Good morning and welcome. Thank you all for being here for the 8x8 Analyst Update live from Nasdaq. Thanks to folks in the room. I know we've got some folks joining us remote, and we've got an incredible program planned for today, and some exciting announcements, starting with...
Fábio. Always.
Fábio and myself.
Didn't expect that one.
I'm Lisa Walker, Head of Brand here at 8x8, and I'm joined by Fábio Ramos, our Head of Product Marketing. Next slide. Clicker needs to work. There we go. Our new brand campaign launched today out on the Nasdaq tower, which is a really exciting moment for all of us, and it's obviously surrounding those of you here in the room with us live. Communications for the customer obsessed. I have no doubt that by the end of today's program, our speakers will have brought this headline to life for all of you. Fábio.
Thank you. Thanks, Lisa. Let's go to the next one.
Next slide.
There you go. All right. We're thrilled to host you here at the Nasdaq today. Such a great venue, so thanks for joining us. Before we get started, I really wanna make sure that we cover this piece in here. We issued a press release last night. I hope you had a chance to see that. In that release, in case you haven't seen that, but in that release, we're announcing three things. The first one is. If the clicker helps me. Again. The new Supervisor Workspace, which is purpose-built specifically for Contact Center leaders. Our first conversational AI offering, the 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant. There you go. And then.
Oh, we're excited.
Thank you. Finally, our platform-wide integration with OpenAI that will bring their natural language understanding models to our platform across both UC and CCaaS. We'll have more details on those as the day goes along. It will be a packed agenda, lots of curated content in here. We're gonna start with Sam Wilson, our CEO, who's gonna be sharing with us his, you know, his vision of the industry, the state of the industry, and where we're going as a company for the next several quarters. Mehdi Salour and Hunter Middleton will share an update on the work they have been doing to bring all the components of our platform together in a modern microservices-based architecture.
At that point, we will jump into the three product announcements. Dhwani Soni and Patrick Russell will actually give us an overview of the three announcements that we, you know, that we just shared with you. We're gonna break for 10 minutes at that point and then come back for a customer panel discussion that will be moderated by Jessica Smith. I wanna thank Zach, Brad, Jeff, and Chris for joining us today, taking the time from your busy schedule. Just really appreciate you guys being with us here today to share your experience. At that point, we're gonna move straight into working lunch, right? Sam and Hunter will host a Q&A while we all, you know, have lunch at the time. At 1:00, we'll break. We'll basically host two breakout sessions.
Sam, Kate Patterson, who heads up investor relations for us, and our CFO, Kevin Kraus, will host our guests from the investor community for a financial update. Hunter will provide a product update for us at that time as well. Immediately after that, the product update is done, we're gonna do another executive Q&A. I'm gonna invite a broad session of 8x8 executives to join us here at the stage, representatives from across multiple areas of the organization, so we can share, you know, how all the announcements that we're making today are gonna be impacting the different, you know, teams and how we're, you know, hoping that will actually drive growth for us as we go along.
We're gonna stop at 2:00 P.M. for a quick networking session, and then at 2:00 P.M., the Nasdaq team is gonna come over, and they're gonna take us to the bell closing ceremony, right? Bell or the button.
Yep.
Pushing ceremony.
The button-pushing ceremony.
Exactly. Then, hopefully, once it's all done, you guys are gonna be able to join us for cocktails as we wrap up today. All right? It's a lot of content. We hope you enjoy it. With that said, I think, Lisa, you need to do.
I've got a little bit of housekeeping.
Disclaimers and housekeeping, right?
Yep. All right. Some housekeeping items before we get started. All information is public unless otherwise noted as under NDA. We do have financial analysts joining us today, which is great, we will be live streaming this event up until 11:00 A.M. You can find us on Twitter at 8x8, the hashtag for this event is #8x8AnalystUpdate, and we hope all of you will use it as we share some of the exciting things happening with the company and with the platform. For those of you in the room, of course, if you need to take a call, you can please head out. Just be on earshot. That would be great. When you're in the room, please have phones muted. Of course, restrooms are out around the corner.
The all-important Wi-Fi should be on the table tent in front of you. It's 8x8 at Nasdaq with a dollar sign. All right, one more bit of information before I turn the meeting over. Please note that today's discussion, we may make some forward-looking statements. These statements are predictions only, and actual events or results may differ materially, depending on a number of factors. These factors include, but are not limited to, the risks and uncertainties listed on this slide. For a full discussion of risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ from our forward-looking statement, see the risk factor discussions in our 10-K and 10-Q filings. With that, let's get started. I'm thrilled to introduce 8x8 CEO, Sam Wilson, to give us a business update. Sam?
Gotta love those safe harbor statements, the SEC. All right, let me start by saying good morning. Thank you to each and every one of you for making the trip to visit us here. If you came from outside the New York City area, thank you for the arduous traffic, planes, trains, and automobiles it took you to get here. If you're inside the New York area, thank you for making the subway journey. That's an adventure all into itself to get here. If you're one of our customers- I'm sorry?
Wasn't that a joke? I laughed.
You're more than welcome to. If you're one of our customers or partners, thank you for joining us today. I wanna do a special shout-out, and thank you to Lisa and Fábio for putting this all together, and the team that worked with them and underneath them and around them, et cetera. I certainly am just a small bit player in this adventure today. They did all the heavy lifting. All right, to the laugh earlier, please interact today. If you have a strong point you wanna make, Hunter and I'll be up at lunch to answer a ton of questions if you want 'em. In between, if you wanna throw darts or anything at us, we'll take it and we can address it on the fly. All right.
With that, I wanna talk about where we are as a company. Let's just start right with the basics. We continue to grow and expand. We've grown both organically and inorganically over the last couple of years. What's inorganically? We acquired Fuze about a year ago. Kevin's got an update on that. Fuze for us has been a phenomenal home run. Here, let me get out of the way for the pictures. Fuze has been a phenomenal home run already. We have a lot of further opportunity around it. Why? XCaaS resonates with enterprise customers. Just for everyone's benefit, XCaaS is the bundling and the integration of UC and CC on a single platform available for customers. We see it, right? Our enterprise business, our ARR growing substantially faster than the overall company.
Our average seat count on the UC side growing. Our number of active users, you know, a vast majority of our Contact Center business is in excess of 100 agents active at a given time. Those kinds of things, right? We continue to grow and expand in the enterprise segment because this resonates. We remain committed to our leadership position in global telephony. However, what we're gonna talk about today a lot is really around the Contact Center side. That's been something we've been less known for, and I wanna talk about it extensively. The other thing, as you'll see, is we updated the number on Microsoft Teams here. Over 300,000 seats of Microsoft Teams. We were an early partner of Microsoft, worked on the integration, et cetera. It's now in excess of 10% of our seat count.
Just as a reminder, we were the first Microsoft Teams certified Contact Center. There can only be one number one. That was us. Teams remains an important piece, we wanted to put it up on the chart. For those interested, if you're gonna do the math for you, our Teams seats are growing triple digits year-over-year. It's a very powerful tailwind that we have. All right. With that, I wanna talk about an important topic for us as a company, right? We've been moving from a sales and marketing-led company to an innovation-led company. What this chart shows is our non-GAAP R&D spending has increased 4x since 2018. Our Contact Center innovation spending has increased 8x since 2021. Our overall R&D spending is up 82% in the last two years.
We are working diligently to continue to increase this. We wanna be a product-led company because a software company should, first and foremost, be judged by its software. First and foremost. We're a services and product company. You should judge us on our services and products. We see it. That's really gonna be a lot of the point today because this, as you can see from the chart, stepped up about a year ago. When we acquired Fuze, we were very clear, we were acquiring Fuze to get the revenue and the R&D capacity that Fuze gives us. We picked up over 20 Scrum teams. Those Scrum teams have been diligently working both on upgrading the Fuze base to 8x8 and innovation. That's really what we wanna talk about today, is that innovation.
As we reignite growth of the company, we'll continue to invest aggressively in R&D. It's a key piece of where we're going as a company. All right. I wanna talk a sec about the industry and where that innovation investment is going. If you look at 8x8 in 2018, 2019, I've been with the company almost six years now. We were very much a collaboration company. That's where the industry was. You're talking about voice, video, and chat for business communications, mainly small business customers at the time. That's absolutely powerful. We sold Contact Center. It was a smaller piece of our business, and the story fundamentally was on-prem to cloud. Excuse me. On-prem to cloud. As this graphic shows, part of what we're announcing today is we are making a move away from that collaboration portion.
Still remains part of our business, we're much more focused on bringing UC and CC together for a customer-obsessed user of our product. I think that's super important. The reason I think it's super important is because I and the team believe the industry fundamentally changed in 2020. It's not about the pandemic. From 1995 to 2020, Silicon Valley investment, venture capital, the move to cloud was a lot about pre-sales to sales. The CRM vendors, HubSpot, Salesforce, et cetera. The marketing automation vendors, marketing operations vendors, Marketo, Eloqua, et cetera. Pre-sales to sales. All right? What happened in the meantime in the Contact Center? The Contact Center was move it to a developing country, strip out all the costs, do the bare minimum for the absolute least amount of spending that you can do.
Starting in 2020, we've noticed the sea change. Suddenly, we see tremendous investment. We're gonna talk a lot more about this today. Tremendous investment in post-sales. Retaining customers is as important as getting customers, is what the enterprises are starting to realize. You talk about what drove this change. Clearly, it was a realization as more and more people moved to a subscription-based business model that retaining customers matters, but it was also about machine learning and artificial intelligence. Suddenly, things like self-service, agent replacement, bots, all these kinds of things. We believe there's a tremendous opportunity in creating a platform for that customer obsessed, that customer experience user of our products. That's why Lisa, huge kudos to her, drove a branding campaign that changed the words that we use, communications for the customer obsessed, and really wanna highlight that. All right.
The last thing I really wanna highlight is, you know, we're realists at 8x8. Those on the left side of this chart, they're left competing with Microsoft. Microsoft is Teams. No, on the left side. Hold on. The ones in the middle of the C, all competing, they're all competing with Microsoft. All the ones on the collaboration vendors are competing with Microsoft. Look, huge kudos to Microsoft. Teams has been a home run. 280 million MAUs, I think, is what they said last, et cetera. Part of the reason we're charting a course away from that is because we partner with Microsoft, we don't wanna compete with Microsoft. We'll let others in the industry do that. All right. I don't wanna make sure...
I wanna make sure one of the things I state very early on is we are not moving away from the XCaaS. We are not moving away from combined UC and CC. This is not, and I've already heard some of the rumors that, you know, we're exiting the UC business. We are not. We haven't changed our minds. We've been listening and watching how customers use our UC products today. There is a tremendous number of people who touch customers every day who are not in the Contact Center. We have fundamental feature function data and analytic capabilities by extending from the Contact Center through the entire organization, and that's with or without Teams. It doesn't matter. We'll capture the telephony side of Teams to enable that combined UCC/CC customer experience.
Should you choose not to use Teams or you're gonna have users, your stores, your warehouses, and other things that don't want to be on Teams for cost reasons or practicality reasons, we'll capture those on our system. XCaaS fundamentally brings this customer obsession to life. All right. Let me take a step back and say, a lot of what you're gonna see today is based on this premise. If you look at this chart, this is how we view the Contact Center ML/AI landscape. In particular, we're gonna talk a little bit about what changed in 2020. If you look at the far left of this chart, you're gonna see the hyperscalers. You all know them as Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, or if you're more in the know, Amazon Web Services, GCP, and Azure. Those are the hyperscalers.
Those are the platform. They have the core primitives and infrastructure that's used. Who's it used by primarily today? Category number two. Yes, we use them also. Category number two, the applied AI companies. I think this is the thing that I, being in Silicon Valley for 25 years, see so closely that the more we talk to our customers and partners, we've realized isn't broadly known. There are now in excess of 1,000 startup companies around the Contact Center space. Our best estimate is well in excess of sorry, $100 billion of venture capital raised. They rely on the hyperscalers to build their products. They are taking the primitives and the technology of the hyperscalers and bringing it to point and case solutions.
Health scoring, sentiment analysis, obviously chatbots, agent assist, all those kinds of things. Note very clearly in this ML/AI landscape who I didn't show, because I think it's very important. I don't show the traditional Contact Center on-prem or cloud-based companies. You don't see them here because their spending is less than $1 billion, best case in ML/AI R&D. They're being outspent 100 to one, their stated mission is to compete against the applied ML/AI companies. We believe there's a tremendous opportunity to partner with that community, let me tell you why. That $100 billion is leading to tremendous innovation. I have to laugh. ChatGPT and OpenAI is all the rage. We put out a press release this morning, right, saying, "Hey, we have an integration." You'll hear about it later today in production right now.
We knew about this months ago. Why? 'Cause we're a Silicon Valley company, and they're down the street from us. We also knew it 'cause we're talking to this startup community and interacting with this startup community. That's super key. We are not trying to compete with that community. I'll talk more about that in a second. That's where the innovation is occurring around the Contact Center, along with companies like ours. The ML/AI innovation is truly occurring in that $100 billion, and the traditional vendors are being way outspent. It is not our goal to compete with those companies. All right. Why do I think we have an opportunity in this space? As this chart shows, 2016-2023, right?
The VW on the left. Make sure I got it right there because it's on the reverse for me and the portion on the right. Okay. Five years ago, we started fundamentally rebuilding the foundation of our Contact Center products from the ground up. It used to be a monolithic code stack. It used to be, you know, one release every 90 days or so if we were lucky. Today, we are a microservices front-end and back-end with CI/CD, continuous integration, continuous deployment technologies throughout. We've gone from one release every 90 days to 1,000 releases every 90 days. 1,000+ releases every 90 days. We literally do four to five releases every single working day. This enables two things. Number one, near perfect uptime, and I'll talk about that. All right.
The second thing it enables is a very rapid pace of innovation for us now in the Contact Center. I think this is super important. If you look at the applied AI companies, they are innovating very rapidly. We have to couple. If we're gonna partner with them, we have to couple at their pace of innovation, otherwise they will leave us behind. I think this is a fundamental advantage of us over other Contact Center companies, is that we are now at a pace of innovation on the core piece of it that can hook up or match. Oh, picture time. The applied AI companies. All right. Also, besides high uptime, which I think is super important for the Contact Center, obviously mission-critical software. The other thing is, let's talk about something we've all known.
In 2016, on average, we would have 300 customer-found defects in backlog. Today, we have zero. Today, there are zero bugs from our customers in our software right now. That doesn't mean they don't find them, but when you're making four to five releases per day, no longer is it, "Hey, we found a bug. Great. We'll put that in release 2.0. It should be here in about three to four months." If we find a bug from our customers and we can fix it, we can fix it this afternoon, tomorrow morning, tomorrow afternoon. We do that every day. This allows our backlog of CFDs to go down. Super important when you're talking about an API webhook type of environment and a fast pace of innovation.
All right, where are we investing and what are we gonna talk about today? 'Cause this journey started with Fuze and everything else that we're doing. We wanna focus our core Contact Center on four major areas. Omnichannel, intelligent routing, so skills and attribution-based routing, UI/UX, and you're gonna hear a lot about Supervisor Workspace. That's that microservice front end that can do some absolutely amazing things that Dhwani will talk about. Data and analytics. As you work in this ML/AI world and as you work with ecosystem partners, you're gonna wanna know, did the bot solve the problem or not? Did we have to transfer it to an agent or not? Did the agent solve the problem? How do we continuously keep track of the bots?
How do we continuously know if they need to be trained or retrained or any of those types of things? This is where we'll focus. Forgive me for a second to the industry analysts, let me take a step back in time. This strategy of building a set of APIs or a set of webhooks and opening them up to further innovation on top, that platform strategy, it isn't new. It's new to the Contact Center, it's not new to software. This is what the consumer companies did in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008. This is what Force.com is. There are 5,000 plugins to Marketo. There's no reason the Contact Center should not look like marketing operations in the future.
We are blazing the same road that was blazed by others in front of us from web 1.0 to 2.0. We believe the same thing occurs in the Contact Center. The company that will win is the company that has the platform that is able to embrace that rapid pace of innovation. It can't all be in-house. Oops. All right, quick summary slide just to make sure we put it together 'cause I'm gonna switch gears for a second. Right? At the ecosystem, right now we're looking at things like Conversational AI, workforce management and optimization, agent productivity, some of the visualization 'cause you get data dump out of it into a visualization platform, agent assist, health scoring, all those other things, and we're gonna focus on those core areas. We're gonna focus on get the case, move the case.
If an ML/AI engine or partner can't solve the case, get it to somebody who can. Make sure that customers are always taken care of. This view that we developed here is done extensively with customer interviews through our research department, et cetera. The idea here is channel agnostic, technology agnostic, human being, bot agnostic, those kinds of things, and making sure we build a platform that always keeps the administrators and supervisors completely aware of what's happening at any given moment. All right. When we built this strategy, by we, I mean myself, the team, everybody at 8x8 , through that interviews, through that research, we came away with two key questions. The first one we came away with was, do ecosystem partners care? Do they wanna work with us?
Starting on January one is the first time we reached out to ecosystem partners. I'm not gonna. You're gonna see slides, and you've seen some logos. We have not made these public yet 'cause we're gonna let them and their marketing engines make them public. We started reaching out and saying, "Do you believe in this vision? Would you like to join us?" We have been overwhelmingly surprised by the response. This says 14 'cause I built the slide yesterday, and as of this morning, I believe it's 15, 'cause last night, one of the Tier 1 agent assist companies signed up. We already have 15 signed up in almost less than eight weeks. Six have demoable products. There's already API requests coming through, and we have over 20 sitting on a waiting list.
We literally cannot onboard ecosystem partners fast enough, and that's one of the areas we're moving resources around. We have seen a significantly stronger reception from those applied AI companies than even we imagined. I just wanna highlight, these are not small players. These are all brand names that you would know. These are industry-leading players in conversational AI, in agent assist, in health scoring, in sentiment analysis, in these types of things. All right, why? Why are we getting this reception? I believe it boils down to a few key core things. Number one, our platform allows partners to innovate rapidly. Number two, the way we're doing this makes the ecosystem partner a first-class citizen. This is gonna be really important to point number three. We believe that ecosystem partner should be on par with any of our products.
No degraded APIs, no internal APIs that get, you know, can't get shared, et cetera, et cetera, because most importantly, it is not our plan to compete with those ecosystem partners. If you look at the native Contact Center, if you look at the on-prem guys, you look at some of the other guys in the space, they actively compete with their ecosystem. We hear it from the sales go-to-market side every single day. Those partners know if they partner with us, we want a win-win situation. Why? 'Cause we're a customer-centric company. This allows customers to choose a set of vendors and capabilities that most tailors, customizes, whatever word you wanna use, to their exact needs. All right. The other thing this does, and this is super exciting for me, is 8x8, what have you guys known us for, right?
On-prem to cloud, woo-hoo, $50 billion market, 300 seats of UC moving to the cloud. The on-prem guys don't have a cloud product, et cetera. Now, even more importantly, we think we can go after the market for Contact Center labor. Why is this important? Contact center labor costs went down for 20 years, and last year grew for the first time in 20 years, I think, or 15 years. There's some controversy about the numbers, but we are seeing growth in Contact Center human being labor costs for the first time in years.
[audio distortion]
Could be that too. Fair comment. All right. What are we looking at? We're looking at what ML/AI technologies do, what technology has always been great at, is replacing rote labor, I wanna be careful, rote labor with technology. Agents should no longer be agents. We should start calling them specialists because what they're gonna handle is they're gonna handle the complex cases. They're gonna handle the difficult cases. Authenticating a call, looking up a balance at a bank, getting an RMA number, all these things can be fully automated, and they're available today for automation. Wanna get your mean. The best part is all of these things increase customer satisfaction. What do customers want today? Self-service, seven by 24 in global languages. ML/AI is great at that stuff, and so are we.
Bring those two things together, and you can improve customer satisfaction across the board. All right. Now, I'm sure, 'cause I'm looking at the industry analysts, and I see all your eyes up here. I'm sure a number of you are saying, "This is from 8x8. It's slideware. It doesn't exist. Will it ever exist? Are you gonna bring it to market?" I stand before you today saying simply, "Yes, we can." We're profitable. We're cash flow positive. We have the money. We are investing in innovation. We have world-class technologists. We're good at it. How do I know we're good at it? 'Cause we have the broadest IP portfolio in UC and CC. Hundreds of patents and that pace of innovation has been accelerating. We have more patent applications today than we've ever had in the history of the company.
We have the money to spend. We are spending it, and we're spending it 'cause we wanna build world-class software to make our customers happy and delighted. That's what customer obsession means. It doesn't mean there won't be bumps in the road, and I'm sure at one point all of you will hear about them. If you're fast, you're innovating quickly, any bump in the road can be fixed quickly, and we will fix them quickly. All right. 1 last slide, I'm gonna sum up here. This isn't a dream. This isn't aspirational. The chart in front of you is the proof of concept we have done in-house at 8x8 over the last two years. We have an ML/AI chatbot.
We have an ecosystem of partners that do things like case management, health scoring, alerting when a prime customer is in a situation, et cetera. All right? We see the real results today. We have 50% case deflection, and that's not a bad word, with higher customer satisfaction than we did two years ago. We have less tier one agents today than we had two years ago with a higher NPS score, higher customer satisfaction, and more customers. We have more volume and less human tier one agents. What have we done? We haven't taken those tier one agents and laid them off. We've made them tier two agents.
They work on the difficult problems and the how-to questions, how do I set up my auto attendant, how do I repurpose my phone, how do I set up, you know, holiday greetings, all those kinds of things are all handled by technology. We now have the capability of calling a customer and saying, "We think you're having a problem." And they're like, "No, no, we're good." 10 seconds later, "Nope, you're right. We do have a problem." And already you're ahead of it. Why? 'Cause we use our in-house core omni-channel ML/AI, et cetera, all those things, along with a broad ecosystem of partners to make those things happen. This works. This brings the tangible results to customers. All we have to do now is productize it.
With that, I'm gonna turn it over in a sec to Mehdi here, but I wanna leave you with a simple thing. Our strategy, become that ML/AI consumer experience platform. Why can we do it? 'Cause we're a modern platform built on a thick foundation, tall foundation, whatever. In 2016, we could handle a two-story building on our foundation. Today, we can handle a 50-story skyscraper on our foundation. It's there. Lastly, 'cause we believe by combining UC and CT together, we can create a very customer-obsessed organization, and we stand behind our customers and what happens. With that, I wanna turn it over to Hunter and Mehdi because they're the stars of the show. Technology is what we're here to talk about today, and the technologists are gonna take us away from that. Mehdi.
Thanks very much.
Hey, everybody. Mehdi's gonna lead off, but I just wanted to start. I've heard from a few of you over the last several months that we haven't told enough of our technology and innovation story at 8x8. This is your punishment. Mehdi is awesome. He's been with the company for a long time, one of our chief technologists in the company. He's run our network operations and our DevOps teams and stuff for many years. I will translate when he's done. Mehdi, take it away.
Thank you very much, actually, Hunter. He's absolutely right. He needs to translate later. Good morning, everyone. My name is Mehdi Salour. I'm the SVP of Global Network and DevOps for 8x8. I've been with 8x8 for over 22 years, since the inception of our cloud services. It's safe to say that I've seen it all, from the very first server that we installed in the rack, the very first $35 that we celebrated, that we got from the very first customer, to $700 million ARR that you saw basically on Sam's screen. One thing that I can say that it's always we have been super passionate and obsessed with innovation and engineering excellence, okay? You've seen this through our patent portfolio and how much innovation we have done on the core technology.
Today I'm gonna show you a side of 8x8 and technology that we have not talked about publicly much before, and I'm super excited to do that. Basically, we have been hard at work in the past few years to modernize our engineering, infrastructure, tech stack, and frameworks that we're using to deliver services. Why did we need to do that? We did all of the work to pave the way to be able to do the announcements that you're hearing today and deliver the vision that was laid out by Sam just a few minutes ago, and we're super excited about it. We are a very different company than we were a few years, okay?
With that, I would like to start with giving you a quick view of, like it's like a back mirror looking at it, where we were a few years ago, okay? A few years ago, we were busy doing a lot of acquisitions. We brought in a lot of technology, that's like our culture, right? We are obsessed with technology. We wanted to own the IP, so we did a lot of different technologies. Then with this acquisition, the way that we were delivering the services, we had some level of integration behind the scenes between these. However, it was not fully integrated single platform. What you were seeing were SKUs that were over independent products. We had some independent UIs to access different basically parts and functions of the system, right? Many of our core technologies were mostly monolithic.
We were exploring some of the microservices, but there was no framework for those, right? Each individual team was working on some basically microservices. We were mostly data center-centric, right? We had some cloud footprint, some of the acquisition that we did, some of the things were running in cloud, but mostly we're running in the data centers. That's probably the view that you had about us as well at the time. Now, let me tell you how we look today. We've been doing a bit of a heart surgery in the past few years. One thing that we started to take on was the platformization of the service.
We started to look at all these different tech stacks that we had, and we started to push more and more things that were common functionalities, things that you're gonna be utilizing in different parts of the system into microservices architecture, into the platform and shared services. An SMS is an SMS. Whether you're a Contact Center agent, you're receiving an SMS, or you're a UC user receiving an SMS, the technology behind it is the same. You don't want to develop these independently. You want one team to be responsible for this to deliver all this SMS functionality independent of everybody else. Same goes for chat, same goes for many, many different services that we have. If you wanna move fast, you wanna move to the microservices architecture.
Everything that you're seeing in between the dotted lines were re-architected open-heart surgery to achieve what we're trying to do. On the left-hand side, you also have our global network. I'll talk a little bit more about this, the art and science of network engineering that we have implemented. It's some cool stuff, but I'm gonna park it for now. On the bottom, you have basically our very, very strong, you see basically connectivity to our partners all around the world. As you probably know, we have, we can cover basically PSTN, full PSTN replacement in 58 countries around the world. That includes emergency services, toll-free, all short codes, all the capabilities of the PSTN in over 58 countries. We're connected to over 40 partners around the world to accomplish that.
On the CPaaS side also, we're connected to 190 carriers around the world. The other thing that we did, each one of our systems had their own API, set of APIs, kind of independent. You had to be developing things separately. We started to create an open API framework and standardize it across the board. Okay. With microservices, people all talk about whether you're technical or not, it's easy to understand why microservices make sense, right? You're moving the things that are independent, you can move faster, people will develop things independently. However, people usually don't talk about the pitfalls and issues that comes with microservices. Microservices done right is extremely difficult. There are many things that can go wrong. There are cascade failures. There are interdependencies.
How do you deal with the cloud infrastructure that you have in different places that are quite different? You have OCI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, you have AWS, you have GCP, you have Microsoft Azure. Each one has their own set of basically APIs and tools that you're utilizing to deliver the services. How do you deal with those complexities? That's where we come up with something incredibly powerful. We created two frameworks, one we call Cloud Eight, the other one we call Infra Eight. We needed to be able to move fast, so deliver things that the customers want very quickly. We need to simplify the complexities of these basically networks and systems and cloud players, which I'm gonna talk more about.
We needed to make sure everything that we're delivering, if you're delivering this many new releases, if you have this many teams working on different things, they are secure, and they needed to be scalable. Scalable from two different perspective, both from the service delivery perspective and also from the organization perspective. I'm gonna be simply expand on that. Let's start with Cloud Eight. Cloud Eight is an ecosystem for delivering robust microservices. It's cloud agnostic, extremely resilient and scalable. Why did we create this? Developers should not worry about the complexities of microservices. We want them to be just worried about their own app. I don't want them to think about high availability. How do I achieve high availability? I don't want them to think about security. How do I achieve security for my services? I don't want them to think about scale.
How do I scale up when there's extra load coming in? How do I deal with Kubernetes when there is a failure of a server or services? We have abstracted all of these capabilities into the framework so the developer can just focus on developing their own app. This is incredibly powerful. Along with that, we created another framework we call Infra Eight, that's been utilized by Cloud Eight. What is Infra Eight? We talked quickly about cloud agnostic over there. Cloud agnostic is from the perspective of our developer, right? We need to be able to deploy the application, whether it's on Oracle Cloud, whether it's on OCI or in our data centers, we should be able to treat all of them the exact same way from the developer perspective.
Behind the scenes, the infrastructure of each one of these players and our data centers are different, right? Again, we created Infra Eight to abstract all of that for the developer community that we have. Everything automated, self-serve, robust security and governance in place, so we would be able to do all of this completely transparent to the developer teams. All the Scrum teams that Sam was talking about, they can develop their own application, not to worry about where it's going, where they're gonna be deploying. They just know the region that they need to deploy to, right? All of those basically exposed to them. Where do you want to do it? We make the decision where they need to go. The developer does not care. I do care. Cost is very different between the cloud providers, different feature functionality, performance of different components.
I make those decisions behind the scenes in the rule sets that we put over here. They're completely dynamic. The developer just knows that, hey, we want to basically deploy the services in U.S., East and West, E.U., one or two, right? They don't know what's happening behind the scenes. It's incredibly powerful and a freedom for developers to not worry about the entire stack and only worry about their application. That's a superpower that is really paving the way for the velocity that we want to have now and moving forward. Where are we at with this framework? Over 300 microservices to date have been deployed on this framework. These are the type of things we have not talked about before externally. I'm very...
I mean, we have over 400 services and microservices, 300 of them are on this framework. You can see a few examples that I put in that resonates with people. Directory services. Doesn't matter which service, UCC, whatever, directory service is a directory service. It's a microservice that's running over here. Chat, presence, TTS, 300 of these types of services. They're all Kubernetes-based and on Cloud Eight. I would like to highlight one of the like one of the things I'm very proud of on the Cloud Eight infrastructure is extreme resiliency that I talked about. Kubernetes by itself, for those who are in technology, is extremely resilient. This technology was invented by Google. Loss of server, services, pods, nodes would not impact services, right?
On top of that, what we did is Kubernetes is not known to have great resiliency geographically. Things happen. In fact, for again, those of you who are following basically the cloud industry and everything, go back December 2021, one of the most famous basic cloud providers had an entire region going down despite three availability zones, right? Things like that happen. You cannot rely on, "Oh, I have availability zones." You need to have geographical redundancy. We have created an architecture with active geographical redundancy, considering the sovereignty zones as well. U.S; East and West, E.U; one, two , U.K; one, two , Australia; one, two , India; one, two , very diverse geographically, and we're able to provide the services in an active mode where losing an entire region would not impact us.
In fact, that example that I just gave did not impact us, and we were so happy high-fiving actually in the rooms and whatnot. Like it's very bad to see any outage of any provider. Nobody wants to see that, but the fact that we're not impacted was incredible, okay? That's one of the areas that we're very proud of, so I wanted to really highlight here. Next is, I'm gonna go to some foundational stuff. Like we treat performance of the service delivery at 8x8 as a foundational thing. There are three pillars to it, and I want to highlight these three pillars. There are measures and work that we're doing that we call preventative.
These basically measures and work that we're doing are the type of work to ensure that the issue would not happen in the first place. A lot of things that I showed you guys, including the high availability active for Cloud Eight, have been designed to prevent issues from happening in the first place. Organizational rigor on change. That we're moving that fast, you gotta make sure these changes cannot break production, right? Very important. Automation is the big part of it. The moment you have manual intervention, you're opening things up for errors. Human error happens. There is, like, no question. Automation is the way to prevent that from happening. Service health reviews. As I mentioned, we have over 400 microservices, 300 of them on Cloud Eight.
We're basically looking at the health. Each Scrum team is responsible for their teams. They're looking at it all the time. We have our proactive measures. Proactive measures are predictive systems that we have put in place to ensure if something is gonna happen in the future, we know about it as soon as we can. These are time series. We're collecting an enormous amount of metrics. While we did Cloud Eight, we started to instrument all of our systems to ensure that they publish basically all kinds of metrics to the background, to our data series, so we can actually look into the trends, the changes. AI/ ML actually here comes into play as well, to predict if something is gonna go wrong, so we can stay in front of it. We do also chaos engineering.
This is kind of fun. We actually interject problems into the system. We introduce problems, latency issues, connectivity, to see what happens. microservices are very difficult to do, as I mentioned. Interdependencies, cascade failures. You wanna test them out. While in theory and in architecture, you're doing everything right, you still wanna make sure that everything goes as planned when there are failures. That's where we go and introduce the chaos engineering by our end-to-end team. Failover and DR testing is, of course, part of that as well. Reactive measures is the last line of defense. If something goes wrong, you want to know where the problem is. Again, another problem with microservices is like early days when we didn't have a framework, I had this headache.
All of a sudden, like 15 things are blowing up red on your screens, you don't know which one is the root cause. Every team is engaged to trying to figure out what's going on because there are interdependencies between different components, and you're trying to figure out where the problem is. The reactive measures and being able to really look deep into the systems and figure out where the exact problem is, this is where we have deployed tracing tools to be able to very quickly narrow down, okay, everything is showing red because this service over here is having problems. Okay? With that, moving on to another foundational thing over here. At the heart of everything that we're doing is reliability and quality. On the reliability part, I wanna touch on a few points over here.
We're 100% cloud right now. When we're saying 100% cloud, meaning there's no customer premise thing that we're deploying, but we're in data centers and the cloud providers. More and more we're with the cloud providers. We have not expanded our data center footprint for a long time now and have been expanding significantly with OCI and AWS. We're cloud agnostic, and I explained agnostic means from the perspective of our developers and how we're deploying the services. We're Kubernetes-based, so I can run the same software in our data center, in OCI, or in AWS. No difference from the developer perspective. We have done all the pipings underneath to make that happen. Redundancy at 4 layers infrastructure, platform, data, and geographic. Transparent public service status. You can subscribe, you can get notification if there are issues.
We are very thorough with our RCAs, one of the best, I think, in the industry, how transparent we are when something happens. HA systems can have failures as well. Let's make that clear. It's like you can have 10 redundancy if there is a same root cause, if it's conditional, can hit 10 different things the same way. An aircraft with two engines, a bird hits the first one, and it hits the second one, same root cause, it will take it down, right? You want to know, like learn from everything, making sure that something would not happen again. We have a 24/7 NOC, two 24/7 NOCs, one in E.U., one in the U.S. Both are capable of...
This is in addition to all of the Scrum teams are PagerD uty'd and basically completely responsible for their own services. On top of that, we have two NOCs that are monitoring the services at a higher level, and they're also responsible to watch the carriers. We have all these carrier partners around the world. Like, if they have a quality issue, that perception is gonna come to us. It's very important to make sure that they're performing very well as well. Quality, this is something that we absolutely differentiate ourselves when we talk about quality of service, real-time services when it comes to voice and video. There are three different ways that we combine together. We completely differentiate ourselves from the rest of the market. One is our Global Reach technology.
Global Reach technology basically allows us to, if a user, it doesn't matter where the parent company is, a U.S., for example, based user traveling to Hong Kong, picks up his, like, mobile device or phone or agent UI for the CC, they get connected to the closest region where we have services. We're gonna be utilizing the carriers within that region to complete the call. If you go to Hong Kong, make a call to a pizza shop around the corner, we're utilizing the carriers in that region. No user intervention. Everything is happening completely automated from that perspective. Two advantages for that. One, latency. Latency is a real thing. For ordering a pizza, it's not a big deal. If there's some latency, you're talking over each other, you're waiting.
If you're a Contact Center agent eight hours a day on the phone, you wear yourself out, just keep holding yourself and letting the other person finish a sentence, then you start. We take care of latency that way. Second is by reducing the amount of distance that you traverse over the Internet, we reduce the possibilities of quality issues. If there are issues, this is real-time service, the most difficult service to be delivered over the Internet. If there is any problem over the Internet, we try to work around it, which we're gonna talk about later, and we're gonna take it as close as possible to our centers, so we traverse the Internet and try to avoid those issues. The second one is the art and science of network engineering. We have spent a tremendous amount of time over this.
All of our endpoints are instrumented, including web clients, to tell us how's the quality of service to the data centers they are connecting to. They are constantly publishing this information. We use this data to change the routes over the internet to get around problematic areas. If there are peering issues between the ISPs, we work around it. All of that does a great job until the problem is the very last mile. If your Wi-Fi here is having a problem, we cannot work around it because there's one way to get to you. That's where the third basically item comes into place, which is our superior audio stack, dealing with less than ideal network conditions. There are certain things that, like people have heard about jitter, packet loss, latency. Not too many people have heard about bufferbloat.
We have invented technologies to deal with these conditions that we're not seeing a great result when we're testing other clients basically being able to deal with those types of situations. We're trying to do our best to deliver the best quality of service no matter where you're at. All right, just a quick view of our Global Reach. Thank you very much. A quick view of our Global Reach. This is basically, we used to be like very big on the numbers, like, "Oh, it's 36, 35." I don't care anymore. Because of Infra Eight, I'm able to bring a completely new region in the world on OCI within two hours with the entire base on architecture that it needs, compute nodes, databases, everything within two hours.
Can you give me one minute on why you like OCI?
Cost is a huge factor. Yes. Cost is a huge factor. They have been a great partner. AWS is a great partner as well, but they have helped us, especially during the pandemic with our video load, extreme amount of data transfer. They helped us a lot actually during that point. Here, basically, on any of these, like we have data centers, we still have 15 private data centers. We have public regions. This is enough for us to cover the world from latency perspective and all of that. I'm not seeing any reason necessarily to bring something up. These numbers might fluctuate, go down or up. I don't care as long as I cover everything.
One thing to bring up, in all major markets, I have at least two regions: U.S.; East, West; E.U; E.U., one, two ; U.K.; U.K., one, two. They're all geographically diverse. Australia one, two's, Melbourne and Sydney. India, one, two. All of the major market, we have two independent regions to ensure the data sovereignty. It helps with data sovereignty and things of that sort, so we keep things and don't fail over to a completely different region. Okay. All right, let's now talk about the progress of the platform. I've been talking so far all about infrastructure underlying stuff. Now let's show how engineering is utilizing what we have created. All right, the outcomes.
For engineering, as we have like unleashed their power and like made them not to think more, more about like the stack and what the infrastructure looks like and whatnot, they are moving really fast. We used to, Sam mentioned this as well. A Contact Center release for us was taking between three to four months globally. Like it was, of course, that was like with some of the pauses and things of that sort when we were finding some problems and things of that sort. Now, just to give you a glimpse of this, on the Cloud Eight infrastructure, we're doing a few hundred production releases a month, okay? I'm gonna talk about the front-end piece very soon as well.
This is like that type of difference that has happened in the past few years where we have started to work on these frameworks. Releases that were taking months are now taking days, basically. With that, in fact, Sam mentioned this as well, the customer-found defects were always hovering around 200, 300. This number fluctuates because you do a new release, customers find new things. Literally recently, at one point we're at zero. It's not gonna stay always at zero because customers find new things and it keeps coming in. We can resolve those fast and respond to it so it hovers in very low numbers right now, and we're very proud of that we can take care of things that quickly.
Of course, in like areas such as Contact Center, change is also very important, so we're very aware of that. User experience was not a big thing at 8x8 a few years ago. We're so engineering-driven, always backing, as me, Brian, like looking at the core technologies, and thank God we brought people like Ronnie to start to look at the user experience and the front end. We're very wary that what we're changing as well. It's not like we're like messing everything up like every day, like with five releases. Micro frontends to the UI is the same as microservices to the server side, okay? It's like very similar concepts. On our front end, we have moved to the micro frontends architecture. What that means is each component you saw, like there was a build when I clicked on this.
Each component that you're seeing on the screen is basically being driven by a completely different team, independently developed, and if something goes wrong with one of these deployments, the rest is not basically being impacted. This framework has been created that they are completely independent. They have contracts. They can talk to each other, but one would not impact the other one. This was not the case. You go a few years back, if like the chat thing was getting stuck, the whole UI would become unresponsive. Now you don't have any of these problems. Each one of these completely independently developed, deployed at their own schedules. We're doing around 75 deployments a week on the micro front-end services right now, different teams, okay?
Again, very careful about the UI experience, but we're able to really keep the pace and deliver things that the customers need. The constant evolution, what's next for this and what's coming up that's even more exciting, you saw all of those micro frontends infrastructure that I showed. We are gonna be opening those up to partners and customers. The things that you're seeing, the custom-made basic things that you can move around, some of those could be not 8x8. That ecosystem that Sam was referring to, they can be developing their own things and be part of that experience for the agent who is utilizing our service or customer themselves can develop things that they need to.
That goes back to the API framework that I mentioned that we have created in the back end. Of course, a full ecosystem needs to be put around it so customers and partners can develop things around that. With rich standard APIs, events via webhooks, this is real-time events that you can subscribe to, composable custom UI that I showed you. Data enrichment that we're gonna talk much later about that. All right. I talked about a lot of stuff. Just quickly touch on security. You can never do enough for security. We have been also completely modernizing our security approach with everything that we have done. First, we have built a lot of the security modules, everything from the endpoint protection, everything is within Infra Eight and Cloud Eight. Again, the developers don't need to be worried about it.
Our CI/CD system is integrated with dynamic and static scanning to ensure if there is a flaw within the code that the engineer has written, it's been caught right there, okay? That is a huge basically aspect of it. We have updated and upgraded our tools significantly. Security insights all over the place, basically as far as what's happening in production. Next gen endpoint protection. These are very cool things. There are emerging threats. Like you would not have always a signature for a threat when it's very new. You need to look at the system behaviors to see if there is an anomaly that can be detected and contained very quickly. We're utilizing that type of systems in place, of course, DDoS protection and all the good stuff as well. This is a kind of a market.
You can go to our website, see the same logos.
On some of those scans as well.
Yes, yes.
Are you using it to third party? Are you using-
Absolutely. They are third-party solutions. They're all third-party solutions.
Kind of core.
Absolutely. We're not in the business of developing those types of things, but we have built those in, a lot of them plugged into our framework. Again, like they come standard. No engineering team can go and deploy something without having that endpoint protection already on the server, right? We have taken care of these things, errors cannot happen. People cannot do things that's outside of the framework. We're using also the third parties heavily for Penetration testing and things of that sort. As I said, you can never do enough on security, you can never like go and beat your chest that we have like the best of the best.
SOC?
Absolutely. Yeah. SOC, we have external partners as well as an internal team that's working with them.
To not or are those separate?
Separate teams. Now let's quickly summarize why our platform advances matter. Dedication to reliability. I talked about the extreme resilience of the Cloud Eight framework that we have put in place. Simple design principles. This is simplicity for engineers, right? We said we want to make sure engineers can work on their stuff without being worried about everything or other teams. They have to be able to independently, Scrum teams, work without being worried where other people are. Speed of innovation. Due to doing that, we have unleashed engineering power so they can do things and not wait. It used to be everybody needed to wait for a big release and put their stuff in, and things were out of sync, and some people wanted to go fast, some couldn't.
None of that is happening in the new infrastructure because we're able to move independently. Constant evolution, as I said, how we can take this now to the next level to our customers and partners, which we're gonna be very excited about that piece. All right. Modernization requires constant evolution. We covered all of the work that we have been doing the past few years. I know I've covered a lot, actually, in just a few minutes. Of course, I'll be available for Q&A right after this with Hunter and also during the breaks. I would really enjoy talking to each one of you. Thanks very much. With that, Hunter.
All right. Thank you, Mehdi.
Thank you.
I warned you. Hi, Hunter Middleton. I'm the Chief Product Officer at 8x8. You are now all trained to be engineers at 8x8. If you were paying attention. There'll be a test later on all of this. Mehdi, thanks so much. I love it. I joined five years ago. Five years and one week ago.
Happy anniversary.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
In the old days.
Oh my god. So much transformation in that time. It's just incredible how things have changed in our infrastructure during that period. I'll start the translation part now. Although that was a great summary slide. Did you have that last time? Look, our top focus is quality and reliability. For the customers that we care about, they need uptime. This isn't a task you ever finish, but as Mehdi described, we are excited about how this modern architecture is supporting these goals. Turnaround time on bug fixes is now measured in days or even hours on the majority of our code landscape. Releases happen hundreds of times a month without incident. We still have a few key projects in flight here, right?
There's always work going on in this area, but we're really excited about where we are, and we are expecting that quality and reliability are going to be key selling points versus our competition in the coming year. That's where we want to be. Excuse me. Usability was certainly something 8x8 was not known for when I arrived. I will admit that. We had a very old-looking interface, and a lot of the engineering challenges that Mehdi just discussed. We now have as many staff in design and user research as we have product managers. It is a very much a commitment to us to excel at the user experience for all the personas that are using 8x8's products. What makes their efforts really come alive is the modern microservice frontend architecture.
With this architecture, we can maintain reusable design component library that brings consistent modern interaction design across the entire landscape. Engineers are not building and rebuilding the same duplicate functionality everywhere. We have a huge number of components sitting in that library that are just there for an engineer to plop into the next UI that they want. Even more than that is the pace of innovation. Completely rebuilding the user experience of your full product line is not a small task. This takes a lot of work and a lot of time. Look at the progress. Coding in our microservice frontends built on clean API interfaces to our platform, our new platform, has been like giving our engineering team wings. Sorry, I'm gonna. I pace around. I'm sorry about the photos.
If, just wave me out of the way if you need to 'cause I will forget.
If you sit in the corner, it'd be great.
Okay. I can't see my notes when I do that, right? It's only gonna get faster as we continue to improve the composition tooling. In the course of the coming year, we will even open up our workspaces to enable third-party widgets to be included. Now you think about the pace of innovation when it's not just 8x8 engineers doing it. It's our partners, our ecosystem, even customers that wanna put something into the UI. It'll be that easy to do. We started with Frontdesk back in 2021 as our first composed experience. A lot of you were in the room when we shared that initially. Agent Workspace debuted a little over a year ago and has had 40 meaningful improvements in the, in the year since then.
That's more than one per sprint, right? This goes to that pace of innovation that we've been talking about. Sales Workspace, we've talked about before in the last analyst session that we had. It's been in beta since about October. This is our workspace where we're exploring the needs of customer engagement professionals outside the Contact Center. We started with a sales professional. The beta has been very enlightening. Firmly supporting the strategy that customer engagement outside the Contact Center absolutely has its dedicated needs as well. We're also had a wealth of insight that came from that, right? We're gonna show you more about that later, but this is an area for Sales Workspace. We're probably gonna keep this in beta a bit longer because we've learned a lot about what we need to do there.
There's a lot of commonality. One of the things, for instance, we found folks within 8x8 that had nothing to do with sales coming out of the woodwork saying, "Well, that helps me, but I just need this also." Right? Now you start thinking about the workflow collaboration that's happening, the integration to Teams, the coordination with what's going on in the Contact Center, and we realized that even though the first version arguably would be a success, and we'll make it a public beta so that customers can use it, we actually think we can do something even more revolutionary. We're gonna keep experimenting with that one. Dhwani's been going to be covering our new Supervisor Workspace in our product introduction session in a minute. I don't wanna foreshadow too much of that. This thing is great.
It's pulling together user and queue management, team analytics, even our coaching and WEM interfaces all in one place for the supervisor to conveniently live their day. Excuse me. This UI working off multiple microservices simply wouldn't have been possible four years ago. We couldn't have even built it. Instead, thinking about the pace of innovation, that product that you're gonna see in a few minutes was built by engineering teams that came with the Fuze acquisition. They arrived, I think, in February, when we completed the acquisition. Because of the flexibility of the Cloud Eight platform that Mehdi was just talking about, within a couple weeks, they were submitting code. They had prototype services in production in a month. The majority of that product was built entirely by Scrum teams that came from Fuze.
They had prototype services running for 8x8 users within six months. We are launching 12 months after they arrived, a huge new product for 8x8. That is a testament to what this infrastructure can do. If you wanna find out whether somebody has a modern platform, ask a new engineer that has just arrived at that company and has been there for 30 days, whether they're going like this or they feel like they're moving fast already and up to speed. Pace of innovation, huge, right? Across the board, the change since 2020 has been incredible. 2020? I don't think I wrote that number in there. Even 2020. I mean, it's true. It's just incredible, and it's fundamentally enabled by the microservice front-ends and common XCaaS components.
All right, it's hard to pick, but probably the area we are most excited about in our platform innovation progress is the new integration frameworks that we're working on. It's radically improving the ecosystem development. Ecosystem is not an area that you guys would probably say 8x8 is known for in the past. We certainly have integrations. They've been fairly hard-coded. That world is changing very fast for us. The time has arrived for this. With the emergence of conversational AI as a mainstream customer engagement capability, the importance of ecosystem has never been greater. When you look at the reviews that you guys are actually publishing, the best conversational AI functionality available today is not native to the industry-leading CCaaS vendors. They mostly don't even make the list.
They don't make the MQ.
I think one of them does, but I'm not gonna- I'm not gonna-.
Name.
I'm not gonna name them. If you want to deliver best-in-class customer engagement, you have to work with the ecosystem. That's it. There's no other way anymore. That's what we're doing. In our product announcements in a few minutes, you're gonna see how we're leveraging our new platform integration capabilities to deliver best-in-class conversational AI to 8x8 customers. Our new 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant is built in partnership with Cognigy, a recognized leader in the space. A simple-to-use conversational AI solution allows you to create engaging self-service experiences across any channel, any region, and multiple languages. It's exactly where the customer needs to start, right? With Intelligent Customer Assistant, customers can both radically improve their customer experience and at the same time, improve the efficiency of their operations. It is the best of both worlds. The time has come for this.
In addition to Intelligent Customer Assistant, our customers can also bring their own provider. Sorry, my notes are old, though it's changing every day. I put we have over 12. I guess it's true. Sam says we're up to 15. I didn't check my chat this morning. 15 partners already signed up to build their own integrations to 8x8 and including several of the market leaders. It's a new 8x8 built for ecosystem. Tech stack modernization is clearly paying off in value delivered to customers. Quality, reliability, great usability, pace of innovation, solutions that deliver efficiency and customer sat at the same time. An ecosystem providing best-in-class options to our customers, all value that is in the product today, not promises about the future. Of course, I do have to make some promises about the future.
I can't get away without doing that a bit. The important thing to talk about there is this is not just about filling some gaps in our products today. We are moving toward an even greater purpose that Sam was talking about earlier. All right, what is this customer-obsessed communications that Sam was talking about? Each of us has sort of our own way of thinking about it. For me, the rubber hits the road when you think about how companies like 8x8 operate. 8x8 is a fairly typical medium enterprise company. We got 2,000 employees or so, a few hundred people in our Contact Center. We provide product and services to our customers and maintain those customer relationships over time periods that are measured in years.
We think about customer engagement in terms of lifetime customer value, not individual transaction efficiency. When I look internally with 8x8 as a representative example, and I want to understand where that customer engagement is happening, around half of the interactions in our company are outside the Contact Center. Half. Half is huge. It's not a rounding error. It's a huge part of where we do customer engagement. It's account managers, billing specialists, customer success, user research, technical account managers, renewals team, developer relations. Then it's a long list, right? It's throughout the organization. It's not a formal agent, or at least this part is not a formal agent. It's a lot of the deeper and more meaningful engagement that we do.
It's so sizable that if you focus your attention and your AI/ ML only on your Contact Center, you are going to miss half the conversation, and it might even be the more interesting half. Sure, our own Contact Center is very central to our customer support strategy, but it's only half the story. As Sam said, our industry is at a crossroads. The acceleration in the adoption of Teams, advances in AI, continued investment in digital transformation have really changed the market dynamics. I think this is a change that I think actually plays to 8x8's strengths. We still see a significant opportunity in UCaaS, as Sam said, don't get me wrong, to migrate customers to the cloud on our leading global communications platform.
We believe there is an even bigger opportunity if we focus on delivering a comprehensive customer engagement solution throughout the enterprise organization. Contact center is the anchor tenant, but with minimal respect for the boundaries of that organization. Org should be a config. It should be a scope in your RBAC controls, right? Organization should not be a visible divider in your platform or in the solution landscape that you choose to deploy as a customer. Break down those walls. I like to think of this as XCaaS fully grown up. Right? Anchored on omnichannel interaction handling that works effectively across any agent, human or AI, wherever they sit in the org chart. Global communications and MS Teams collab integration that ensures that any customer engagement professional anywhere in the world, inside or outside the Contact Center, can reliably connect with customers and teammates wherever they are.
Customer interaction data from throughout the organization that's accessible to your native and your third-party AI/ ML applications. Finally, the extensible workspaces that put those capabilities, including embedded third-party content, at the fingers of everyone in the organization involved in customer engagement. All of that supporting a strong ecosystem of third-party applications that span your formal Contact Center and other customer engagement needs. This is our XCaaS platform, right? Over the next year, you're gonna see the visible results of this strategy. Enhancing our omnichannel and CC platform capabilities, expanding our ecosystem and delivering that true ecosystem adoption, not just logos on a marketing page. Deepening investment in MS Teams telephony and collab integration. Significant development of our Contact Center leg go-to-market, leading with Contact Center. That's not something you've seen from 8x8 in the past. Compelling workspaces for non-CC customer engagement users.
Think about Agent Workspace delivered to your professionals outside the Contact Center. All ensuring that we're on the path of being the leading AI/ ML-driven platform for company-wide customer engagement. All right, this is our vision. Now, Mehdi and I have some time for questions to cover what you want on our innovation path and how we're applying that toward our future.
Hunter, I think we need to.
Yeah.
The microphone to folks or you just repeat it?
Let's try the microphone, see how that goes. I won't do as good a job paraphrasing as the original requester, so. That's what... Yeah, I knew I brought that up for a reason. It wasn't just 'cause Nasdaq paid me $1 for every time you get that in the, in a published photo.
you know I've been focusing on the integration of UC CC.
Yeah
There've always been lots of challenges when it comes to it, like pricing. How do you price Contact Center capabilities for non-agents? How do you get non-agents to deal with customers when they say, "It's not my job," and all those things? There are lots of challenges, and, you know, obviously, I'm a big advocate, you know, from day one, but there are things that have to be overcome. I'm just wondering how you address some of those things.
You can paraphrase that 'cause I just turned the microphone on.
Oh. Okay. Well, I was counting on that, but you're right. I didn't hear it, did I? All right, there's lots of challenges.
Pricing for non-agents.
Pricing for non-agents. How do you get non-agents interested in working with customers? I'm gonna start on the second half of that. First of all, I talked about half of our own customer engagement happening outside the Contact Center. I don't think we have that challenge in that respect. I don't think that's 8x8 because that's their job. A customer success manager is hired to be a customer success manager. A sales account manager is hired for that. The person managing the customer community, their job is moderating the customer community. My job is to go talk to customers and attend exec QBRs. There's a... before we get...
I know there's that group you're talking about, but before you even get to them, the starting point is even delivering a great experience to the folks today that don't have any question about whether customer engagement is part of their job. Once you've done that, once you've delivered the right tool for the right user, the right persona in the right spot, and you've brought the insights to them from your AI/ML, now you can talk about going further. A lot of the reasons that folks don't wanna engage with customers is they don't know what to say. They don't know what is this customer gonna complain to me about? What did I do right? What did I do wrong?
When you've given them the right content to work with, you can start breaking down those barriers to that engagement, and the engagement will start moving further out into the organization. Make it easier, give them the right tools to do it, deliver the insights and the knowledge and the suggestions to the person, and I think you will find that it's naturally an easier thing to do with less anxiety. Humans don't like change. They don't like anxiety. If you can bring down the anxiety, the engagement will go up. That comes with information and knowledge and the AI/ML, AI/ML stuff. Pricing. That's a really good one. I think part of that is also about segmenting your personas.
When you have an application like Sales Workspace that is very targeted at a particular persona, you can actually figure out how to get pricing right for that persona. It doesn't have to mirror your Contact Center, right? You can adjust what's in the UI. These workspaces are very configurable. We've got some demos later. You'll be able to go to a panel and add additional widgets in. What shows up there can be governed by what your pricing model is, so that you can make sure that that persona at that price point has access to the things that are appropriately packaged for them. Is that a $20 telephony seat? No. Right?
If it's something that's that important to your day, that you're using constantly throughout the day, you should be hitting that $40-$50 type of price point very easily because you're that important to what they do. No, it's not a $150 Contact Center seat, right? I think the workspaces and the ability to configure what's in them gives us a lot of flexibility to hit intermediate price points all the way from a telephony-only user sitting on Operator Connect up to a full Contact Center seat. Okay.
Could you... I don't wanna make any assumptions. Could you maybe give a couple examples of... I think the way you phrased it was, that anyone could... You know, you could look at kind of any function now that is dealing with customer engagement-
Uh-huh.
8x8 could be that function's workspace.
Yes.
Okay. Could you give me a couple examples of how you see that playing out beyond the Sales Workspace? Are you envisioning a marketing workspace, a in-store workspace?
What the-
Maybe give me a couple examples of what you're talking about.
Yeah. Great. Great question. I think I wanna start. Sam talked about post-sales, that's really where we'll probably focus post-acquisition, I think. Ongoing account management.
Can you just back up?
You landed a new customer.
Okay.
Let's talk about their life cycle. All right? I mentioned that we launched a Sales Workspace into beta, but then a lot of our CSMs wanted it. Our customer support managers want it. Why? This is a user experience that when there's an interaction going on, it automatically configures around the context of that interaction. It pulls immediately information from Salesforce. It gives you... It changes all of your history of interactions to focus only on the interactions you've had, not with just that user, but other users from that company as well. It brings up the chat rooms where you've had internal conversations about them. You start thinking about that functionality, and the reality is that's pretty common a loss across a lot of customer engagement. Now let's take a little further. Sam showed in...
He showed the tooling that we use internally today in our prototype. One, one element that we use in our Contact Center is SupportLogic. Our CSMs don't have access to it. It's only. The output goes to our supervisors in the Contact Center. It's measuring escalation likelihood, right? How good was that support experience? Wouldn't the customer support manager also want to see that information? We're starting to see a lot of cases where once you've implemented all this tooling across, there's a lot of places in the organization that can make use of that. They shouldn't do separate deployments of this. If you go put SupportLogic or a customer health scoring in, everybody that touches the customer should be able to see that information. I think the starting point is actually the reverse.
It's less about there are 20 personas. It's more that we found a rich vein of commonality in what they need. We need to start with a strong base, that serves multiple of them, and then allow the customization from there.
The 8x8 business strategy behind that would then be for every customization of persona within an enterprise, you would then move from there to-
Yeah, you may start with a somewhat something that looks like a fairly generic customer engagement workspace. Notice a very generic language that I used there. If you're in sales, there may be specific add-ins that you wanna pull in, right? It's a microservice front end. I can put a very special widget that is showing you know, the information from your sales training. Here's how you pitch this, right? Here's the stiffs that are associated with these products right now. If you wanted to say, you know, "Here's a script for doing that," the scripting could be different in each one of these areas. If I'm a CSM, I don't have a script. My job is to know you very well and serve you at a different level.
Those things can now be add-ins that enable customization of the space very easily. They may not even be add-ins that we built. We're gonna talk about how third parties are already starting to develop on this framework so that they can bring additional content in. It's not that there's 10. Sheila, I think you asked me about this the last time. There's a lot of personas out there in the organization. We don't have to do canned experiences for each of them. We need to put a good base out there and then enable both our ecosystem, our partners. We've got a partner in Ireland that's done their own take on Contact Center analytics.
Mm-hmm.
That will fit right in. You don't have just a set number. There's like an infinite configurability of this stuff.
I guess, and I'm sorry if my question wasn't clear. How does that then change the business model of how-
Ah.
who 8x8 is selling to. It changes the trajectory.
Okay.
of 8x8, if I'm understanding you correctly.
It does not change who we're selling to because this is actually what our customers are asking for. It is who we sell to today. We'll talk about this a little bit more later, especially that medium enterprise that, you know, you're talking a few hundred to a few thousand seat customers. They have a formal Contact Center. When we've looked as we've deployed XCaaS, a lot of our deployments today are the combination of UC and CC. All of them are targeting their customer engagement professionals with the more advanced UC functionality that we offer. They want the call queues, they want the ring groups. They think of it. The questions come in in a more rearview mirror-looking way 'cause they talk about the feat. I need a ring group for this.
They don't say, "I need a customer engagement workspace." Like, that's not how they talk. It's not what they say. You look at the use cases, and what you find is they do need these other things to come together. Like, even our SupportLogic implementation today, I asked our head of support, "How does the supervisor get the alerts from SupportLogic?" "Well, SupportLogic has a UI." "Okay, great. Do they actually use that UI?" "No. It's yet another UI. They don't like going to it, so we email it to them." Right? That's not how these things should work.
As a product leader and product designer that, you know, Dhwani will say this too, you don't say, "What is the feature you want?" You say, "What is the problem you're trying to solve?" This is what we find out. It's not changing our market. It's going deeper in that market. It is what they need.
All right, we're gonna take one more question and then turn it over to our product.
I'm gonna take it to Mehdi.
Yes.
I heard you say Kubernetes. I'm not an engineer. When I hear Kubernetes, I think about older code being surrounded as opposed to something built directly in microservices. Sometimes I hear about things moving from Kubernetes to microservices as a process, right? X%, and we're gonna do more. Can you kinda give me a sense.
Sure, sure.
of what that means for you?
No, no problem at all. Good question. There are 2 completely separate things. You can create microservices. The reason that somebody would use Kubernetes containers is the actual foundation is providing you with a lot of capabilities. That is one of the most modern ways of dealing with containers versus virtual machines and things of that sort. There are multiple ways to deploy services. You can put it on a, basically like a standalone server, or it could be a virtualized environment, which is something that you see usually with all of the cloud providers, like they are providing you with virtual machines. You can put it on containers, which actually has the least amount of overhead. It's really running the codes that's necessary for what you're delivering. It's a way of delivering services, which is-
Basically the most advanced and least overhead, with a lot of functionalities built in underneath. It can, all these three options, whether it's a standalone server, bare metal, or it's a VM, or it's a Kubernetes, they can all deliver a standalone application. They can deliver a microservice or like any sort of services that you put out there. The concept of microservices is more about breaking down like the bigger monolithic application and put them into these independent modules where teams can individually work on them. The infrastructure they're deployed to, like we have some microservices that are not on Kubernetes today, and they're running, for example, on VM infrastructure. Again, if you remember, I said we have over 400 services, and then 300 of them are in the cloud infrastructure.
That's not contradicting with the fact that they have been modernized and they are in microservices. They're just running on virtualized machines versus virtualized containers. Kubernetes gives a lot of resiliency of things that people deal with, and as I said, least overhead. It's a great concept. It started by Google, and now it's of course open source.
Yeah.
like a lot of people are utilizing it. It's not a necessity for microservices. You can do microservices on Kubernetes or off of Kubernetes on the other side.
Quick follow-up.
Sure.
Why do I get the sense that sometimes somebody who has older prem software-
Mm-hmm.
-kinda surrounds it with Kubernetes-
Oh, yeah.
without really modernizing the code?
Yeah. It could be that, I mean, if they have containerized, there are ways to actually take an application that used to run on a regular machine and make it a container and run it in Kubernetes. That could be an easy way for somebody to say that we have modernized without really modernizing. Yeah.
Well, it's not modernizing.
Yes. Yes.
It abstracts you from the environment you're running the code in.
Right.
You can take old code and put it in.
In a container.
Put it in the container, and then the container can go to.
Infrastructure
cloud infrastructure. You didn't modernize your code.
Modernize your application.
You can use Kubernetes without modernizing your code.
No, Kubernetes is a really good thing if you're here.
If you do both.
Yeah
You get a lot of benefits.
Even in those cases, even though it's not adding necessarily, I would say, a lot of value to the application itself, it adds a lot of value to the service delivery part of it.
Yes.
-because of the resilience. It's a good thing. The other thing that it does-
Yeah.
The good thing about Kubernetes is it's, it doesn't matter like I have Kubernetes in my data centers. I have OKE in OCI, which is managed Kubernetes, and EKS in AWS. It doesn't matter what the underlying foundation is. You can deploy the same code everywhere. That's one of the benefits of Kubernetes, where you become independent of the underlying infrastructure. Anybody who's using... Of course, you still need to do your pipings of how you're provisioning your different cloud providers. That's the part that I talked about. Once it's on a container, you have kind of freed yourself from the dependencies necessarily to manage services and different cloud providers and things of that sort to a certain degree. You're running it on an environment that is platform independent.
Okay. These two are gonna be back for lots more Q&A.
All right.
I promise. Now I wanna welcome Dhvani Soni to the stage-
Thank you very much.
-to talk about our product announcements. Thank you, guys.
All right. I'm still beaming from that pace of innovation slide. Those of you who don't know me, I'm Dhwani Soni. I'm GVP, Product Management, Design and Operations. Very soon, I will have Patrick join me. He is director of Product Management, leading WEM and CCR product line for 8x8. Sam and Hunter spoke about our commitment to innovate and build products that make customers more efficient and help them provide the best of technology that can help them provide the best of experience to their customers. Today, we are excited to bring forward two new product launches. Patrick will be walking you guys through the new AI-driven self-service, the product, the Intelligent Customer Assistant. He will also be speaking about our investments in AI, OpenAI, and how we are leveraging it to enhance our quality management and speech analytic capabilities.
Before that, I am super excited to bring you the new supervisor experience. You guys know this. Supervisors are heavy users of multiple interfaces. A typical supervisor toggles between about nine or more interfaces, each with a different navigation logic. To dive in, search, look at the information. This is all before they can even start taking an action. They also gotta stay on top of the service level and make sure agents are on the right queues and wait times are not high, agents are saying the right things and handling the customers correctly, while keeping the customers happy and running an efficient performing org. Wow, that's crazy. That's insane. It's super stressful. What if we could really make their job easier?
What if there was a modern dynamic UI that could provide coherent data access from multiple sources to drive proactive monitoring and actions to deliver high performance of agents and organization? Imagine all of that provided in just one UI. No more application switching. Well, we've done just that. Supervisor Workspace brings all your data sources into one composable UI that can be absolutely personalized to the needs. It's got tailored performance-based alerts with the ability to access native and third-party data, analytics, drive actions from a single pane of glass. Guys, that's Supervisor UI for you. Let's take a look. Let me get my script ready here. Just a second. All right. Continuing with our one app composable UI approach, Supervisor Workspace brings together reporting, analytics, and actions from multiple sources together in the most modern way possible.
You've got agent and queue management, team analytics, our coaching, quality management, and speech analytics, you name it. It's all in one place for the supervisor to conveniently live the day. A UI that's easy on the eyes, inclusive or as classic as it can get. It'll be right beside our 8x8 Work in the collab. All your work needs are in one app. There is no more switching around. You've got single click to monitor your agents or monitor queues or change the agent status remotely. Shh, it's coming out by itself. It's built on the concept of best out of the box, or you can bring your own templates. Well, it's still working on the queues. All right.
You can look at the queues, advanced support, and then you can have multiple templates right out on the top of the UI that are absolutely independently built and can be enabled. Something is going on. Sorry. I'm sorry. Okay. We have widgets that will enable drill down. They're absolutely modularized. They allow you to focus on the key KPIs, and that are relevant to you in the moment. If in the morning you wanna focus on queue performance, whereas in the evening you wanna stay focused on the agent performance and keep under SLAs, you can drill down from small to medium to large widgets. Now, as your role adapts during the day, so will your templates. You have pre-saved multiple templates that can be loaded, or you can build your own.
They will be available at the top of your screen at a single click. One UI could focus on keeping things under the SLA, the other could focus on coaching. You could simply switch between them with a single click. Like I said, as your role or your function evolves around the day, your workflow will adapt. This is the exciting bit. We've got an extensible toolbox. You have best of the options from 8x8 as components and templates that are available, you can bring your own special ones that matter to you for your business goals. What we did here was we tried to do a switch of the widget, it's as simple as a quick drag and drop, that's it. You can revert to your previous settings if you don't wanna make the change.
Now, user can also create performance-based alerts as highlights. These alerts can be queue specific, performance specific, or agent group specific. You can set floor and ceiling thresholds and warnings to be alerted. For example, if a specific queue has a service level that is being reached, the supervisor will get a warning by the channel of their choice. This workspace helps you create the alerts that matter to you and your business in the most powerful way possible. Now, we have invested in architecture that makes you personalize a product and fall in love with it. Supervisor Workspace works well with an 8x8 Work, or you could just pop it out. Each of the tables will be popped out to work well alongside this workspace or another. It's an extremely flexible model and can be personalized as you want it to be.
Let's talk a little bit about reporting. For, for a supervisor, it is imperative to be on top of metrics and reports. It's a crucial part of the jobs. Highlights can change day over day, and you'll have AI-driven suggestions for the very next day. Supervisor UI is extremely versatile. There are no limitations, and it's absolutely flexible. The workspace can be made as powerful or skinned down as much as you wanna focus into and makes you the most efficient for your business and your goals. Supervisor Workspace has been in beta as of January, even though the slide did not say that, and it's been actively used by our customers today. One single app pulling in data from multiple sources, including third-party sources. Single-click drill downs to the most common actions.
No more tabbing through multiple UIs to get your answer. Not just the data is present, it is coherent and it's consistent, it's presentable in a very presentable way. You can enable an agent on the queue or change the queue assignment or change your agent remotely, like we said. You can buy from us, or you can bring your own and just simply plug it away. Not only this, stay on top of your service levels or alerts, get notified by the channel of your choice, SMS, text, email, 8x8 Work, WhatsApp, you got it. All of this brought together by a powerful architecture. An investment that keeps on giving. I love Maddy's energy. Modern, powerful dynamic UI composed together with the best out-of-the-box templates and components, or you bring your own and build your own. It cannot get better than this. All right.
If Maddy can get a creative like me excited about this architecture, I'm sure you guys are also excited. This framework did just that. It's built on microservices, back-end and front-end. Each of these widgets, components that you see here on the red on the left are connected to various APIs that are absolutely independent, can be built by 8x8 or third-party partners, or just you can plug them into widgets or templates. These widgets are connected and will be able to talk and interact with each other as per the use case and the workflow. They also connect directly to the source without the need for the data orchestration layer there, right? This architecture is built for speed and innovation. Workspace is flexible, front-end is composable. Layouts are templatized to drive fast upstart.
Our Supervisor Workspace users have everything they need in one workspace to access consistent data from multiple sources. That's important. We have heard time and again, get us data. A lot of our competitors do that. You have all the data. Is it consistent? Is it talking to each other? Can you do drill downs? Can you go drill downs in the least number of clicks possible? That's what it does. Drives proactive monitoring and perform actions to deliver high performance for agents and drive business for the organization. Supervisor Work went into beta this January. That is, in less than nine months, it went from ideation to launch. That is a speed of innovation, and we are getting better and better. We currently have 180 active users from over 35 different organizations, and we continue to have more sign-ups daily for this.
It is a delight to see the engagement and hear how bringing this all together in one workspace has eased the lives of our of our supervisors. We are actively tracking. This will get into GA when our beta customers say they cannot live without this anymore. Supervisor Workspace, this is our foray into customer's world, where we will open up our composable workspaces to be personalized to the user's need. I know there's lots of questions. We're gonna cover a lot more about this. This is exciting because this is literally, you know. You bring all these features, use cases in one UI in a single pane of glass for the user, and that's what matters to them. The UI needs to be modern, it's consistent, it's dynamic, it supports the workflow. It's not intrusive.
Interface allows for proactive monitoring. The supervisor can stay on top of their service levels. Agents drive more efficient organization, deliver excellent customer service. Supervisor Workspace is going to pave the way for all of our new product innovations that we will be covering later today in our roadmap session. With this, I pass it on to Patrick, who will talk about our investments in AI and self-service.
All right. Well, first, yes, I am Patrick Russell. I'm excited to be here. I know most of you. I know a lot of you have been in this space for a good while. I do pace, the same warning that Hunter gave. If I'm in the way, just kinda give me the wave, and I'll get out of your photos. We are gonna be talking about two different announcements that 8x8 is bringing to the market this month. We're gonna shift and talk a little bit about self-service. More specifically, conversational self-service. Just to level set, we define self-service as the ability for an end user or customer to resolve their needs without human assistance. This is how customers can radically reduce cost while simultaneously improving the customer experience.
Before we get into what we're bringing to market, it's important to understand some of the moving parts and within the self-service and conversational AI space to really understand how our strategy will best meet and support the needs of our customers. Here is one leading indicator we pulled from a trend report on the shift in consumer preferences, and we totally agree. The more a business can give time back to their customer by way of lower wait times, faster time to resolution, lower effort, that is a way to bring to improve the satisfaction and brand loyalty that these consumers will have with businesses. The recent years have seen tremendous advancements in the building blocks that make up conversational AI.
I'm not gonna read all of these, but these first three especially, natural language understanding, natural language processing, natural language generation, these areas have evolved in, at an incredible speed over the last few years. These advancements have led to a drastic increase in the number of technology providers that have entered this space. We're talking thousands, depending on the analyst, and they're all here, and what time it is. It is a large number of providers that have entered this space just in the last few years. We are approaching an inflection point between the intersection of technology maturity as well as customer interest. This inflection point, we believe, has created an opportunity for 8x8 to think differently and stand apart from our competitors. Customer expectations continue to evolve with time and technology. Consumers, myself included, expect 24/7 support.
I expect a personalized service and, more importantly, a consistent experience across channels. Legacy or generation one self-service solutions were very limited. It's really a rules-based automation with pre-canned responses. That is gen one approach to self-service. While it does kind of meet certain needs, when it fails, it really destroys or has a very, very negative impact on the customer experience. Our approach will enable us to evolve and adapt alongside of the emerging technologies that our customers would benefit from. We're aiming to work with the evolution that we see coming, not against it. I'm happy to get to be the one here to share with you and introduce 8x8's conversational AI product, our self-service solution. Audio.
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We'll give that a rewind.
What makes a great chatbot? Simple. A chatbot that doesn't feel like a chatbot. With personalized conversations, intuitive responses, and fast resolutions, customers can engage in natural, familiar dialogue that delivers effective support. They'll hardly know they're talking to a chatbot. Introducing 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant, a conversational AI solution delivering smart self-service to handle customer requests. With 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant, you can create engaging, trusted experiences across every channel, design and manage dynamic self-service flows with simple click and add scripting functions or pre-built templates. Easily connect with existing systems and deploy rapidly through turnkey integrations. Plus, tap into comprehensive analytics to get rich insights into your bot's performance. Keep wait times short, agents engaged, and customers happy with 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant.
Great. Intelligent Customer Assistant enables customers to build or adjust conversational flows with clicks, not code. Conversation flows are built once and can be applied to any channel in any of the 100 supported languages. Customers can more seamlessly move from bot to human while also passing a summarized summary of the context and the full context, depending on the use case for that given agent. The comprehensive analytics that were referenced in the video will very soon be available and distributed through the Supervisor Workspace. Again, building on a lot of the things that you heard Mehdi talk about from an architecture perspective to move with speed and what Dhwani was speaking to with regard to Supervisor Workspace.
Intelligent Customer Assistant also can surface customer friction points or high points of failure within the conversation flow and provide pinpoint suggestions on how to improve that given pain point or point of frustration. This also includes analysis of intent and channel data from rich conversational insights. For those in the industry, think of rich conversational insights as speech analytics for the bot-to-human conversation. One of the things we'll be doing with these rich conversation insights is bringing them into and marrying them alongside of our speech analytics, which is traditionally the human-to-customer interaction. This is gonna give a full view of the interaction, the full journey that a customer has with your business from within the conversation. It's a different kind of angle on how we'll be approaching it.
Very excited to share as this evolves. Our approach will ease the effort for our customers to add or change bot providers or even add multiple bot providers to a single organization. As you heard Sam mention earlier, 8x8's internal support team, we have multiple bots deployed from multiple vendors. We see this as a growing trend as there's more specialized bots that might be the best possible solution for one use case, but a horrible solution for others. That's where we see this need for multiple providers to likely be in the mix for many of our customers. Some of our ecosystem partners will have all or certain aspects of their products available and accessed through the Supervisor Workspace, and some will opt not to.
We're game for both. That's why we have multiple approaches to how we'll be managing our partnerships throughout this ecosystem. 8x8 customers will have freedom of choice to use our OEM offering, any of the options from within the ecosystem or bring their own preferred vendor. We're designed for all of those and to move quickly to fast implementations. 8x8, sorry, as was mentioned earlier, we are a big proponent of alpha programs, beta programs, early adopter programs, and so forth. The Intelligent Customer Assistant has been in an early adopter program since the beginning of this year.
Wanted to share at least one comment that we received from one of our current Intelligent Customer Assistant customers. First, I wanna thank Acer for providing this quote, and more importantly, thank them for joining the early adopter program for Intelligent Customer Assistant. The big call-outs that I wanted to mention here on this quote is that Gary is confirming that our offering is robust, easy to use, and seamlessly passes the customer from bot to human with that context. That is such an important component that is completely missed usually on those Gen One providers. This kind of technology has previously been reserved or mostly out of reach for most organizations and was mostly seen in the large enterprise space.
With Intelligent Customer Assistants, we're aiming to make it easier to buy, deploy, change, add, what have you, any conversational bot for any business size. With Intelligent Customer Assistant, 8x8 will be able to automate conversations for any channel, as mentioned earlier, with the supporting of over 100 languages and with a high success rate. That is what our customers need, not just another solution, not just another bot, but a bot that actually delivers on the promise to resolve those interactions with a high customer satisfaction. This move to automate and with the new ability to automate all of these channels, this will help us help our customers reduce their labor requirements while simultaneously driving up their customer satisfaction. First contact resolution, less wait times, and so on.
We're gonna talk about the ways that 8x8 will be working with OpenAI outside of its use within Intelligent Customer Assistance, which it is completely part of that product. It's mostly used in as a back-end service to surface up the opportunities within a conversation flow that are causing friction and then providing that suggestive next step. OpenAI. Back in September, there was this little-known company that released a new transcription service, transcription and translation service. That service is called Whisper. Right away, within the first week of its release, 8x8 engineers were, "We never heard of this company." We're testing, we're challenging at scale, trying to kind of poke holes in the claims that this new service was providing. We're comparing it to all of the industry leaders for transcription and translation, we were completely blown away.
A few months later, I'll talk more on that in a moment. A few months later, this small little-known company released another service called ChatGPT, as everyone in this room knows, is now a worldwide household name. What we have effectively been working with OpenAI for about 6 months, and this month we'll be releasing OpenAI Whisper as a standard component to our quality management and speech analytics offering. 8x8 and OpenAI will bring industry-leading transcription accuracy to the 8x8 XCaaS platform. Again, supporting over 50 languages in this case. Paired with 8x8 XCaaS quality management and speech analytics, we are making it easier for organizations to better understand their customers and provide more prescriptive coaching to their agents.
The accuracy levels we've independently verified are high, at or above industry-leading standards. This reference here, about 90% for the top 10, is really just that premium level that we're seeing within those top 10 languages. We still are above an 85% accuracy score in the 20 or so common language window, which is still a very high accuracy rate on a very broad number of languages. OpenAI Whisper will improve or enable multiple downstream uses of transcriptions. Speech analytics will see improvements. Sentiment analysis will see improvements. Our approach, our new approach to automated evaluations will be very much using this service and automated coaching guidance. I could go on for the ways that we're gonna be using OpenAI, working with OpenAI. Just to kind of keep it short.
We're also in development utilizing ChatGPT for its interaction summarization capability. For use as a summary service for an individual interaction, if you just want a quick summary of how an interaction went or what the highlights were, or an aggregate of interactions. Of 1,000 interactions, how would you summarize all of those? Both of those things will be available. Additionally, we will use this service to add an additional layer of intelligence to our speech analytics product by way of automated categorization, identification, and creation. For those in this space, some speech analytics services require the user to input all the words and phrases they wanna search.
Our new approach will have that, plus having a system that's looking for the keywords and phrases that you should be made aware of or that you should be taking action to resolve or praise in some cases. 8x8 and OpenAI services will have a significant impact on the value that we're bringing to our customers through the quality management and speech analytics products specifically. OpenAI services will be throughout the XCaaS platform, but this is the first point and kind of the most impact that our customers will get very soon, in some cases this month and the rest of it throughout the next couple of months. Yeah.
How does it compare to price?
The best part about these changes.
Free, free.
Well, she's not totally right. I wouldn't use that word. That's a dangerous word, free.
Can you share a term?
The way that this will work is we are bringing this drastically improved accuracy for translation and transcription and all the downstream benefits to our customers without changing our cost structures. Whatever they're paying today. They keep paying whatever our list price and so are no change. We're just improving the value and usefulness of this product. That's what our customers deserve.
To follow up on Erwin's question then. It seems like in this industry, anything anybody rolls out now, they include without changing their cost structure to customers, you know, which means you do a lot of work for no extra revenue. Do you see there being things down the road that you can charge a premium for that could actually raise the ASP?
Yeah, we do. There's actually three or four different product areas or categories that we think will be an add-on chargeable component. In this particular case, the changes we strongly believe that this will drastically improve the adoption and usefulness of the product. You know, having the product is one thing. Getting a high number of monthly active users, weekly active users, that's a horse of another color. We are-
Getting prospects to buy.
Precisely. Precisely. It's really more of an enhancement to help us improve close rates, improve retention, and add more value to our customers without, you know, nickel and diming, which we see in some of our competitors. We believe our use of OpenAI services paired with some unique 8x8 innovation, will deliver the industry-leading transcription accuracy to our customers. We have built around OpenAI Whisper. We're not just using it as a single service. We have enhanced that service with some unique things that we've done. Speech analytics will provide a greater depth of understanding at scale for our customers this year.
I would like to add that these improvements as a whole are really forming a new foundation for 8x8 to bring a new approach to the industry in how we solve and how we tackle automated interaction evaluations. It's kind of an old feature that many, many providers offer, and that approach that everyone's taken in the past was using old technology. All those evolved components have not resulted in a new approach to this automation, and we'll be tackling that this year as well. Before we get to questions, I just wanna highlight one last thing. Mehdi mentioned it earlier about how we've re-architected and reshaped ourselves and Sam mentioned this as well.
OpenAI Whisper service was just introduced to the world the end of September, and it's being used by our customers today. It's in a limited availability right now. It will be fully GA in the coming weeks. with that.
We're gonna move to break.
Move to break.
Yeah. We're gonna make Patrick and Dhwani available during the lunchtime Q&A.
Oh, okay.
'Cause I wanna keep us on track. If you guys have questions, if you can just write them down and save them for the lunchtime Q&A. We're gonna take a 10-minute break and come on back in 10 minutes.
Great. Awesome.
Thank you.
Thank you.