This is my second Forrester Wave™ evaluation covering contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) platforms, and to the uninitiated, the familiar set of vendors in this Wave could make it appear almost as if there has not been much change in the market. But looks can be deceiving.

Two years has made a big difference for CCaaS vendors, as Forrester’s newly published report, The Forrester Wave™: Contact-Center-As-A-Service Platforms, Q2 2025, reveals. The CCaaS vendors have marched forward through a time of incredible change: Generative AI (genAI) is reshaping customer service, adjacent vendors are working to commoditize CCaaS, and the CCaaS vendors continue to expand their value proposition. Much as these proverbial ducks appear to be bobbing along serenely, under the surface, those feet are paddling away through the choppy waters of this market. Following are some of the most striking changes I saw while researching this Wave.

In CCaaS, AI Changes The Game (Again!)

ChatGPT 3.5 was announced within weeks of the launch of the 2023 CCaaS Wave, promising great potential but too soon then to impact any of the offerings in early 2023. Of course, AI was already reshaping the offerings in this space with new approaches to self-service, agent assist, analytics, quality management, and more. Now that genAI has had time to permeate CCaaS offerings, we are seeing new levels of capabilities that are changing what it means to run a contact center:

  • Call summarization. This capability became a commodity in a matter of months. Generative AI-written notes are high-quality and save agents time performing an important but rote task, thereby freeing them to spend more time with customers.
  • Analytics. Every call is now transcribed, and genAI enables the business to query this data to unearth business insights without requiring a data scientist. New insights are helping brands run their contact centers and hold the promise of spreading customer insights across the organization.
  • Quality management. No longer do we need to sample 1% of calls and hope to find a good example of an interaction to judge an agent on (an old process with ineffective results). AI can score all calls, noting customer and agent sentiment to provide overall feedback. This capability frees supervisors to focus more on coaching and improvement instead of basic scoring.
  • Agent assist. Two years ago, CCaaS offerings could demo the system, advising the agent advice such as “The customer has negative sentiment; be more empathetic.” Cool, yes, but the advice wasn’t particularly relevant or useful. GenAI provides real insights and next-best-action recommendations that save training for agents and improve outcomes for customers.
  • Customer self-service. This is one place where the CCaaS vendors are lagging the conversational AI point-solution vendors that have aggressively embraced genAI for self-service applications, since the alternative would be quick extinction. For the CCaaS crew, genAI provides value in many places without unleashing genAI directly on customers. As a result, it’s not surprising to see that the CCaaS vendors have invested in other areas. Look for this to change before you see the next CCaaS Wave.

CCaaS Vendors Deliver More Than Incremental Improvements

CCaaS vendors are thinking beyond the confines of improving the traditional capabilities of a CCaaS platform. For example, they might be providing a new level of value, extending beyond the contact center, or preparing for a new, AI-centric world. Areas we saw in this Wave include:

  • Next best action. This capability offers useful suggestions for what agents can do, which the system often suggests proactively based on the conversation between the agent and the customer. So far, this capability is more practical for conversations that happen in the digital realm, as there is still too much lag time in most solutions to keep up with the chaotic nature of spoken human conversation.
  • Analytics reaches beyond the contact center. The more the contact center can understand what happened to the customer before they hit the contact center, the better an agent can anticipate that customer’s needs. Understanding the customer journey beyond the confines of the customer service interaction allows for a much better service experience, and CCaaS systems can provide insights that have value beyond the contact center.
  • New pricing models. There is general agreement that as AI increases automation across the contact center, the number of agents will start to decline, putting pressure on prevalent agent-based pricing models. Vendors in this Wave evaluation showcased a variety of approaches that typically focus on monetizing AI capabilities to offset any losses from traditional seat-based revenue.

The CCaaS market continues to evolve — watch for the pace of innovation to increase further. To understand what this evolution means for your organization, please schedule a guidance session or inquiry with me!