What's Up with Tech?

Why Voice Still Reigns In Customer Experience As AI Scales

• Evan Kirstel

Share episode

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com

Want a clear view of where global voice is headed and how AI changes the math? We sit down with Barbara Dondiego CEO at Avoxi to unpack the shift from legacy telephony to a modern cloud voice backbone that unifies numbers, routes across multiple CCaaS platforms, and puts intelligence at the very top of the stack. If you’ve wrestled with six vendors, inconsistent quality, and opaque billing, this conversation shows how enterprises regain control, visibility, and speed.

We trace the evolution from regional servers and PBXs to a software-first model that treats voice like programmable infrastructure. Barbara explains why agentic AI is driving voice minutes up, not down—once simple calls are automated, brands stop throttling phone support and let customers choose the fastest path. We dig into real deployment patterns: AI answering known intents, clean escalations to skilled agents for revenue moments, and omnichannel journeys where long text threads pivot to a quick call for instant clarity. Along the way, we cover the mobile-first reality—most inbound traffic now hits from cell networks—and why the phone remains the most universal, regulated, and low-friction gateway to natural language systems.

Under the hood, we get practical about interconnects and standards. Avoxi’s role in the ecosystem is to simplify the last mile with direct carrier connections worldwide while staying open to your stack—Amazon Connect, Genesys, Five9, NICE, Webex, and beyond. That openness lets teams consolidate on a single global voice layer while mixing applications by region or line of business. We also look ahead to what’s next: voice-native security as AI increases call volumes, anomaly detection at the phone-number level, end-to-end encryption, and smarter defenses against automated floods that pretend to be people.

If you’re planning your CX roadmap, this is a grounded guide to consolidating providers, automating with confidence, and securing the future of voice. Subscribe, share with your team, and tell us: where would AI at the top of your stack make the biggest impact?

Support the show

More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel

SPEAKER_00:

Do. Hey everybody. Super excited today to dive into the future of international cloud voice, cloud communications, and how it's shaping the global customer employee experience and beyond with a true expert and innovator in the field from Avoxy. Barbara, how are you?

SPEAKER_01:

Hi, I'm doing great, Evan. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, thanks for being here. For those who may not know what Avoxy does exactly and who you work with, how do you describe the company these days?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So Avoxy is a software platform that takes voice services and puts those into the cloud and delivers those through all the different tech stacks of our clients around the world so they can answer the phone and communicate with their customers in the cloud.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, you make it sound so simple. When I started 35 years ago in telephony, it was a little more complicated. Let's look under the hood. What's the current state of international cloud voice? What does the marketplace look like right now?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah. There's a lot going on. So, you know, what we see is if you kind of think about how international communications evolved over the years, right? How people actually moved internationally with their companies. They used to, you know, go get a location somewhere. I always use Singapore. You'll get an office in Singapore, you, you know, you get a building, you put a server in there for your computers, you put a server in there for your PBXs, one for your contact center, and then you get utilities, and then you get phone numbers, you get people, and you're sort of in Asia. So if you think about how we've changed, particularly over the past five or six years, all of those things are moving to the cloud. You know, you don't need a server for computing anymore. You don't need a server for your PBX, your server for your contact center. All those things are moving to the cloud. Even your people can be in that office or they can be remote, um, working wherever. And um what's really left is those old original phone lines are kind of left all over the world and they're plugged into gateways and all kinds of complicated stuff. So we can take a look at that first slide. Um basically, we're seeing a lot of great trends here. We're seeing our customers really moving to the cloud. So they're moving all those things to the cloud, and what's left is that phone line, but even that phone line now, we're starting to help them move to the cloud. And the reason is is because of point two here, a lot of our customers that are global multinationals are dealing with more than six different providers all around the world, different languages, different currencies, different infrastructure. And 97% of them want to consolidate that to the cloud. Um, and then the last point here we're seeing is really the rise of agentic AI. So, you know, not only are you trying to move all your workflows to the cloud, then you're trying to consolidate all your voice vendors into one platform, but then now you're trying to layer AI on top of that and really start to enhance the overall customer experience using that new power, those new powerful tools. And what we're seeing too is 80% of enterprises expect their voice minutes to go up as they're as they launch more AI. Um, kind of think about voice historically has been kind of an expensive channel. Uh, the reason it's expensive is because of the cost of the agent. So if you can start to bring the cost of the agent down by answering the call with a machine, a machine-assisted agent, that allows our clients to kind of ungate voice. So they expect voice to go up from a minutes perspective as they launch AI. So um, it's really exciting times for the Voxy platform for sure.

SPEAKER_00:

Fantastic. And what are the behaviors in the global enterprise these days when it comes to voice modernization? What are they doing? What where are they spending? Invest in dollars, and what's changed over the last couple, three years?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, definitely. If we want to bring up that second slide I sent you, we can talk a little bit about that. So we'll go to the next one here. There we go. So what we're seeing is we usually come in and our customers have some type of version of this chart here on the left. So they have a lot of different providers, voice everywhere. Think of my Singapore example. There's that going on in multiple countries, and then they're plugging it into all different platforms, just depending on where they are and their evolution of the cloud. And you know, a lot of these different contact centers they evolved um kind of organically in different regions and they all made different technology decisions. So you take this complexity, and now with the Voxy platform, you're really possible to really integrate that into one whole simple platform where you have a lot of transparency and visibility. So you can move all the voice over and then you can answer the phone in whatever way you want with whatever platform. You can use one platform to answer the phone, like maybe everybody's on Genesis or everybody's on AWS Connect. But more than more than not, we find our customers have more than one platform, and then you can answer your calls in different platforms. And then with AI, I think that's really the new thing going on here is that now you can you can have your AI agents answer the phone as well and route that directly. If you want to, I call it the top of the tech stack. If you want to have your voice call come in and you want to say, you know what, this type of call that looks like this, maybe from these types of customers with this type of data indicator, I want that automatically answered by AI before it even hits a human agent, before it even hits any other part of my platform. That's possible too. So our customers are really now starting to think through their tech stacks and trying to understand what do I really need from infrastructure, the voice infrastructure, which is what the Voxy platform does. And then how do I start to put together all the other pieces of the tech stack, including AI, in um, you know, how I deliver a great customer experience?

SPEAKER_00:

Fantastic. It sounds like uh despite all the excitement around chatbots and and um you know AI stacks and LLMs, voice communications uh is still alive and well. And uh tell tell us about what you're seeing in a in the environment that still makes voice king for customer experience.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so I always say this. I started my career 30 plus years ago, also a while ago, started my career um in data services. And the reason was because um voice was kind of like old then. It was kind of gonna die. And I started working on this product. My first product was called Frame Relay. And I it was everything was data, and I thought voice was dumb. So the fact that I run a voice, uh cloud voice company, I find is very ironic because I was really most of my career. So um, but if you think about voice and you think about um two-way communication, so voice is a really great way to manage many different types of problems, still today and always. Like if you have a complicated solution, if you need to have, you know, if you if you if you're like four or five different points on how you need to explain what something, what, what's happening, that real-time two-way communication is very valuable. And so that has is been why uh voice has really stayed as a primary channel in the contact center, even though it has been expensive. So as voice costs are coming down with AI, this, you know, your phone here, your mobile phone, is really a great conduit into a natural language processor. It's the best way for you to get to your clients. It's it's available all around the world, everybody has access to it, people know what it costs, they don't have to download different apps. It has regulatory approval already in different countries. And so it's really becoming a new conduit, not just for a human agent, but for a natural language processing, for an AI agent to communicate with your clients.

SPEAKER_00:

Fantastic. There's also a lot of consolidation happening on all levels of the industry. How do you think that affects things, you, your customers, good, bad, indifferent, both?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's so much. I think there's always gonna be happening in technology and in infrastructure. Um, so for us, I think, you know, um the more choices our customers have on how they can deliver a great customer experience, the better they're gonna be. And the more investment in all these different areas around CX, the better, you know, the better our clients are gonna be able to deliver some their products to their customers. So I think it's all very positive. Um, and I think that uh, you know, the more that we can be consistent about how we deliver services with some of the you know technology protocols around the world, like SIP, for example, the better off we're gonna be as well.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and of course, in the meantime, big tech has entered the voice and CX arena in a major way, whether it's WhatsApp, which is probably the world's largest phone company right now, whether it's Amazon and their CX offerings, Google, uh, on and on. Um is that a good thing for you and the enterprises, or does it make life more interesting?

SPEAKER_01:

Um, both, I think. But for us, I know we are a partner with Amazon. So we um we actually partner with them on the voice infrastructure side, which is really exciting for us. We love doing that. Um, and uh, we also partner with Genesis and Five9 and Nice in Contact and all these different platforms because we really focus on the voice infrastructure piece, and that's what's really unique and different about our company. So for us, that's all really great. Um, and then on uh the client side, I think trying to figure out how to weave in all these new places that their customers might be, whether they're gonna be at the end of a WhatsApp line or whether they're gonna be at a mobile phone number or a regular phone number. Um, I think that's continued to evolve. I'm pretty excited about the things that WhatsApp is doing and how they're really trying to um integrate more explicitly for businesses. Um, you know, they started off, of course, as everyone knows, as such a consumer-focused platform. It's been a little bit more challenging than I think we all all had expected to really make WhatsApp work for business. Um they're just they're really getting there now. So I'm excited about seeing how to pull that channel in through uh for the experience as well.

SPEAKER_00:

Fantastic. So you reference free rain relay. I'll I'll throw back at you an old school reference, the baby bells. Oh yeah. And the phone companies. Oh, yeah. What are the roles of of the big uh what we used to call PTTs? You know, I guess we call them phone companies in the mix. Are they partners of yours? Do you do you know interconnect with them? How do how do they own the phone numbers, I guess? But how does that work in your world these days?

SPEAKER_01:

Great question. So um, you know, the the voice contact center market is like by our calculation, like a 60 plus billion dollar market just for voice because it's everywhere around the world. It's a huge, huge market seeped in a lot of legacy technology. And so what we're able to do is really pull all that technology into the cloud and pull all that voice into the cloud, deliver that for the customers. But at the end of the day, um, in really every single country around the world, you still have to connect to whether it's this device or a physical phone number, and you're connecting through that final last uh carrier. So whether it's a you know a Virgin Mobile or Vodafone or ATT or Verizon or British Telecom or Telstra, any of those carriers around the world, you have to connect to them last to for your client to call in to you because they're buying their phones from those people. Um so we do have to interconnect with all those different carriers around the world to get that last little piece that's still 100% not in the cloud, but then everything else is in the cloud with the platform. So we take all that complexity and we really obfuscate that or manage that for our clients. Um, and we have about 110 different interconnects all around the world. Um so we want to be as direct as possible, have as, you know, as we want to be as close to the customer as we possibly can.

SPEAKER_00:

Fantastic. And the other thing that's come a long way, of course, is mobile voice, mobile telephony. And uh now with eSIM and technologies like 5G and eight high definition voice, you know, it can make a big difference for agents, for users. Some parts of the world don't even have phones, they have mobile.

SPEAKER_01:

No, no, they never went landline, yeah, because they didn't have the late 1800s where they had being built everywhere. Yeah, they yeah, they just went mobile. And you know, we I would say um from a mobile landline perspective, I don't know anyone really who has a home phone number anymore. Um even in business, people aren't using their phones. It's really in the contact center, and it's really about a mobile phone calling you. So typically that's I mean, we probably see 70% of all traffic around the world is mobile coming into call centers. And I would think that will just continue to increase as that as that is the preferred way that people want to call and communicate.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and call and message. We've seen uh messaging come to the forefront. Now we have RCS kind of finally. Uh that must be a big boost for some of the CX projects that you're involved with as well, where it's multi-mode voice and messaging.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. And how can you convert back and forth? You know, I always uh on my team, and I also we also see this with our clients, is if you have three or four messages, just pick up the phone then, or just place a call. So really it's it's being able to transition. One thing we are seeing in voice communications in our research is that um I don't know, maybe like 50% of interactions start on voice, but 80% of interactions end on voice.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow.

SPEAKER_01:

And so, you know, you're chatting back and forth, you're messaging back and forth, you're texting back and forth. Okay, after three or four, let's just call because you can probably resolve something in about 20 seconds versus a five-minute chat interaction. So being able to really seamlessly integrate between all these channels is really important for the experience, too.

SPEAKER_00:

Fantastic. Uh, you have many, many customers. So I don't want you to pick a favorite child, but any examples there that you can point to or kind of give us the feel for where things are headed?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I mean so many. Uh, you know, we have a we have so many great customers. Our customers, just as a reminder for your audience, our customers are typically folks who are over a thousand employees, um, operating in five or more countries, and of course, operating some type of contact center. And a lot of uh like reservation centers from the hospitality side of the house. We also have um, you know, logistics companies that are our clients as well, and then pharmaceutical companies, anybody who's really operating more of a very critical call center to their product for a revenue perspective or service. Um, so what we're seeing is our our customers are really following those three major trends. You know, they are continuing to move as much as they can to the cloud and remove anything that's physical and their whole infrastructure. And then they're really trying to consolidate and move everything to a modern platform like the Avoxy platform to have more visibility and control and really start to change the game on service. And that's one thing I think Avoxy does really well is we actually change how you think about service. Instead of having a reactive service mode, we're able to use our software platform to be more proactive. So we actually have models, um, machine learning models that are built at the phone number level that can tell you what's going to be normal traffic for that phone number. And if it doesn't look normal, if it's it looks like there's an anomaly, we'll proactively work on that and see if we need to um address something for you around the world. So that's a very different type of service that we offer. And we're able to do that because we deliver everything with software. And then I'll say the last thing they're doing is they're all working on AI projects. So, you know, whether it's the pharmaceutical industry, the logistics industry, hospitality, they're all layering in and dramatic increases in AI over the past 12 months, where they're layering in, you know, if you call now and try to make a reservation in any of the top 10 hotel hotel companies, they're gonna see, well, if you're just checking the status of your reservation, they're really gonna want to have you talk to an AI agent. But if you're gonna buy more room for more nights or expand or want to upgrade to a suite, they're gonna want you to talk to a human because that's where they're gonna make more, uh, you know, a better outcome from their perspective for their business.

SPEAKER_00:

Fantastic. Any, um, I can't believe we're a few weeks away from 2026, but any predictions or insights into what might uh happen in Cloud Voice uh 2026 or just more the same.

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, I think there's still total rise of AI. I think we're just really scratching the surface there. You know, what we're seeing on the workflow side is our customers are um really starting to think about how to reprioritize voice now that they have a lower cost per call. And they are trying to understand which parts of a Gentic AI are gonna work best for their overall end-to-end experience. And they are really thinking about how to truly own their tech stacks versus, you know, having those embedded in all in one system. They're really breaking out certain applications that they're gonna own, whether it's for their IVR or whether it's for their, you know, how they're doing uh payment, payment processing. Um, the last thing I'll say on a prediction is we're really looking at new technologies around security in voice. The inbound, if you think about AI increasing voice, AI increasing traffic into the call center, um, well, the call center is inherently not that secure on voice. Really. I mean, in banking it is, right? In banking, you have to give all this information, financial services, but in all other product-based companies, they're really frictionless, was the whole point was get the customer on the line as fast as possible so you can have a great outcome and sell them something else. Close their, you know, close their reservation, give them an airline ticket, um, you know, whatever. So there's not a lot of inbound security on voice naturally, like historically. So really starting to look at different things that that can um help to prevent unwanted calls, especially unwanted calls driven by machines. If you kind of flip the flip it around, you could have machines flooding into your call centers acting like humans, which can cause some problems. So more security. Um, so we're we're taking a look at um some enhanced security profile, uh some enhanced security products for a Voxy as we look into 2026.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it's amazing how still many of these voice solutions, I won't name names, they're not end-to-end encrypted these days, which yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Avoxy ours is, but shocking.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, yeah. Um I'm just making plans for next year, heading out to CES, but then Mobile World Congress and Enterprise Connect. Yeah, what are you excited about level wise, event-wise next year?

SPEAKER_01:

We will be yeah, we will definitely be at Enterprise Connect. We are doing um a lot more shows with all of the different contact center platforms. So you'll see us around the world. We were just at the Genesis show that was in Australia last month. We were just at reInvent right now with AWS Connect. So that's a huge, huge show. Um, so we'll be at the AWS shows, we'll be at Genesis shows. We did uh a WebEx show this year um to check that out. WebEx is actually doing some interesting things too. So that's probably where you'll see us either at Enterprise Connect or at some of these uh larger, larger platform shows.

SPEAKER_00:

Fantastic. We'll be sure to see you there. Thanks so much for sharing the update and all the great insights.

SPEAKER_01:

Sounds great. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you. And thanks everyone for listening, watching, sharing the episode. And be sure to check out our TV show, techimpact.tv, now in Fox Business, and Bloomberg. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Barbara.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you.