I want to share some exciting news: I’m expanding my research coverage. In addition to my work on enterprise networking and telecommunications, I’m now covering communications platform as a service (CPaaS). For me, this is a natural evolution. I’ve spent much of my career around communications, connectivity, and the technologies that bring businesses and their customers together, and CPaaS increasingly sits at the intersection of all three. 

I’m currently working on updating our Forrester CPaaS Landscape, planned for early 2027. And I’m jumping into the market at an interesting point in its development. CPaaS has already moved well beyond its origins as APIs that developers use to embed messaging, voice, video, and other communications into applications. Low-code tools, omnichannel engagement, customer data, conversational AI, authentication, and orchestration are hardly new to the category. What’s changing now is how these capabilities are coming together and beginning to redefine the role CPaaS plays in the enterprise technology stack. 

Three developments particularly stand out: 

  • The first evolution of CPaaS has already happened. The next one is starting. Communications APIs remain foundational, but leading platforms have been steadily adding low-code tools, engagement workflows, data, AI, identity, security, and orchestration. The next phase goes further. AI agents, persistent interaction context, conversation and journey intelligence, fraud controls, and programmable network capabilities are starting to converge with those communications foundations. Providers are approaching this opportunity from very different directions, including communications infrastructure, customer engagement, cloud, contact center, and telecom networks. The question is no longer whether CPaaS will move up the stack. It already has. The question is what CPaaS becomes as those layers converge. 
  • Enterprise use of CPaaS is broadening along with it. Embedding a message or phone call into an application remains important, but it represents only part of today’s opportunity. Enterprises increasingly apply CPaaS to interactions triggered by business events, customer engagement throughout the lifecycle, sophisticated service conversations, trust and fraud prevention, acquisition and conversion, workflow orchestration, commerce, and emerging interactions in which AI agents communicate and act. As a result, CPaaS increasingly matters to business and technology stakeholders well beyond the developers who helped define the category. 
  • The capabilities that differentiate CPaaS are shifting. Channel breadth and global communications reach still matter, but increasingly they aren’t enough. Enterprises should pay more attention to how providers maintain context across interactions, orchestrate channels and workflows, integrate enterprise and customer data, apply AI to conversations and journeys, authenticate users and communications, combat fraud, expose network intelligence, and monitor communications performance. The competitive question is shifting from simply “Which channels does the platform support?” toward “How intelligently, securely, and reliably can the platform manage an interaction from beginning to end?” 

 

These are exciting times for CPaaS because the market isn’t abandoning its communications roots. It is building another layer on top of them. The early CPaaS market made communications programmable. Its next phase will increasingly make communications contextual, intelligent, trusted, orchestrated, and autonomous. That transformation is only beginning, and I’ll have much more to share as we move toward the new Forrester CPaaS Landscape in early 2027. In the meantime, if these changes are affecting your communications strategy, reach out and book an inquiry by submitting a request to inquiry@forrester.com. Schedule a conversation with me — Octavio Garcia Granados– and let’s talk CPaaS.  

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