The collaboration market has seen a frenzy of AI activity this year as the industry’s largest collaboration giants and UCaaS specialists pack their platforms full of new features and agentic AI technology.
The AI race is on this year in the collaboration space as tech giants and startups increasingly use AI tools and features to simplify workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and facilitate clearer communication. These new capabilities that are being built into Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and collaboration platforms are transforming human collaboration and customer experience.
The usual suspects are placing big bets on AI for collaboration, including Cisco, Google, and Microsoft. But it’s not just the market leaders that are packing their platforms with more intelligence. UC specialists, such as RingCentral and Intermedia have also introduced AI and AI agents. Then there are the Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) players, such as Five9, who are building out agentic AI capabilities at scale for more context-aware experiences.
Last year, worldwide unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) market revenues grew 7.8 percent year over year to $69.2 billion. The global UC&C market is projected to reach $85.4 billion between 2025 and 2029, according to market research firm IDC.
From the biggest of the big collaboration leaders to the UCaaS and CCaaS specialists and upstarts that have been packing their platforms with new AI features for enterprises and SMBs, here are 10 of the hottest collaboration tools so far in 2025.
Cisco Webex AI Agent
Similar to the work that the tech giant is doing across the rest of its portfolios, Cisco’s collaboration offerings got an agentic AI upgrade this spring when it announced availability of Webex AI Agent, a 24/7, self-service tool that works alongside human agents to answer routine and high-volume customer questions. It can also take action to fulfil customer requests, while eliminating the need for queues or wait times, all while using human-like, natural language during conversations. Cisco Webex AI Agent integrates out of the box with Webex Contact Center.
The company in March also introduced new features for Cisco AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center, including suggested responses and real-time transcription for agents.
Five9 Agentic CX
Customer experience specialist Five9 has always led with AI, even before it was a buzzword. The company recently launched Agentic CX capabilities, a set of AI agent features built into its popular Genius AI platform. The company said that these new capabilities are designed to drive intelligent CX and AI at scale with reasoning, adapting, and action for secure, seamless, and context-aware experiences.
The Genius AI platform offers trusted AI governance, modular tools, and embedded intelligence across the customer journey to help businesses accelerate outcomes, empower agents, and increase automation at scale, according to San Ramon, Calif.-based Five9.
Google Workspace
The Google Workspace suite is the tech giant’s portfolio of productivity and collaboration tools, including Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Sites and more. Google Cloud in January kicked off the year by integrating its Gemini AI technology inside Workspace free of charge for clients with Business and Enterprise subscription plans.
With AI security top of mind for businesses today, Google earlier this month updated its Information Rights Management (IRM) feature for Google Drive. Now, individual file owners and shared drive managers can apply printing, copying, and downloading restrictions to users with edit permissions as well. Editors and owners can still edit the document itself, but they’ll only be able to copy and paste document content within the document itself. The latest feature will help prevent sensitive content from being leaked, according to Google’s Workspace updates blog.
Intermedia Unite
The partner-first provider of intelligent cloud communications comes to market with Intermedia Unite, its integrated collaboration and voice platform that’s fortified with the company’s SPARK AI technology for increased productivity and customer experience.
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Intermedia recently launched a new way to embed its advanced voice capabilities directly into Microsoft Teams, one of the largest collaboration players. The move, which provides a flexible alternative to native Microsoft communications, is enhancing deal sizes for partners, the company’s COO Jonathan McCormick told CRN in February.
Microsoft Teams
Still arguably the largest collaboration player, Microsoft nearly every month is updating Teams with a bevy of new features. Microsoft recently revealed that its updated Teams AI library is now available with new capabilities like agentic memory, Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A), Model Context Protocol (MCP), and more. Also now available in public preview are the Meeting AI Insights API, Interactive Agents for Teams Meetings and Calls and Adoption and Engagement insights.
For Teams mobile users on iOS and Android, the agent experience and interaction flow has been streamlined for users who aren’t on a laptop but still want AI assistance when and where they need it, Microsoft said. Users are now able to interact with an agent from any chat, channel, meeting, or personal app tray, without leaving their workload.
Microsoft holds the largest market share in the UC&C space, with a 46 percent share, according to IDC.
RingCentral AI Receptionist
Business unified communications provider RingCentral earlier this year revealed RingCentral AI Receptionist (RingCentral AIR), an AI phone agent AI Receptionist can be used as a front desk receptionist, sales development representative and customer service representative. The phone agent can handle conversations, route calls intelligently, follow up via SMS, and work seamlessly across existing voice platforms such as Microsoft Teams Phone, Avaya, and Mitel. Newer features of AIR include call analytics, multi-location support, Spanish language support, which is still in beta, and HIPAA Compliance.
RingCentral said that more than 2,000 organizations have already deployed AIR. The company in March announced introductory pricing for AI Receptionist and in July announced the general availability of the phone agent.
TalkDesk AI Agents for Voice
Contact Center-as-a-Service provider Talkdesk in the spring launched AI Agents for Voice, a conversational offering for lifelike conversations with AI agents that’s fueled by agentic AI automation. AI Agents for Voice lets businesses create virtual agents capable of independently handling customer queries by analyzing situations and making informed decisions, the company said. Talkdesk’s offering dynamically interprets and adapts to speech without relying on rigid scripts, according to the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company.
The company in June also launched its Customer Experience Automation platform. Talkdesk said this offering takes traditional CCaaS and customer relationship management (CRM) to the next level by replacing fragmented, manually coordinated workflows with a unified system of intelligent, autonomous AI agents.
Vida AI Voice Agent
Carrier-grade AI voice agent developer Vida is a new player in the space, but the startup today is specializing in AI agents for small to midsized customers that deliver lifelike, low-latency and emotionally expressive multilingual conversations. The agents can help automate certain business functions such as customer service, lead qualification, scheduling and sales, according to the Austin, Texas-based upstart.
Vida’s voice agents are powered by advanced AI, including OpenAI’s Realtime API. Since the company’s launch last year, it has successfully deployed over 20,000 AI voice agents, handling more than 2 million calls and texts for SMBs and telecom providers, Vida said.
Vida recently expanded its Partner and Reseller Programs. The company in 2024 received a $3 million seed funding round led by Los Angeles-based investment firm Stillmark Venture Capital.
Wildix x-bees
Business UCaaS provider Wildix, which specializes in collaboration for sales teams, in 2024 debuted x‑bees, the company’s AI‑driven communication platform that integrates voice, video, messaging, and conferencing into a single interface. The standout feature, according to the company, is its Salesforce integration.
Since then, Estonia-based Wildix has been adding on AI-powered innovations to the platform, such as virtual meeting participants, AI-driven CRM data population, real-time transcriptions, sentiment analysis, intelligent summarizations, and task management. x‑bees can support multiple languages, which the company said is because the platform is designed to serve a diverse global market.
Zoom AI Companion
Always innovating, collaboration leader Zoom in the spring unveiled agentic AI Companion capabilities, and more than 45 new Zoom AI Companion skills and AI updates across its platform, including Zoom Meetings, Zoom Team Chat, Zoom Docs, Zoom Phone, Zoom Whiteboard, Zoom Contact Center, industry solutions, and more. The company said that the slew of recent updates help users get more done, do their best work, and strengthen relationships. Earlier this month, the company revealed a further 16 third-party app integrations available with the Custom AI Companion add-on that will help users save time and complete tasks.
The videoconferencing giant in May unveiled new self-service capabilities for faster quoting, to accelerate deal cycles and simplify pricing for Zoom’s tens of thousands of global partners, Nick Tidd, head of global channel go-to-market for Zoom, told CRN.
Zoom’s UC&C revenue grew approximately 1 percent YoY in 2024 to $4.3 billion. The company accounted for a 6.2 percent market share last year, according to IDC.
