‘Telephony Is Commoditised’: Verint's Ady Meretz on why CX has taken over the boardroom agenda

As AI reshapes how enterprises manage customer interactions, organisations across Asia-Pacific are shifting their technology priorities away from telephony infrastructure toward measurable customer experience outcomes. In a conversation with TechCircle, Ady Meretz, President of APAC at Verint, discusses a workforce optimisation and customer engagement software company, following the firm's merger with Calabrio. Meretz discussed how decision-making in the contact centre industry is changing, what the merger means for market coverage, and why India's financial sector is emerging as a growth area for AI-driven CX.

Edited Excerpts: 

From your vantage point across APAC, how is the customer experience landscape evolving?

The demand for CX is increasing, and with AI, it is now possible to deliver it faster than before. What I see is a real change in how decisions are made.

If I look backwards, decisions around contact centres and CX were more focused on technology, starting from telephony, then recording, quality management, analytics, and each vendor came in at the right stage and delivered their solutions. During COVID, the transition to the cloud was accelerated by work-from-home requirements. But in the last two years, the AI shift has become the main driver, and it is not just about what technology sits behind the scenes, it is really about how you deliver value to the customer.

What we are seeing is customers moving from what I would call telephony-centric decision-making, which, if you go back five or ten years, was how most choices were framed, to a more CX-centric model. That means the question is no longer which technology delivers the telephony, but how do I deliver a better customer experience? Telephony is increasingly commoditised, with Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and similar platforms, and customers have largely stopped leading with telephony as the primary consideration.

Part of what drove that shift was seeing that moving telephony from on-premises to the cloud does not actually improve customer experience, it is just replacing one technology with another. More and more customers now make decisions around CX as the central focus. When you have a CX-focused procurement process rather than a technology-focused one, the vendors who come in are those with real application expertise and intellectual property in that space, which is where Verint sits, because we have the data on customer interactions, the capability to improve customer service, and increasingly the ability to leverage AI to do it faster.

APAC is a broad region. How do enterprises there differ from global counterparts in terms of CX maturity and AI adoption?

APAC has a wide definition because each market has its own story. When it comes to AI, you need to be open to the cloud, because you cannot do proper AI without it. Markets like Australia are more mature in cloud adoption compared to other parts of Asia.

The second factor is data sovereignty, requirements that data must remain within a country's borders. Even if a solution is cloud-based, it may need to run within a specific country. A bank in India, for example, will typically insist that its data stays in India. That is true across most Asian markets, particularly in the financial sector. Some customers insist on on-premises deployment purely for security reasons; others are prepared to use cloud, provided it stays in-country; and some, outside the financial vertical, are more flexible.

That dynamic directly shapes what vendors can offer. In Verint, we are flexible about where data resides. We can run AI on the cloud and keep data on-premises or at a country level, and it does not matter where the telephony sits. That gives us flexibility that many vendors cannot match.

On overall maturity, Australia is ahead. Markets across Asia and India are picking up, but data localisation requirements continue to constrain what is possible with AI. That said, I think customers everywhere are becoming more open to understanding that cloud-based AI is necessary to make real progress. The financial sector in Asia is still behind when it comes to approving true cloud deployments, only a small number of banks have genuinely moved in that direction, but I expect that to change significantly in the coming year.

Let us talk about the Calabrio integration. What gap or opportunity were you addressing with that merger?

Calabrio was one of the key players in the market. The merger adds roughly 20% to Verint's total revenue, making us a market leader in workforce optimisation, with deep expertise in both WFO (workforce optimisation) and CX.

Both companies were focused on CX and were neutral to telephony, which is the direction the market is heading, regardless. I think we are well-positioned with our intellectual property, our data assets, and our solutions to meet what the market requires.

Where the two companies differed was in market focus. Calabrio was more concentrated on the mid-market and had a partner-oriented model, while Verint's legacy business was firmly focused on large enterprises. By combining the two, we now cover the market across all dimensions. And with the AI capabilities in Verint's portfolio, which were previously available only to Verint customers, we can now extend those to the Calabrio customer base.

So, a mid-market or Calabrio customer does not need to change their existing infrastructure, they can add AI capabilities on top of what they already have, using Verint's products. The core message to the market is: whatever investment you have made in the past, you can keep it and layer AI on top. I see this as an opportunity to expand our partner network, grow our enterprise reach, and also upsell AI components to the Calabrio base in a way that was not available before.

Because we are now the largest player in WFO by some margin, partners who were working with both companies separately will likely consolidate around a single combined vendor. I see the combination producing more value than simply adding two market shares together, it opens up sales paths to different customer bases and strengthens partner relationships globally and across the region.

You have extended Verint's AI-powered bots to Calabrio customers through the CX automation platform. How meaningful is that in reducing adoption friction?

Adding AI bots and CX capabilities to the Calabrio base represents a significant upsell opportunity. On the Verint base, these capabilities had already been available for some time. The reason these AI bots and CX solutions are critical is that they help customers achieve a better return on investment in a relatively short time.

Let me give a concrete example. If a customer has a thousand contact centre agents handling calls with an average duration of five minutes, by deploying the range of bots we offer, each targeted at specific activities during the call, we can shorten those calls and automate parts of the interaction. Our co-pilots provide real-time guidance to agents, helping them handle the conversation more effectively. Automation handles background tasks that agents previously had to manage while speaking with a customer. Knowledge management tools surface relevant information in real time to reduce call length. Voice bots and chat bots redirect traffic to self-service where possible. And analytics run in a closed loop, identifying why self-service is failing and enabling continuous improvement.

Each of these tools saves some time per interaction. Taken together, we have customers who have reduced a five-minute average call to around two and a half minutes within two to three months of deployment, which theoretically represents a 50% cost saving. That shorter interaction time also benefits customers, because agents are more available and response times improve. Fewer telephony lines are needed as more interactions move to self-service. Agents are more empowered and more satisfied.

We are seeing more and more customers financing these projects entirely from the efficiency gains they produce, and within a short implementation period. That is also why I would argue organisations should not default to a telephony migration as their first step, if you lead with CX, you are likely to reduce the number of licences you need, which itself generates savings.

In India specifically, post-merger, what are the biggest opportunities you are targeting in this region?

There are a few paths here. The primary strategic direction is expanding our AI applications across our entire installed base, whether that is legacy Calabrio customers or Verint customers. Beyond that, there is strong demand for what we have been discussing, using AI to improve CX, and that is our central focus.

One key advantage is our openness to any telephony environment. Whether a customer is running on-premises infrastructure, cloud telephony, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams, they do not need a complex routing platform. We see increasing numbers of customers asking us to integrate across different telephony sources, not just in the contact centre, but also in retail and back-office environments, because they want a single unified view of all customer interaction data. That means one analytics platform covering self-service, voice, and all other channels, focused on delivering a better customer experience overall.

That openness is something both Verint and Calabrio share, we are genuinely neutral on telephony. If a customer goes with a telephony vendor, they are often locked into buying everything from that vendor, which is increasingly seen as a disadvantage. Customers are looking for open architectures and best-of-breed applications. We fit that model.

In Asia specifically, a hybrid architecture is important because many customers still have telephony on-premises but want to accelerate their AI adoption. Those two things do not have to be connected. You can lead with CX and leave the telephony as it is, that is a model we offer. The third element is data residency flexibility, which I mentioned earlier. In India, customers will often require that AI runs in-country and that data stays on-premises or at least within India. Most vendors cannot accommodate that, which we believe gives us a distinctive position in the market.

Our second differentiator is speed. Because of our intellectual property and our data, we can deliver results quickly. Customers do not need to spend two years transforming their infrastructure before they see the benefit of AI or improved CX. We can produce outcomes fast, and I think that is genuinely distinctive for Verint right now.

India functions both as a major CX delivery hub through the BPO sector, and as a fast-growing domestic consumption market. How do you see its role in your strategy?

India is a very important market for us. Looking back over the last ten years, it began with significant growth in the BPO (business process outsourcing) sector, which remains a core part of our India operations. Most BPOs in India use Verint solutions, serving both domestic and international clients. We have partnered with them for many years. What we are now seeing is those BPOs evolving their business models, moving beyond providing technology or staffing to also offering consulting and CX delivery capabilities bundled as part of their proposition. Our solutions give them a differentiated offering in that context, and because BPOs often operate flexible infrastructure arrangements, sometimes owning it, sometimes working within the end customer's environment, our architectural openness is a meaningful advantage.

The second area of growth over the last two or three years is the domestic market in India, particularly the financial sector. Most large Indian banks are now Verint customers, and most use our speech and analytics solutions. Until recently, even as recently as a year ago, most of them insisted that all data remain on-premises and off cloud, which has become a constraint as they now want to use AI capabilities that require cloud infrastructure.

Because most of these institutions are already our customers, we have been working with them on how to address that challenge. What we are seeing is that over the last year, the banking and financial sector in India has become more open to AI, understands that cloud is necessary to run it, but still has substantial requirements around how data is managed and secured. We can deliver AI capabilities within India for the financial vertical, all of the bot capabilities we offer, while meeting those data requirements. We are expanding those relationships quarter by quarter, both deepening AI adoption in the large banks and expanding into second-tier banking in India, which is itself a fast-growing segment. And it extends beyond banking to financial services more broadly, and then to other verticals.

I expect India's domestic market to grow quickly in AI adoption over the next two years.

Looking ahead, what will define a truly differentiated CX organisation, and how is Verint preparing for that?

The key is understanding what processes can realistically be automated and approaching that systematically. Many organisations try to build this themselves and struggle because they do not have sufficient data to do it well. A customer who spends several minutes with a bot that ultimately fails and then still needs to be transferred to a human is not a satisfied customer. And repeating that loop damages the experience further.

Organisations that succeed with AI will do so by moving in measured steps, but moving fast. Instead of attempting to automate everything at once and running evaluation cycles of six to twelve months, which is the wrong approach, particularly because AI capabilities are changing so quickly that what you evaluated three months ago may already be different, the right approach is to jump in and start with small automations of specific processes.

It is relatively straightforward to identify, from interaction data, why people are calling, what the most common reasons are, and which of those are easier to automate. Start there. Even in a large contact centre, saving ten seconds from a three-minute call generates substantial aggregate value at scale.

The question of whether to build internally or work with a specialist also matters. If you are a bank, you are not an expert in AI for customer service. We consistently see organisations that try to build internally struggling for years to achieve results. In this space, speed matters, if you move in micro steps and move fast, you get a better return on investment and start improving cost efficiency and customer service quality much sooner. We have customers who, by following this approach, have saved 50% of their costs within a few months.

What I expect to see is more organisations automating their processes and blending bots with human agents as part of a single interaction. AI will not replace human agents, but it will replace specific tasks where human involvement is not necessary, and it will improve response times by freeing up agent capacity for more complex interactions.

The competitive dimension matters too. If an organisation does CX well, it opens a gap over competitors. But the reverse is also true, if the experience is poor, customers can switch vendors in seconds. In financial services, a bad interaction can lead directly to a customer getting a competitor's quote immediately afterward. That makes real-time analytics and real-time understanding of customer behaviour essential. Those who get this right will gain market share quickly. I think the opportunity for a material shift in market position based on CX quality is real, and the organisations that move deliberately will be the ones that benefit.