Max Ball
Principal Analyst
Author Insights
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Lessons Learned From The Forrester Wave™: Conversational AI Platforms For Customer Service, Q2 2026
Learn key lessons about deploying conversational AI from practitioners who have delivered self-service applications for their organization.
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From CRM To The Agentic Enterprise: Salesforce’s Biggest Dreamforce 2026 Reveals
At Dreamforce 2026, Salesforce presented its most complete vision yet for the “agentic enterprise.” It shifted the core focus away from individual apps (such as those focused on sales, services, or marketing) and unified them through a single architecture built around data, logic and AI agents. This vision includes: (1) AIforce, Salesforce’s UX layer that […]
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Zendesk Relate 2026 Showed Why Agentic Customer Service Starts With Knowledge
Zendesk Relate 2026 showed that agentic customer service depends on structured knowledge, new service engineering roles, and operational readiness for AI execution.
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Google Cloud Next 2026: The End Of The AI Pilot Era
Google Cloud Next 2026 opened with Thomas Kurian declaring the end of the AI pilot era and Sundar Pichai comparing the enterprise refrain of last year (“Can we build an agent?”) to today’s: “How do we manage thousands of them?” Google Cloud Next ’26 answers the second question with a single product story: Gemini Enterprise […]
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The Tightrope Walkers: Conversational AI Must Bridge Modern AI And Contact Center Reality
Learn how conversational AI vendors balance rapid innovation with trust and fit for contact centers based on the 2026 Forrester Wave™ evaluation.
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Please Test Your AI Agents — Like, At All
Recent, public AI agent and bot failures have exposed the hazards of forgoing testing. Here’s what you should do before rolling out your own agents.
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What We Saw At AWS re:Invent 2025
The goal of this year’s event was to position AWS as a newly transformed, AI-native cloud that’s ready right now. Here’s a closer look at the key announcements and developments.
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Why AI Isn’t The Silver Bullet For Customer Service — Yet
AI is being marketed as a technology that will transform customer service for the better, but results are lacking. Here’s why.
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CCaaS Vendors Thrive In A Wild Market
The Forrester Wave™: Contact-Center-As-A-Service Platforms, Q2 2025, is out! Dive into the latest genAI-driven changes in this fast-moving space.
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Google Cloud Next 2025: Agentic AI Stack, Multimodality, And Sovereignty
Loads of news came out of a hot Google Cloud Next 2025 in Las Vegas. The most notable announcements? Sovereign AI solutions on-prem, developer innovations that meet timely needs, very applicable multimodality for content and CX, and new elements for building the enterprise agentic AI stack.
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The Customer Service Tech Landscape: What It Means For You
To succeed, customer service organizations must curate a set of technologies that underpin their operations. To discover the most important ones, we surveyed technology decision-makers, suppliers, and other subject matter experts for their opinions about which ones really mattered.
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Build The Right Chatbot Business Case
Most companies make the wrong business case for their chatbot. Here’s how to make the right one.
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Get Ready For GenAI Chatbots: The State Of Conversational AI
Talk about change! As we approach the two-year anniversary of the announcement of OpenAI’s launch of GPT-3.5, conversational AI has been reinvented to incorporate generative AI (genAI) to take advantage of the many ways that this technology can make self-service applications smarter. Previously, the conversational AI tools used to create chatbots and intelligent virtual agents […]
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Is GenAI Falling Short? Not In The Contact Center
Infrequently asked questions is an example of how genAI is bringing value to the contact center
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Even GenAI-Trained Execs Are Confused About It (Our Survey Shows) — So Give Them Better Training
Do executives understand generative AI (genAI) better than consumers do? Nope — apparently not. Our research shows that among consumers, generative AI is poorly understood or not at all (see The State Of Consumer Usage Of Generative AI, 2024). And you might think that execs would be better informed, considering the high-stakes decisions they must […]
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Meet The Digital-Double Power Player
In a not-so-distant future, a digital double will save you time — but at the expense of your data.
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Generative AI Marks A New Dawn For Contact Centers
Contact center leaders are now employing generative AI to mark a new dawn in the contact center. Brands will need to face challenges head on and capitalize on opportunities to redefine the contact center as we know it.
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Frenemies Forever — The Tension Between CRM And CCaaS Vendors
The two technologies are increasingly encroaching on each other’s spaces. It's up to the brands that deploy these solutions to decide what functionality to take from which vendor — which is not a simple task.
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Our New Conversational AI Forrester Wave™: GenAI And LLMs Drive A Vendor Revolution
As generative AI has emerged in the past year, conversational AI vendors have evolved their capabilities. Get a sneak peek at five of those capabilities in this preview of our new Wave report.
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re:Invent 2023 — Is AWS In Unfamiliar Territory As A Follower?
At AWS re:Invent 2023 the AI announcements were underwhelming despite high expectations. Find out more in this extended review of the event.
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