they get into the into the queue and then get to the agent, and it's so noisy, the agent can't hear anything. So, the agents agents able to press a button, they can turn off the dogs barking in the background. They can turn off the road noise, the the noisy tires in the background, the windows open, and just hear the caller, and it really makes an amazing experience. Now, the other part of that that rolls into even further AI is, so if I'm in a call center or I'm taking a call from a customer, and the call comes in and it's really noisy, how good do you think the speech-to-text recording is going to be? Right? If I can't make out what that person's saying, do you think the speech-to-text is going to be good? It's not. So, Babble Labs really reduces all that background noise so that we can take all these calls and with AI, turn them all into call summaries. So, we can basically take every single phone call, record it, put it into summaries, make markups, um, deliver the summaries to not only people, you know, just day-to-day users, power users, um, but you can also deliver that to supervisors, to agents. You can actually take that and do summaries and then call back reasons, and then you can actually take that functionality, roll roll that into the call center and make your call center even more intelligent. So, those are a few of the AI tidbits that we're coming out with um or that we've delivered and we're continuing to evolve on. Um, but it goes even further. So, for instance, if I wanted to, you know, one of the one of the big lifts for customers is incoming calls into the into the um just a standard auto-attendant, right? With with WebEx Calling, we've got the ability to just text-to-speech and then spoken AI. So, we built an AI engine, a robot into our um inbound calling platform. And so, we can actually do conversational speeching speech interactions with just the the IVR coming into the calls or into the call center or into just the basic the basic um, you know, front door. So, digital front door doesn't need to be met by a human per se. It can be um, and we've got a great tool for that, you know, an um, an AI-based front desk attendant. Okay. Um, but conversationally wise, I can actually just instead of manning the front desk with a phone call that says, you know, "Welcome to ABC Company. How can I help you?" Um, you've got a robot that does that now. So, we've got an AI engine that sounds conversational, sounds like human, interacts with you, and completely transforms that experience for a person coming in. "Tell me what you want to do today." "I want to talk to sales." "Okay, let me route you there." And so, all those things are built into that WebEx platform, and that's that's part of the AI engine um is AI Assist. So, very, very cool stuff.

I mean, I think I remember when uh background noise reduction was starting to hit the market and I said, you know, this is like a virtual background for audio. You know, when when they came out with virtual backgrounds for video, it was like, you get rid of the distractions, you get rid of people walking behind you or anything else. And uh, you know, this is this is a virtual background for audio. But I've never heard anybody have a solution where, you know, everybody's got, I can reduce it on my side. Cool. But I've never heard anybody until just now say, "I can also remove it for somebody else." Because it happens all the time where somebody's in a in a noisy environment, especially now as we're, you know, kind of starting to get out of our home offices, we're doing return to office, people are commuting again. Um, you know, having the ability to kind of catch somebody who may not be paying attention to their own personal environment and say, "Hey, you know what? Mute." Uh, you know, get rid of that background noise. That that's really interesting stuff. It just, you know, AI is just an incredible uh subset of capabilities and we're still scratching the surface there. And I'm really excited to work with you guys. I'm really excited to have WebEx on our platform. Really excited to work with you again. And uh, I just want to say thank you again for uh joining us here at Fleet Week and sharing some of what we're doing with WebEx. I would uh basically say, stay tuned. We're going to be doing a lot more uh with Cisco on helping those customers embrace uh the workforce of tomorrow and leverage the uh WebEx platform for their communications needs. So, Jason, again, thanks for joining us here at uh Fleet Week.

Thanks so much, Steve. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It's great seeing you.

Same. That was a great discussion with Jason. I really really am excited to work with him again. Really excited to work with Cisco and their customers to help them enable this this revolution of voice becoming and and communications more broadly. You know, voice and digital communications becoming a um tool that you use or a feature that you turn on instead of a standalone platform that you purchase. Ton of opportunity there for uh more customers to take advantage of our fast, easy, and flexible platform, and there's even more opportunity uh for our partners to serve more customers and ultimately uh succeed and grow in this marketplace. Uh, so now I'd like to change gears a little bit. Uh, I'd like to shift and we're going to invite our friends from Zoom to join us uh on the main stage to talk a little bit about Zoom's story and where they're moving in the market because I think they've got a really unique uh solution that they're pushing into the market space. They've really changed from what they were in 2020 when, you know, during the pandemic, we all had to work overnight uh from the safety of our homes. Zoom became a verb. You know, we all zoomed into meetings and um the the simplicity of the platform enabled anyone with the accessibility to reach out and see people even when it wasn't safe to necessarily gather together. And it was easy enough to where, you know, my mom could potentially join uh a virtual, you know, Easter with uh her family. So, I think there's a lot of opportunity in the market. I think Zoom has built an amazing customer base and with what they've built with the Zoom platform, there's a lot of opportunity for their customers to take advantage of this uh this revolution, but also for partners to expand their total addressable market to grow their businesses overall. So, what I'd like to do is invite uh Jim McGiri, head of global partner strategy at Zoom, to join me for a uh quick interview to talk about what's going on at Zoom.

Jim, Steve, great to see you. Thank you for having me. Thanks for asking Zoom to be here. And uh, hello to everybody in the Cypio community out there today.

Jim, thanks for starting. Let's start at a high level. Yeah, you guys are no longer just a video meeting service. You guys have built a true communications platform. So, how do you describe the company's strategy today? Especially when you're talking to partners and customers who adopted you guys during the pandemic because that was what everybody was doing, and now they just kind of see you as just video. They haven't really seen the the the full story. How what do you describe the strategy as to those types of people?

Yeah, thank you. And and and Steve, I think you hit the nail on the head when you went through your opening, right? During the the times of of 2020, the explosive growth that Zoom had during that time and obviously becoming a verb that we're all incredibly thankful for for what we've been able to deliver on the video communication side of things. You know, if you if you think about where Zoom was then and where we are now, uh the speed in which we have innovated inside of the product is absolutely incredible and and nothing like any pace that I have seen previously. If you actually go back one year at our Zoomtopia conference, which is our our public end-user conference that we uh that we also participate in, um somewhere north of 3,000 features got added into the platform last year. And these are features and this is functionality that really is from the voice of the customer. Not just for where we are at today, but for where we are going in inside of our future. And and when you look at Zoom more than just meetings as a productivity platform uh and a collaboration platform, it really starts to expand of how organizations use it every single day from not just video, but obviously the growth in what we're doing in phone, how we're using productivity tools like our documents, our mail, our calendar functionality, inter interpinning all of that with the power of the Zoom AI Companion, which has been an incredible story, and then ultimately our our latest step in for a into what we're doing with contact center, which has been an an an explosively growth product for us, but also the user stories and the feature stories that are coming out of it uh are absolutely incredible and um all of that is to say that the way that Zoom is going to continue to grow inside of inside of today and where our future is uh is all from our channel community globally. The channel growth is is the target that we have more than anything else. It's getting our partners out there, getting them enabled, getting them up to speed with the features and the functionality of what we deliver today. And how do we go position that into the customers that you're working with to really see this full tool set uh to continue to grow?

Yeah. And you know, I spent a lot of time selling phone systems, then it turned into phone systems in the sky, you know, and in 2020 that evolved into, well, you know, it's it's not just a phone system, it's it's the tri the three points of the triangle: messaging, video, and phone. And as a result, a lot of your competitors are still trying to create Zoom meeting clones to to bundle with their, you know, phone system in the sky. Um, but you guys have taken a different route on building a a full productivity platform. Can you talk about the strategic decision and how that's been paying off for Zoom?

Yeah, I think, you know, we're we're we're I like the way that you've you've kind of carried on this this conversation with your partners. Um, we recognize that we live in a world where Microsoft, Zoom, and Cisco, even at times, uh, we we collaborate together or we're a tool set that ultimately works together for to serve what the customer ultimately needs. And and we recognize that while we bundle in the different productivity enhancements and the tools that are in there today, that they may be used by some, they're not necessarily going to be used by all in every single capacity. We recognize that. But what we are what we are really carrying forward the conversation is is we talk probably more internally and and what we continue to share externally around the leveraging the use of our Zoom AI Companion. And if you have not used it, if you're a current meetings customer, which is the video product, even just testing out the delivery of what AI Companion can do from a transcription, a summary, a task management tool set, is absolutely incredible. And and really the way that we look at it is the meetings with the AI Companion working that into phone is ultimately kind of the leading indicator of where our customers are headed. Once you start using it, once you seeing once you start seeing how it can be used inside of the platform, you really start adopting more and more of that functionality. Um, and and and it and it does go to say, like like we shared with Microsoft earlier, we recognize that they're out there. We recognize they're on so many desktops from a from a productivity suite of products. So, for us, it's a conversation of how do we work together to deliver an experience that the customer is looking for that ties the best of both worlds together. And and a lot of times that's an integration of the phone product into the Teams client. A lot of times that's individual users who may be focused just working on Zoom, others working on Teams, but how do we make it easy for them to collaborate together? And that's really the message that we continue to stand forward on is if we have such a when since we have such a great video product that's easy to use, it use it leverages other components inside the collaboration space, how do we tie in all these productivity tools to work together? Because truly, you know, we've talked for years, Steve, about unifying communications. Well, I'm not unifying communications for anybody unless we're ultimately using other pieces and parts for for you personally, internally, to make sure that it's the communication experience that you want. And I think that's one of the things I find interesting about Zoom is, you know, as more and more customers, especially in the quote unquote down market, that small and mid-size business uh type customer, the the quote

The mid-market type customer, you know, they are rapidly looking at, you know, their overall IT tech stack and the the legacy thinking of building best of breed solutions worked when you were on premise. Because each thing was treated as a as a tactical product evaluation, and more and more customers, in my mind, and what I'm hearing from partners, and what I'm hearing from when I talk to them, are moving more towards what I would call best of suite.

Um, you know, I I want to find something that solves all of my needs because, by and large, a lot of these vendors are all checking all of the the primary boxes. Everybody's got a different, you know, twist here, a different twist there. And I think what you guys have done is been really compelling in building out Zoom Docs, Zoom Mail, Zoom Calendar, uh Zoom Contact Center, and Zoom Phone.

Um, there's been a lot of buzz around Zoom Phone. You guys, that's been growing like a weed uh in the market. Can you talk about its momentum and then what makes it as a a compelling choice for customers? And then I want to talk a little bit about what you were hitting on there about those shared those shared customers and how you're using AI.

Yeah, you bet. So, Zoom Phone, product near and dear to my heart and explosive growth uh ever since really we we released it um in just just a little bit before the 2020 time frame. And I think really what it gets down to is simplicity.

Um, you know, Steve and I, but for anybody that's out there that might recognize me or recognize or obviously know what Steve done in his past, we came from that world and the complexity in hardware PBX design. Um, you know, all we used to focus on was was ease of use. Who had the better ease of use story? Who had the scalability story? And with Zoom and with Zoom Phone specifically, you ultimately get that.

Um, it it's it's amazing to go through a a conversation with a customer and a a trial of those licenses and then ultimately an implementation. More often than not, every customer comes back to us and says, "That's it. That was easy. I can do all of the all of the things through my administrator portal and they're up and running." It's such a simplified process to take something that is very complex and and actually simplify it, right?

Um, there's very intelligent people who have once said to do something simple is incredibly hard, and I think we've and I think we've captured that with with Zoom Phone. So really the thought process is is you're in here for your meetings. We all work in an ever-changing environment, whether that is in a return to office scenario, some version of hybrid, or continuing to stay remote. I need the ease and flexibility of a simple uh to use application that already integrates within my workday inside of the collaboration suite, which we use in Zoom Workplace, and then ultimately be able to follow me inside of a mobile environment, work wherever I'm going to be at for that day, whether it's inside of the US or here in Austin, Texas, where I'm located, or globally.

How do we be able to deliver that communication experience on phone without really having to to think about it as a complex uh as a complex system or or just how that phone number is going to get to me? The other piece that we've continued to see evolve is really the the use of handsets on the desktop. There are many handsets that we support. There's many customers that we use that actually use those handsets still today, but more and more we're approaching customers who are leveraging the softphone because you're jumping from a video call, hopping onto a phone call. The ease of use inside of the softphone capabilities uh has really driven where the adoption of Zoom Phone has gone. And for us, it's an incredible uh it's incredible tool set to be able to move from the each one of those sources of communication to be able to deliver a very easy and seamless experience.

And again, I know I talked about it already, but don't forget that the the seamless integration of Zoom uh AI Companion inside of Zoom Phone is also available. So now when I can get a readout of my phone call or my meetings and all of that intertwines to tell me what the tasks, what the summary was, I don't have to be responsible or worry about taking notes any longer because I'm going to get immediate feedback of exactly what we just talked about. So, it's just fun to see these legacy platforms continuing to evolve, change, and ultimately grow with where we're all headed uh in the communication industry.

So, you just hit on number one, you spoke to my my soul by talking about taking things that are hard and making them easy. Yeah. That was one of the things that attracted me to to join Cypio was, you know, our mission to make things fast to get started, easy to manage, and just make them reliable forever. So, you guys are a perfect fit for that. But you also just hit on that keyword of AI and I know you guys are really leaning in on AI Companion. I think the fact that it's included with your Zoom subscription is really a differentiator and a game-changer for you guys. So obviously AI is a big part of Zoom's future.

Um, what's the vision for AI across the platform and how are customers already using uh AI Companion today?

Yeah, the thanks Stephen. The applications are incredible. You know, I think everybody has a different version when they think of AI. What does that mean? Whether it's, you know, from a personal standpoint, whether you're leveraging ChatGPT to facilitate some level of productivity or, you know, messing around with friends and creating all kinds of new things. That's one aspect of it. But as we continue to expand inside of the enterprise, there's a lot of there's a lot of things that that people find and hold near and dear to their hearts when you're talking about the sensitivity of data inside of the AI model. And it's important to note that that Zoom is a is absolutely not using your information to obviously train our systems. I think that's a very important piece of of information for you. Your AI data is your AI data.

And what's going to be fun for us as we continue to evolve into more of an AI company that's obviously leveraging the collaboration workspace is that there's going to be a continued trend of how do we work together to build models off of the data that that you're collecting to use personally for yourself, personally for your your your company, and also integrate into other applications that you use every day that are not on Zoom that cross the stack. How can I take the conversations from a meeting I just had and relate that to a spreadsheet that might exist inside of another platform? This is where we are headed. And the amount of productivity and growth is absolutely incredible.

I I think my favorite use case right now that we're seeing from an AI standpoint, it it actually involves our contact center. Uh it involves the agentic AI and what we call um our our our our Zoom Virtual Agent, right? So what that looks like and we've also seen it internally where you have north of 75, 80% of trouble tickets going into the chatbot being solved and solutioned in a first call closure that never has to touch an individual. Right? The power that we can do behind these virtual agents, what we can add into the AI adoption of what that virtual agent looks like because we're feeding it all of the relevant data for us. There's some just incredible use cases and stories that are out there as customers are leaning in to agentic AI, as they're leaning into the conversation of what we can do on the platform itself. The the it's growing every single day from what these capabilities can be and it's it's really an exciting time for that.

That's awesome. So, can you tell us a little bit more about your custom AI Companion and how, you know, allowing users to build their own AI tools and bots is going to reshape productivity and customer service use cases?

Yeah, you're going to see more and more of this come out um as we as we continue to roll it out over the over the coming weeks and months. But really, it's it's that same principle that I was just talking about. Imagine a world where you get off of a meeting and there's important data that exists inside of another platform or suite of platforms that you're using today. How can I how can I take that information, correlate the two things together to give you an output, a summary for you personally to be able to build your own LLM off of your workstation, off of your off of your client experience itself. That is where we are going.

I don't want to I don't want to take too much of the the too much out of the the wind of the sales right now, but there's so much that is coming inside of this AI platform that our conversations have shifted in the market. We we obviously talk about the collaboration. We talk about the platform and all the things that workplace can do, but where that underlying theme, that thread that ties all things together inside of the the AI Companion, which will ultimately fold into the the custom AI Companion is going to be a truly powerful experience for our customers and I think it's going to change the way we look at AI inside of the industry.

So, I want to talk to our partners for a second. Um, you guys have made public commitments around growing your channel contribution. Uh, you're at 40% of your revenue comes from a channel partner today, 50% by the end of the year, 80% next year. That's a lot of opportunity that you're you're going to start harnessing the channel for, which again sings to my heart.

Um, what's driving that shift and what does it mean for those that are watching today?

Yeah, it's it is truly about global scale for Zoom. Um, you are all closest to your customers every single day. You know where your customers, what your customers are needing. You're working with them in and out of the applications that they're using every single day. How do we as Zoom continue to grow inside of that channel contribution and and we've done that with multiple ways. We're obviously adding more channel resources into our team. We're enabling our sellers that are out there in the market uh every day on education, on working with the channel. And the win stories again of integrating with the channel are absolutely incredible because it's accounts that we traditionally would not get into. We know the relationships that you have in every single one of these these opportunities and we're leveraging our channel partners to get into those accounts, work collaboratively together and give you access to not just the the platform itself, but how do we implement it? How do we serve it from a customer success platform uh, you know, down the road? How do we ensure adoption of all of the different products that we have? These are the tools that we're empowering all of our partners with and and all of that only becomes successful if we stand on the pillar of automation.

So, how do we automate the sales process? How do we automate the quoting and the ordering process to make it easier than ever to transact Zoom. And and really uh just less than a month ago, we released some of our biggest enhancements from an automation perspective, from a partner lens to obviously integrate with us in a self-service motion through our through our portal or via API through your route to market through your distribution partners or as a seller so that you can go out and transact this and have access immediate access and tie-ins into all of our systems as well.

So, final question uh what advice would you give to partners who are considering doubling down on Zoom? Uh where do they start? What support can they expect from your team? What would you say to them?

Yeah, absolutely. So I I think the big things and I want to hit it up front is obviously go to go to our uh our our partner page on side of our website if you are not a partner uh today. So that's zoom.us/partner. That's a that's a spot that you can go and we can reach out and tie you into a local resource there or work with the distribution partner or TSD of your choice and we can engage you in that process as well and that will engage you with our teams and they will welcome you with open arms and start and start figuring out how we collaborate together. But if you're if you're truly invested in doubling down with Zoom, it's it the advice I would give to a partner is the same advice I give myself every day. Take the time to go through the application and learn about the different tools that are there because I promise you it is expanding every single day with what we can do and with what we can provide.

So, it's really about a personal education. Learn how to tell the story of what we're doing inside of Zoom and then really craft that to be a story that works specifically well for your region, for your part of the globe, or for your customer personally because there is an answer to that that the customer is looking for. There's a desire that they have. There's a need that they have that I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to I take a fair bet in saying that Zoom can find that solution and the solution already exists within the platform. So, it's the same advice I give myself. Educate yourself every single day on what the product is. And the best way to do that is is get into the partner program, get access to the portal. We have obviously tons of training, tons of enablement that's out there for you to to go by by product, uh, by solution, by industry, whatever that might be. And we're going to continue to enhance that with short little bites of information, especially as we keep dropping new content, so that you can take that and fold it into your conversation with your customers as well.

Awesome, Jim. Thank you for joining us here at Fleet Week. We're really excited about working with Zoom, especially uh we see a lot of opportunity for our customers in the SMB and the mid-market space and all the way up into the to the largest of enterprises to really harness the the simplicity and the power of the Zoom platform across the entire communication stack. You guys are so much more than meetings now. Uh and I think there there's a lot of exciting opportunities. So, thanks again for joining us today. And again, this is Jim McGiri. Uh the Jim is the head of global partner strategy at Zoom and we're really lucky to partner with uh Zoom and Jim specifically. So Jim, thanks.

Yeah, thanks so much, Steve. Uh, and have a great week. Thank you.

So now uh let's change gears. The undisputed leader in communications in this space, Microsoft. Uh Microsoft Teams was really what led me to look at a company like Cypio when I was looking at the next step of my career. You know, inevitably when I worked at my past company, I would show uh customers the the MVP, the message, video, phone, that those three points of the triangle I explained. And you know, anywhere from seven to nine times out of 10, customers would say, you know, politely, "That's nice. I just need the P. I I've already got messaging and video figured out. We're a Teams shop. We've adopted Teams because we use Office 365." And the the the deep integration with Teams across that ecosystem led to an almost insurmountable uh opponent. And that was really what drove me to look at uh Microsoft as a solution. And then to come to CIS uh to Cypio because we made it easy to enable uh communications in that platform. You know, we offered a slice of cheese to someone that had a hamburger, so to speak.

Uh, so I'm really excited to close out our keynote session with a discussion with uh Tamour Hussein. He's the global business manager at Microsoft. Uh Tamour, can you be uh brought up onto the stage? There he is. Tamour, thanks for joining us. I'm really excited to have a chat with you about Teams and Copilot and uh being very AI forward. Uh I I think I'm probably more of a power user of AI than most. I'm really excited to kind of hear about what you guys are working on uh in AI broadly and then you know more specifically how it applies to communication stacks inside of Teams. So Tamour, thanks for joining us.

Hey, no problem. Thanks for having uh having me Steve and uh hello to everybody listening up and happy birthday Cypio. Uh I'm I'm I'm a little bit bummed that Don didn't tell the story, the original story that I wanted her to tell for Cypio, but I guess we'll save it for for a later time.

Uh, yeah, so you know, um I think that there's some super exciting things that uh that we can think about. Obviously, um, you know, it was great to listen to uh Cisco and to Zoom talking about um some of the capabilities that they've got in their platform. And I think by this time, anybody who's listening to this particular webinar um and and for yourself as well, none of it is none of it is going to be any different or new other than the fact that the devil's in the details, right? Um, so we've never thought about our Teams phone solution as a standalone sort of phone thing. Um, and and it's actually, you know, it's no surprise that Microsoft imagines that uh phone is a capability that's part of productivity, part of collaboration, part of communication that stretches beyond uh dial tone, be beyond sort of this traditional workload that we've been working on for, you know, 50, 60 years maybe.

Um, and so when we think about phone, we think about it inherently differently. We think that it completes an overall picture, but by no means does it, you know, we don't focus on it by itself. Um, and so everything that we think about and everything that we breathe into phone is thing that we breathe into um M365, really, right? So our productivity and collaboration suite and and the same goes for all of the efforts that we'd be doing with AI. Um, everything that we're doing in the back end for collaboration. You started off this particular session with saying that, oh, you know, Teams kind of became the de facto standard, people started to really gravitate and leverage Teams for chat and collab and for document storage and for co-authoring things and all of the other productivity stuff. So we we actually think that all the other workloads like meetings, like video collaboration and phone is just an extension of that. It's just a it's just completing that picture. It's not really this separate entity that you need to bolt on or you need to think about in a different way.

And so when the reason why I'm saying that is the context is when we start to think about how we're going to breathe AI uh or or pepper in AI across our entire stack, phone is going to be benefiting from everything that we do with Copilot uh with all of the AI stuff that we do. Um, so I I really like some of the things that Cisco and Zoom were talking about because they're very similar to the things that I was going to say as well, right? Um, AI by itself, of course, we've seen the capabilities. Uh, everybody's got this capability where we can do uh, you know, meeting room summaries and, you know, summarize our meeting, give me the notes, give me the action items, call me out. All of that stuff exists for everybody. But when you think about it in the context of collaboration broadly, in terms of the life cycle of a meeting, the documents that might be involved in a meeting, you know, some meetings are on projects that started a year and a half ago. And so sometimes you just need to be caught up on what's actually happening. And so we love that Copilot capability of sort of bringing all of that stuff together.

Um, so that's kind of the the long answer to what you were asking.

Yeah. So let's jump in. You know, I agree with you. You know, I think we're just scratching the surface of what AI can do specifically to communications. And one of the things that I think really makes a giant difference for customers that are considering migrating from their legacy infrastructure into a fully consolidated Teams environment with communications is the fact that Copilot, they they're getting it because it smooths across the entire Office productivity suite. You're using it in Word. I use it in Outlook. I was on vacation for a week and Copilot was able to be my assistant to tell me this is the stuff you've got to action on right away when you first get back and you've got hundreds of unread emails. It helps you find the ones that matter. But when you move voice into Teams, not only are you lowering your total cost of ownership and increasing productivity for your end users, but now you're tapping into that innovation because Copilot spreads across your your communication stack with no additional cost. By the way, like a thick layer of icing on a cake.

So, it's so much more than just, you know, wrap this meeting up or tell me the action items. Um, you know, I'm building a team. Uh, I'm having a lot of interviews with candidates and I use Copilot at the end of each discussion to summarize the discussion, but then also give me some insights into this candidate. Based on this discussion, what's the likelihood they'll be a successful uh channel account manager or business development representative at Cypio? And it it's amazing the insights it gives you from just the conversation and and having that conversation transcribed in the Teams platform. Like having, you know, gold is data is the new gold, so to speak, or data is the new oil, whichever acronym you want to use. It's incredibly powerful and and you guys are really leading the way.

Um, you know, you guys have a whole AI strategy and portfolio of solutions in market. Can you share some of the insights on the latest AI advancements at Microsoft and and if you could click down on how they're being integrated into Copilot and Teams uh because you guys are in a lot of different places at agentic and, you know, with Copilot and your partnership with OpenAI and a whole host of other things with Azure. So can you share a little bit about that and like I said, double-click it down into uh Copilot and Teams.

Yeah. No, absolutely. I think uh, you know, I'll warn you if you get me started talking about this, I probably go for the full full duration of your Fleet Week and so you don't want that. Uh, I will try to boil it down, right? So the first thing I want to talk about is uh, really quickly, Copilot, right? Copilot is our sort of AI capability that sits across M365 and it's going to be prevalent in many many different places. In fact, it'll be prevalent in every single application that you have loved and used for decades um all over Office and Teams and Outlook by itself, standalone. We're going to have new canvases for AI that Copilot will influence. Things you've heard of like notebooks and pages and so on.

Um, and so that's going to be really the glue that brings all of this together. And the idea is pretty simple for Copilot, right? Make work more conversational. Today we have an idea. We ideate about things that, oh, I need to create a document, maybe it's a strategy paper for my leadership to be able to drive a new project or drive funding to a new project. So you start with opening a Word document and you start with putting your thoughts on paper and then you start to format it and then you start to bring more things into it. All of that can be very conversational.

Um, I can prompt Copilot to start that document for me, bring in some things and so on. So um, Copilot is our canvas for AI in M365 and that's going to be really, really important. The next piece is going to be uh, I think the really revolutionary piece. Like this is starting to become a little bit table stakes for AI. Um, we see lots of large language models and lots of conversational AI on built on top of them. Um, and so on. Copilot is one great example. Um, we're also starting to think uh, as I think I think both Cisco and Zoom mentioned this, but u this idea about agentic AI. I know that it's an over overloaded term. Everybody says it, nobody really knows what that means, but agentic AI is going to be really, really big, really powerful.

Um, this idea that um, we have still human beings prompting Copilot or human beings still doing AI work um is going to start to fade away a little bit, right? So um, agentic AI is this idea that me as a person can represent myself in an agent form and then there's lots of other automation beyond that, right?

Um, so I think somebody said where I think the Cisco guy said, sorry, I I know the names, I shouldn't say Cisco guy, but I think Cisco said, uh, you know, we're going to we're going to frontend agents and we're going to sort of, uh, the front desk doesn't need to be a human being. Totally agree. Right. Uh, there's lots of customer contact scenarios where agents are going to help. Um, there's lots of other scenarios where agents are going to help. We already built a bunch of agents into Teams. We've got a great facilitator agent. The interpreter agent is my favorite. If you haven't heard about it or seen it yet, it's it's going to be absolutely amazing. This idea that somebody can speak Japanese and I can listen in English in their voice in my language is I I just just really futuristic for me. Like I think everybody remembers a Babelfish and Hitchhiker's Guide or Star Trek like, you know, stuff. And it's real. Like I I use it today and and you know, it's not perfect, but it's damn close and it really brought a lot of, you know, as as you know, I work around the world and I had language barriers with working with people, things that used to should have taken a half an hour would take two hours, but that is actually closing the gap. It's a real use example.

Uh, we've got lots of other agents as well that I won't talk about, but in general, this agentic uh era is here. Um, we are seeing our partners, our customers, customers build a lot of agents on Copilot Studio, leveraging uh Copilot as the as the canvas and graph APIs, but also Azure AI and do so many different powerful things that you're right, we're just scratching the surface. The next time you have me on there will be, you know, 20 other agents that we can talk about. Um, and so that's really, really exciting for me.

Yeah, I I think I I heard a great analogy about agentic AI and generative AI and large language models cuz there there's a lot of terminology and I think unless you live and breathe in this, it can be really easy to get lost in what these terms are and you just start kind of nodding. And so here's the for for those of you who are are trying to figure this out. Agentic AI is like a self-driving car. You tell it where you want to go and you take your hands off the steering wheel and it drives you there. It deals with the twists and the turns and everything else. You give it guidance and it drives you. It delivers you to an outcome and you you're empowering it to make decisions. Large language models are like the really smart person in the in the passenger seat who's telling you all about, you know, the scenery as you're going by and, you know, factoids about, you know, the the land masses that you're driving across. And then generative AI is like somebody who's artistic in the back painting a nice picture of the scenery as you go by.

So, so moving into a model where I'm not playing a dedicated role in the outcome, I'm telling the AI what I'm looking to get out of it and then getting out of the way, I think, is is really where this next phase is going. You guys are leading the way with Copilot Studio and, you know, other things. What are some of the new features and improvements that are coming to the Teams platform, whether it's through Copilot or what you guys are cooking up uh that have you most excited?

Yeah, I I mean this is kind of where I get myself into trouble because I don't know what's what's still under NDA and what's not. But but I will say I will say this, like you will see obviously a lot more work being put into a couple of areas. The first area would be AI. Uh, not just on the agent side. I've talked about a few agents that are already in Teams or maybe they're not yet released, but they're going to be very soon and we've talked about it publicly.

Um, there will be more capability that we'll talk about there. Um, we also want since you've got a lot of partners on the call probably here, we're also doing a lot of work to enhance the backend, the service part of the Teams Teams platform. Uh, you know, administrating it, troubleshooting it, all that kind of stuff.

Um, you've already probably heard us talk about uh, you know, Copilot in the Teams Admin Center. So rather than going to hunt for various knobs and things that you need to press or licenses you need to sign, why couldn't Copilot do those things? And you'll see us invest a lot in sort of AI not just on an on an end-user perspective, but also on the backend to make partners and and people that we service u their their jobs easier. That's going to be a big investment. We're also looking at um, really thinking about a bunch of different things like customer contact is something that we're really investing heavily in.

Um, you might you may have heard about things like QAP and some of the things that the Dynamics team is doing for Dynamics Contact Center. So we're really thinking about how AI helps customer contact uh and do a much much better job of of omni-channel as well as uh various different customer contact requirements, whether it's in Teams or whether it's in a contact center that integrates with Teams. There's going to be some work that we're going to do there as well.

So, you know, end-user AI is is going to be fantastic. Uh, I think that's that's like like I said, table stakes, but we're also going to be breathing AI into the platform, the service uh, and and also bringing uh, you know, the the intelligent call recap thing is just such an exciting PSD and use case. Like we're phone, we're phone geeks here, I think on the call. Like I think the uh, the Cisco was talking a little bit about, you know, all the way back to Call Manager. I'm at Cisco, so I I remember those days and I remember like cookie mock and cookie link, you know, really interesting times. But but generally speaking, like intelligent call recap is such a great use case for me because I take a bunch of calls on my on my mobile phone and my Teams client.

Um, but, you know, and if I'm on the if I'm on the road, which I am a lot, I really don't have time to take notes or pull out my laptop and do something while I'm on the call. Um, and for for me to be able to end that call and go back and have the entire summary and all the actions and when something was said and everything there, that's super powerful for me. Like I I've really it's it's transformed and with Teams Phone mobile, you know, things that are going to be evolving there. So so for us to be able to think about how AI really, really improves, I mean, you know, I I hate talking about things that are for the sake of it, but these are really great use cases that I think are I'm super excited about.

Yeah, you know, and mentioning partners and, you know, I'm I'm proud to say that we're leading some of this charge. You know, what we've done with uh Beacon and what we're continuing to bring to market with Beacon is a precursor to what you guys are building. Uh, we want to empower our partners to leverage AI to make um, you know, a quoting conversational. You know, instead of the clicks, you just have a conversation with Beacon, whether it's through text or actually speaking to it to say what your customers need. How to gain insight from your customer base to understand um, you know, what your customers are actually looking for. So you're not, you know, the the dreaded cold calling, but you're actually better serving your customers through the use of AI. I think there's the the sky is the limit for what we can do for partners. But can you share which Copilot tools and features that partners should learn about to better serve their customers and grow their businesses? I think this is a real opportunity for channel partners to evolve from the typical way that they differentiate. It's my texts, it's my guys, it's my guys, you know, that are going to pick up the phone when you got an issue to really transition into that business outcome provider to their end customers, but they've got to know where to start.

So, uh, which Copilot tools and features do you think partners should look at and learn about?

Yeah, I mean, I think I think that's a that's a fantastic question. Um, and and before I answer that, let me just say that, you know, I don't think anybody on this call that you've had so far relies more on partners than us. Like for us, the entire ecosystem is driven by partners, especially as you go down market. Like this is this is, you know, and so so we really uh appreciate the work that uh not only all of our channel partners do, but also partners that enable our channel partners like CPIO um, and that's super critical um for us.

I think that if you are a partner today, uh, whether you're in the communication space or not, but especially if you're in the communication space, you've got to start looking at uh not only the uh the Copilot adjunct services that Microsoft is building. Like for example, we have something called Copilot for Service that integrates to CRM and integrates with Teams and and starts to sort of bring those two worlds together or all of that customer contact world together. But you really got to start getting your hands dirty with Copilot Studio and start thinking about agentic AI and how to build agents that are going to automate workflows, automate your customer journeys, automate uh the integrations that you're going to be providing with all of the different products that you do, right? We as Microsoft are a little bit biased because we live in our own world, in our own bubble, but we understand our customers don't. They've got Microsoft stuff, but they're going to have needs for other stuff. And the complexity uh that exists over there is solved by partners such as yourself. And today the complexity could be manual. It could be pretty heavy lifting. But that's where AI is really, really, you know, it's it's basically positioned to do that. And so when you think about agents um, that's going to be the biggest one. And and for you to start thinking about how to build agents to provide more value-added access to your customers, that's the future.

Uh, Steve, I know you and I were setting up this meeting and you asked me 50 times, hey Tamour, what are some times that are available for you? And I gave you some times and then there was a third person involved. Like that could be an agent. Why are you not talking to my agent? In fact, why is Steve's agent not talking to Tamour's agent and figuring this out? That is the very near future. It's not something far out. It's going to be very, very soon. Personal agents are coming. Um, that's just an example, but there's going to be a lot more to that, right? Customer service is going to be completely disrupted with agents um, as as is going to be many more things. So if you, the question is boils down to it, Copilot Studio, building the agents and figuring out how to bring more value with AI to the solutions you already provide to your customers.

So, one of the things I'm excited about in my new role in building out our channel is to better serve kind of the SMB and uh the the mid-market customers, that SMC space. You know, the upper end of the market, they're they get a lot of dedicated attention, rightfully so. But I think one of the underserved spaces in the market really is in in the the volume. You know, 99% of uh businesses globally are less than 500 employees. So how do you address those needs for those customers and those sizes and what opportunities do you see for growth uh in that market segment?

You know, I think that there's a tremendous growth opportunity there. Um, and honestly, it's an opportunity that sits squarely in uh in sort of your area. Everybody on this call and yourselves. Uh, and the reason is because they really don't have the time to consult with Microsoft as a trusted advisor or vendor to their solutions because they don't necessarily buy solutions like that. They they look at, you know, localized solutions, partners, sort of, you know, your mom and pop shops.

Um, and that's kind of where SMB and SMC really because they need some, they need help, right? They don't have dedicated IT staff. They want somebody to come in, figure it out for them, manage it for them. Just not they don't have they don't have the ability to have, you know, 10, 20, 30 people in it learning about it, managing it, advising it, and making plans and so on. They're very nimble, they're very agile, but they're also very like streamlined from an IT perspective. And so therefore, the opportunity is absolutely massive. Uh, you know, as more and more people sort of adopt Teams, look at Teams and think about uh, you know, leveraging sort of the premium value of Teams in things like AI and Copilot and so on, they need more and more guidance from our partners on how to do this, what to do, what are the use cases and how could how they can be solved and how it really can be tailored to their particular business. Nobody more than SMB is, you know, needs more like customized solutions because they are so specific in what they do. They're really, really focused and experts at a particular thing and they need solutions that are tailored towards that and that's why kind of the ecosystem of uh all these point solutions exists anyway, right? They solve a particular problem.

Um, and so for them to be able to make that easier and much more integrated uh is super important. One last thing, we talk about a lot about at Microsoft, what we call the flow of work. Um, and this is a super high-level concept that, you know, maybe may not be well understood, but the flow of work is so important. We learned that when people move between tools like they move from one tool to the other to the other, that's really hard to do because you're it's hard to train people. I mean, we're IT people, so we pick up applications pretty quickly. But if you think about non-IT people that are working in many industries, it's hard for them to to gravitate towards a new thing that they can use or to lose context when they move from one application to the other. So when we talk about the flow of work, we talk about bringing sort of the core competencies of communication, collaboration, productivity, and now AI in a single pane of glass, which we think increases productivity by an intangible value. And that's kind of the value that the Microsoft stack has. And so that's a really important concept for us to land with our customers as well.

Yeah, I mean, increasing productivity by consolidating into, you know, what I call the super app, I think is tremendous value for end customers, especially when you start talking about customers that are in that small and midsize business, the mid-market. They're not really focused on, you know, best of breed and collecting, you know, platforms like they're the Infinity Stones and the Gauntlet. They're really looking for fit-for-purpose tools that minimize the disruption to the business that drive, you know, cost efficiencies and increases in productivity. And I think you nailed on it. You know, having Teams as your all-in-one application or portal that, you know, ties in everything and then putting Copilot as again, that thick layer icing on top is is really, really key.

Um, last question, Tamour. So, you know, we've talked about how you guys are helping customers in that SMB SMC space. In my role, I'm going to be building out and scaling our channel business to help partners uh kind of grow their businesses and I'm coaching them to look at, you know, serving those customers because there's just so many of them and they're so underserved. How does Microsoft plan on supporting partners and scaling that part of the business, particularly down market, uh in that, you know, sub-1000 employee business space where there's just so many customers and again, so many of them are underserved.

Yeah. No, it's it's it's a it's a great question. Um, and also I think it's an important one for us to this is kind of why I'm here to be honest, right? I we think that the this particular market segment is is served the absolute best with our partners. We want to enable our partners with the tools, the platforms that they uh they can use and leverage to be able to automate, to be able to manage efficiently, to be able to build more value-added services on top of. That's what I think works, right?

Um, and so uh, you know, what whatever we can do to provide them the scalability that they need to be able to give a not only a value-added solution but a margin-rich solution because that's what I think partners care about. Everybody cares about money, right?

Um, and so for us to be able to help build and scale those platforms, that's what we're going to be focused on. We have dedicated teams in our engineering organization that are working solely on figuring out what is what works for those particular platforms. What is what does our partner channel need to be able to scale this in a way that's easier for them to provision, to deploy, to manage, to troubleshoot um and provide value-added services on top of.

Um, I think that's going to be the biggest thing that we do. Um, and, you know, any feedback on what we potentially could be doing, I'm very happy to hear about it. I can put you in touch with the right people to work with in order to figure that out. But it's something that a lot of us are super passionate about in in making sure that we help our partners get there. And and thank you, CPIO, for for building out a platform that can help MSPs and our CSP channel and resellers and and Telos to to be able to do that. That's a it's a big part of what we want to do.

Tamour, thank you for joining. I love chatting with you. There's always a ton of insights and things and little thought nuggets that kind of weave into my head. This is no different. I think there's a lot of opportunity out there for customers, especially in that SMB space to embrace, you know, this platform. The most amazing thing is you guys continue to grow the user base. You know, this isn't 2020 anymore where, you know, customers are just adopting solutions. Growth in today's world means competitive displacement. You guys are winning customers from competitors because of the deep level of integration across the productivity stack. Uh, the the the layer of of AI innovation across all of it. I I think really speaks to that statistic that there's a reason why, you know, success is not finding Microsoft. Microsoft is finding success in the market because you guys have built something so unique.

Um, so I really appreciate you joining us today to share some of that with us and uh again, thank you for uh joining Fleet Week.

Hey, thanks for having me. Take care.

No problem. Thanks.

So, you know, great session today. I I hope you got a lot of value from hearing from our friends at Cisco, at Zoom, and Microsoft to really hear about how customers are embracing a new way to communicate by leveraging the communication stacks that they've already adopted and migrating communications into those environments. Instead of looking at communications as a standalone purchase or a service to subscribe to, it's simply a feature that you turn on, uh, no matter which platform you're using, Teams, Zoom, or Webex, and you just see the adoption grow like a rocket ship. You start to see the productivity gains from what we talked about with Tamour, where everything's in one place, and you harness innovation across whatever platform you choose. AI is radically changing what a phone call is uh and how it helps your end users take the work out of getting work done.

Uh, so we've got a whole host of additional content for you to learn more about these incredible options and capabilities inside of these platforms throughout this uh 3-day digital conference. Uh, today starting at Erin, if you can pull up the agenda slide. At 2 PM uh you can join us to learn more about enabling communications in your collaboration platform of choice. 3 PM, we're talking to our customers in higher education on how they can leverage their communications platforms to better enhance communications by students and faculty and administrators and even that outreach to alumni. And then at 400 p.m. Eastern, we're going to be talking to our friends in the legal space about how they can better serve their clients, how they can better facilitate uh interfirm communications to deliver better outcomes and increase billables overall.

Tomorrow's partner day. Our partners are going to be in for a treat. They're going to hear all about market insights, about opportunities in the space. They're going to hear from independent experts in both the industry with Cavell and in the channel with Channel Playbook. And then in the after and they're going to hear from a peer uh and Sean Torres from Intel. The afternoon we've uh got Peter from uh uh Channel Playbook to walk through partners on really thinking differently about this market, this economy, how do you generate new business and how do you uh excel in and outpace growth inside of this space. And then Wednesday, we're inviting our friends to join us on Fleet Week. So we're opening up the doors to our uh partnerships. So our friends from Akixie, from Tollring, from um Solgari and from Clerk Chat to share about their solutions and how they further add communications and customer engagement capabilities to these platforms. And then finally, we're going to close it out with a discussion uh with Patrick Watson, a fireside chat with Patrick Watson from Cavell uh to share their research into the market. It's going to be a really great discussion. Patrick and I had such a great time doing the prep work for it. So, make sure you check that out on Wednesday at 2 PM Eastern. And then the ships will sail off into the prover the proverbial seas uh until we uh come back into port for Fleet Week again.

So again, this is Steve Forham. I'm head of marketing and channel chief here at Cypio. I want to thank you for attending Fleet Week and hope to see you at the other sessions.