What's Up with Tech?

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Pressing zero to reach a human should not be the default plan. We talk with Fred Fontes CEO from Acclaim about what’s finally making enterprise voice-first AI work in the real world, especially inside regulated industries like banking and financial services where compliance, auditability, and data security are not negotiable. For teams burned by old IVR trees and brittle chatbots, the conversation gets practical fast: what has changed in the underlying models, and what has to change in how we deploy and control them.

We dig into the idea of sovereignty and why many CIOs and CTOs feel trapped between the need to innovate and the risk of sending sensitive customer data through multiple third-party clouds. Fred explains how controllable voice AI agents, strong guardrails, and enterprise-grade orchestration can turn “cool demos” into dependable contact center automation. We also get into domain-specific benchmarking, because a universal speech-to-text score does not matter if you cannot accurately transcribe a noisy telephony call about banking topics.

Then we go beneath the hood on outcomes: banking collections use cases showing six to eight percentage points higher recovery rates, the ability to A/B test messaging quickly, and why interaction costs can drop dramatically when conversations are faster, more accurate, and handled in parallel. We also talk about the human side, shifting agents toward higher-value customer experience work, and the hardest obstacle left: integration with systems of record and enterprise workflows.

If you’re building or buying conversational AI, listen closely, share this with a teammate who owns CX or security, and subscribe, leave a review, and tell us what your biggest blocker is to deploying voice AI at scale.
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AI is making a weird problem even worse: it’s getting harder to tell what’s authentic. That’s why we sat down with Russ from Business Intelligence Group to talk about the We Love Tech Awards ( https://welovetechawards.com/) and what real, transparent judging looks like when trust is on the line. We get specific about how awards can be more than marketing, especially when real people review nominations, score the work, and give feedback that founders and product teams can actually use.

We also zoom out to what we’re seeing across the tech landscape right now. From CES to Mobile World Congress, HIMSS, and Enterprise Connect, the energy isn’t just “more AI.” It’s the shift from trials and proofs of concept to real deployments in hospitals, warehouses, and frontline environments. We talk MedTech and digital health, customer experience and contact center technology, cloud apps, and why this moment feels like a true burst of innovation even with macro uncertainty hanging over everything.

Then we go where awards don’t go often enough: people. Russ shares a striking stat that fewer than 10% of business award nominations are for individuals, and we make the case that recognition should match the humanity behind the work. We also cover digital certificates, including blockchain-based credentials that can live on LinkedIn, and we lay out the practical timeline: the nomination deadline is March 27, followed by a judging window supported by thousands of judges worldwide.

If you’re building a product, leading an innovation team, or know someone who deserves real recognition, listen now, share this with your network, and leave a review. Who are you nominating this year?
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AI hype is everywhere at Mobile World Congress, so we went looking for something rarer: real operational proof. From the Ericsson booth in Barcelona, we sit down with Ibrahim Eldeftar, who leads Cognitive Network Solutions product and portfolio for telco AI software, and Claudia Muñiz Garcia, Global Head of Sales for the same unit, to talk about what it actually takes to run autonomous networks.

We break down the autonomy journey in plain language: moving from manual ways of working to systems that can sense, analyze, decide, and execute, with intent-based networking as the layer that helps unlock Level 4 autonomy. Ibrahim shares where carriers really are today (around Level 2 on average) and why many are publicly targeting Level 4 by 2028 to 2030. The driver is network complexity plus rising expectations for “networks for AI” that can support new AI workloads and millions of connected devices without brittle operations.

Claudia explains why Ericsson is being recognized for 5G RAN automation platforms, from standards compliance and security to commercial deployments and scale, and how an open rApp ecosystem accelerates innovation. Then we get into the part operators care about most: outcomes. You’ll hear concrete results from trials and deployments, including major OPEX efficiency gains, fewer issues through anomaly detection and root-cause approaches, spectral efficiency improvements, and a standout uplink story where AI optimization drives meaningful uplink quality and throughput gains.

If you care about network automation, 5G RAN, telco AI, rApps, and the practical road to Level 4 autonomous networks, hit play. Subscribe, share this with a network leader on your team, and leave a review with the one autonomy question you want answered next.
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CRM is about to feel less like a database and more like a conversation. We sit down with Brevo to unpack how a fast-growing customer engagement platform thinks about the next era of CRM, where large language models change the “entry point” for customer data and where the old battle over slick UI starts to disappear.

We walk through Brevo’s evolution from an agency to an email automation tool (many will remember the Sendinblue days) and then into a broader customer engagement and CRM platform built for B2C brands. The big idea is the engagement layer: the system that turns customer data into action across channels, agents, and third-party tools. As LLMs become cheaper and more interchangeable, the winners won’t be the tools with the flashiest interface, they’ll be the platforms that orchestrate workflows, permissions, integrations, and real outcomes.

Then we get practical about ROI. Customer engagement software should be measurable because it exists to move KPIs tied to revenue: subscriber growth, net new customers, repeat purchase, and bigger baskets. We also break down how to evaluate AI inside CRM without hype by looking at efficiency, automation, and output per marketer so you can grow without constantly adding headcount. To round it out, we talk martech consolidation, what M&A looks like as valuations reset, and a smart loyalty and advocacy approach that turns happy customers into demand generators.

Subscribe for more conversations on AI in CRM, customer engagement, marketing automation, and martech strategy and if this sparked a new idea, share it and leave a review. What part of your customer lifecycle would you automate first?
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The fastest way to understand agentic AI is to stop thinking about chatbots and start thinking about outcomes. From Enterprise Connect, we sit down with RingCentral’s John Finch to talk about agentic voice AI that can handle real customer work end to end: answering the call, connecting to back-end systems, completing a transaction, confirming the result, and closing the loop without bouncing the customer between departments.

We also get specific about what makes this hard and why it matters. Voice is still the most demanding channel in the contact center, and RingCentral’s view is that a strong communications layer unlocks everything else: omnichannel customer engagement, smoother handoffs, and higher containment where it actually helps the customer. From there, the CX revolution becomes orchestration. We talk about scheduling AI agents alongside human agents, tracking performance across both, and using signals like CSAT and NPS to continuously improve. The goal is not “AI replaces people,” but “AI removes the repetitive parts so humans can do higher-value work.”

Healthcare raises the bar even further, so we dig into how agentic AI can validate patients, schedule appointments like imaging, and operate with strict guardrails that prevent unsafe medical advice. With templates and deep integrations, teams can deploy faster in complex environments while keeping compliance and safety in view. If you’re evaluating agentic AI, voice AI platforms, or contact center automation, you’ll walk away with a clearer picture of what’s real today and what’s coming next.

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