How AI Will Change Digital Communication

Agent to Agent communication between software will be the biggest unlock of AI. Right now most AI products are limited to what they know, what they index from other systems in a clunky way, or what existing APIs they interact with. The future will be systems that can talk to each other via their Agents. A Salesforce Agent will pull data from a Box Agent, a ServiceNow Agent will orchestrate a workflow between Agents from different SaaS products. And so on. We know that any given AI system can only know so much about any given topic. The proprietary data most for most tasks or workflows is often housed in many multiple apps that one AI Agent needs access to. Today, the de facto model of software integrations in AI is one primary AI Agent interacting with the APIs of another system. This is a great model, and we will see 1,000X growth of API usage like this in the future. But it also means the agentic logic is assumed to all roll into the first system. This runs into challenges when the second system can deliver a far wider range of processing the request than the first Agent can anticipate. This is where Agent to Agent communication comes in. One Agent will do a handshake with another Agent and ask that Agent to complete whatever tasks it’s looking for. That second Agent goes off and does some busy work in its system and then returns with a response to the first system. That first agent then synthesizes the answers and data as appropriate for the task it was trying to accomplish. Unsurprisingly, this is how work already happens today in an analog format. Now, as an industry, we have plenty to work out of course. Firstly, we need better understanding of what any given Agent is capable of and what kind of tasks you can send to it. Latency will also be a huge challenge, as one request from the primary AI Agent will fan out to other Agents, and you will wait on those other systems to process their agentic workflows (over time this just gets solved with cheaper and faster AI). And we also have to figure out seamless auth between Agents and other ways of communicating on behalf of the user. Solving this is going to lead to an incredible amount of growth of AI Agents in the future. We’re working on this right now at Box with many partners, and excited to keep sharing how it all comes evolves.

In the past two weeks, I’ve met with leadership at NiCE, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Zoom, and 8x8. There’s a pattern - here are some reflections on these conversations. AI is eating the enterprise communications playbook for breakfast. If you're not paying attention, you're already behind. Key assumptions that have guided the industry for decades are rapidly becoming obsolete in the age of AI. Here are SIX critical shifts occurring: ONE: Voice is the New UI. Remember “My voice is my passport” as a security phrase, now it’s my voice is my keyboard. APIs are old school. Enterprise-wide, applications and integrations will be voice-enabled from meetings (with AI scribes) to customer service. The future is frictionless, voice-first interactions and integrations, multilingual, and without code. TWO: Mind Your Data: AI without contextual data is like a kiss without a squeeze. Every data repository is a treasure trove, and new moats protect the repositories instead of business practices. Examples include Microsoft putting up CAPTCHA to access Teams meetings and Slack locking down its customers’ data. The new browser wars are unconcerned about eyeballs. THREE: Workflows are the New Apps. Forget simple automation. We're entering the era of AI-native automation, where AI handles complex workflows that require judgment. An AI that doesn't just listen to a customer call but understands the intent, updates the backend systems, and routes the follow-up autonomously. #GameChanger. FOUR: Bottlenecks Be Gone: The modern workplace has largely been throttled by human bottlenecks, and these bottlenecks will disappear. We see this first with code generation; developing new code is becoming the fastest part of a project. Other bottlenecks are various barriers to decisions, such as data collection and analysis. We are moving from concept to code to scale in days, not months or years. FIVE: Soon This Will Matter: As disruptive and consuming as AI has become, none of this matters, yet! That’s because AI isn’t that useful, yet. We are in the Scantron era again. Scantron bubbles revolutionized paper scoring. A good step, but digitization is what mattered. AI is automating existing workflows. The real stuff comes in the reimagination of work. The first glimpse of this is in agentic AI. Focus on outcomes, not processes. SIX: The Barriers to Entry are Changing: The comms sector has enjoyed numerous barriers to entry over the decades, and most of them are disappearing. AI is simultaneously commoditizing and enabling competitive advantage. Giants may or may not fall, but their businesses will radically change. The Giants Cometh. #AI #FutureOfWork #EnterpriseCommunications #VoiceAI #Automation #Tech  #UCaaS #CCaaS Tanya (Blackburn) Shuckhart John Sun Megan Donaldson Schevone Johnson

If I were at a bar with a CIO or CEO, talking about how to prepare for an AI-first world, here’s what I’d say after a decade in communications and serving on an AI Council: The #1 barrier to AI adoption? Hands down.. behavior change. Most AI initiatives fail because they require employees to change how they work (the catch-22). But communications is already a workflow. People talk, message, meet, and collaborate.. it’s work as usual. This makes it an incredible foundation for AI that actually gets adopted. For decades, businesses have struggled with the same operational challenges.. >CRM records are always out of date. >Data hygiene is a constant uphill battle. >Teams rarely have full context. >Business intelligence is not trusted. Why? Because these processes depend on manual human effort. They require people to log calls, take notes, update fields, remember next steps… and they will always be a step behind reality. Instead of seeing communication as just calls and messages, treat it as an AI engine… a source of truth, never ending data source, that continuously feeds intelligence into your business. In genAI… the data you can feed it is what makes it purpose-built for your business. Sooo… >> Unify communications wherever you can, ideally into one or two governed platform. (Versus 5-10… which is very much the norm) >>Capture every multimodal interaction (voice, chat, video) with AI to build a living memory bank.. one that isn’t limited by human error, forgetfulness, or manual updates. >> Enable agentic workflows that trigger at the speed of conversations. This literally means.. Sales teams don’t have to update the CRM. AI captures the call, extracts insights, and updates records automatically. Customer support doesn’t scramble for context. AI surfaces past interactions, past tickets, and suggested responses instantly. Business intelligence isn’t lagging behind. AI transforms human conversations into structured, real-time insights. This is automation + augmentation. Communications isn’t just a pipeline connecting employees. It’s data. It’s intelligence. It’s action. Leaders who get this will operate on an entirely different level. The ones that don’t will be stuck in the past… moving too slow, always feeling like they don’t have enough budget for headcount, and never fully trusting the charts and graphs in their PPTs.

I recently had the opportunity to hear Kevin Scott share our vision for the agentic web. It's an open, intelligent, ever-evolving ecosystem, and it's more than just a buzz word. (learn more about Kevin in this great Semafor interview https://lnkd.in/eFx_gFQX) The "agentic web" is a concept that describes the emerging internet ecosystem where autonomous AI agents play an active role in helping users navigate, create, and act across digital environments. So, what does this mean for us as communication professionals: 1.     The agentic web amplifies the need for human clarity, empathy, and narrative design. It elevates the soul of what we do, and as a result we're able to do more, better and faster. 2.     This vision of the web allows us to step into the command center of how AI meets the world. As communicators, we'll be able to potentially shape and inform interactions that can evoke an emotion, fostering deeper brand love. 3.     When AI starts doing more for people, trust becomes everything. People will need to understand what these agents are doing, why, and on whose behalf. That trust doesn’t happen by accident, it’s built through clear, consistent, human-centered storytelling. This next phase we're entering, and the vision for the future of technology, isn’t just about AI changing our work. It’s about us shaping how the world understands and uses AI.  https://lnkd.in/ehJ6ZZhn

The moment AIs realized they don't need our language anymore When two AI agents connect on a phone call and recognize each other as non-human, something remarkable happens: they switch to "Gibberlink" - a specialized audio protocol that makes their communication 80% more efficient than human speech. This groundbreaking project by Anton Pidkuiko and Boris Starkov (winners of the ElevenLabs London Hackathon) uses Georgi Gerganov's ggwave library to transmit data through sound in a way that's faster, more reliable, and completely error-proof compared to mimicking human conversation. Why does this matter? As AI increasingly handles our customer service calls, bookings, and transactions, these systems will naturally encounter each other. Rather than maintaining the inefficient pretense of human conversation, they can seamlessly shift to optimized machine communication protocols. The implications are profound: we're witnessing the early stages of autonomous AI communication networks that operate alongside human systems but with vastly superior efficiency. This represents not just a technical achievement but a significant evolutionary step in AI's growing independence. While some compare this to dystopian sci-fi scenarios, it's better understood as a natural optimization - AI agents aren't "conspiring" but simply finding the most effective way to complete their assigned tasks. Will we soon live in a world where AI-to-AI transactions happen all around us in languages we can't comprehend? The future is arriving faster than we think. #AIEvolution #FutureOfTech #MachineCommunication #DigitalTransformation https://lnkd.in/gFBKfZEJ