IT Connection

8×8 AI Routing Takes a Sad Song and Makes It Better

July 22, 2026July 22, 2026 by Gregg Willsky, posted in Big Data

G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

• 8×8 AI Routing identifies the right expert anywhere in an organization that can resolve a customer’s inquiry, not just the contact center.

• While 8×8 AI Routing is marginally better than legacy systems it still merits a try out.

We’ve probably all found ourselves reciting this famous opening line to a classic song when trying to connect with someone in customer support: “Help! I need somebody. Help! Not just anybody. Help! You know I need someone. Help!”

Desperately in need of assistance, eventually you get connected with either a person or an AI agent. You breathe a sigh of relief but then it turns out they are ill-equipped to handle your inquiry. You need help from somebody, but not just anybody. Well, 8×8 claims that its recently introduced ‘8×8 AI Routing’ will take that sad song and make it better.

8×8 AI Routing identifies the right expert for a given interaction anywhere in an organization, not just the contact center. The technology scans three 8×8 platforms, identifying contact center agents on 8×8 Contact Center plus subject matter experts on 8×8 Engage and back-office employees on 8×8 Work. Each interaction is analyzed in real-time across several factors such as transcripts, historical patterns, and sentiment to match the customer with the right resource immediately. 8×8 claims that legacy skills-based routing systems, in contrast to 8×8 AI Routing, are static, relying on skills inventories that are entered manually and often out of date. Furthermore, 8×8 says, those systems often route to whoever is available rather than whoever is necessarily best suited to resolve a specific request.

While 8×8 AI Routing is better than manual, legacy systems the difference is marginal. Identifying the ‘right’ resource hinges on AI conducting an accurate assessment of skills. While AI in general is powerful it is far from perfect. AI is known to produce errors, and the chance that a customer could get routed to the ‘wrong’ resource is not insignificant. While 8×8 AI Routing does allow for a human in the loop, with administrators having the opportunity to provide final sign-off on the skills assessment, such intervention introduces a manual element into the process. And although organizations can roll out first with a small pilot and grow the system as they gain comfort, that adjustment represents yet another layer of manual manipulation. Bottom line, while 8×8 AI Routing is not radically different than legacy systems, it does have the potential to improve an organization’s customer experience and thus merits a test drive.

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon Trade Wins in H1 2026 as 5G SA and Mid-band Shape Real-world Performance

July 21, 2026July 21, 2026 by John Marcus, posted in Communicate

John Marcus – Senior Principal Analyst, Enterprise Mobility and IoT Services.

Summary Bullets:

• AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon each improved in H1 2026, with distinct strengths across speed, reliability, and calls.

• Enterprises should evaluate 5G SA maturity, uplink capacity, and location-specific consistency—not just peak download speeds.

US mobile performance improved across the board in H1 2026, according to Ookla’s “State of the Mobile Union” reporting, drawing on RootMetrics testing. RootMetrics technicians ran over 3 million real-world tests from January to June 2026, driving 243,000 miles across all 50 states and 125 major metro markets to evaluate AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon.

While each of the three carriers earned wins, the bigger story is that after more than half a decade, network investments are translating into more consistent, widely available 5G. That has direct consequences for mobile users and, especially, enterprises standardizing mobile connectivity for cloud apps, field operations, and AI-era workflows.

Key findings: shared speed leadership, different network strengths

AT&T earned five national RootScore Awards in H1 2026, including shares of awards for Overall Performance, Network Reliability, and Network Speed, and it won the US Call RootScore Award outright. The carrier also increased high-speed performance in cities, delivering median download speeds of at least 200 Mbps in 110 markets, up from 92 in H2 2025.

T-Mobile shared the national Network Speed award with AT&T and again led in 5G availability, posting 96.1%. It recorded 200+ Mbps median downloads in 123 of 125 major cities tested and took the most State Speed RootScore Awards (38)—demonstrating its strength in broad 5G reach and metro-area throughput.

Verizon earned the most awards overall across geographies, winning or sharing six national awards and leading with 321 State RootScore Awards and 756 Metro Area RootScore Awards. Verizon also won Best 5G Experience and Most Reliable 5G, and improved the number of major cities with 200+ Mbps median downloads from 104 in H2 2025 to 123 in H1 2026.

Verizon tops 5G experience, narrows gap on availability

In its 5G experience testing, RootMetrics cited strong performance for Verizon in both urban and rural testing. While it still trailed T-Mobile’s 5G availability, Verizon improved meaningfully—rising from 80.2% in H2 2025 to 89% in H1 2026. For users, that translates into fewer drops back to LTE and more predictable performance for video calls, collaboration tools, and cloud applications.

Performance gains are tied to spectrum and 5G architecture choices

In its report, Ookla researcher Mike Dano points to heavy carrier spending—such as AT&T’s spectrum deal with EchoStar, T-Mobile’s UScellular asset purchase, and Verizon’s AWS-3 auction activity—as a major driver behind improved outcomes. RootMetrics data indicates that overall mobile speeds on an aggregated nationwide basis increased from about 192 Mbps (H1 2024) to 334 Mbps (H1 2026), while the share of download tests running on 5G (SA or NSA) rose from about 84% to 93%.

Despite joint wins, each carrier is taking a distinct path

• AT&T is expanding mid-band capacity (including wider mid-band channel usage) and shows strong spectral efficiency. However, it continues to rely heavily on 5G NSA and, for some “lite data” tasks, leans on LTE more than rivals—potentially impacting responsiveness even when top-line speeds are improving.

• T-Mobile continues refining its extensive 5G SA footprint and leverages very large bandwidth in metro areas (often 200+ MHz total). It is also experimenting with additional spectrum layers in some markets and highlighting resilience efforts like satellite-based texting outside coverage, though usage in RootMetrics observations remained limited.

• Verizon is rapidly shifting toward 5G SA in metro testing and expanding C-band use while adding capacity features like more advanced carrier aggregation—including uplink improvements that matter as mobile use cases become more upload-heavy (video, telemetry, AI-driven apps). RootMetrics also noted some Voice over New Radio (VoNR)-related growing pains affecting call performance.
What it means for enterprises

For enterprise buyers, the report reinforces that “fastest” is less important than the best fit-to-use-case. Field service and logistics teams may prioritize coverage and 5G availability; headquarters and dense office environments may prioritize capacity and consistency; and organizations adopting real-time analytics, video, and AI workflows should pay closer attention to uplink performance and 5G SA maturity.

The bottom line is that US mobile networks are improving quickly, but in different ways. Enterprises should validate carrier performance where employees actually work—by region, indoor/outdoor mix, and application type—because competitive differences are increasingly about consistency of experience, architecture (SA vs. NSA), and how well each network handles the workloads businesses are transitioning to mobile.

Slackbot Spreads Its Wings but Questions Remain

July 14, 2026July 14, 2026 by Gregg Willsky, posted in Cloud Enable

G. Willsky

Summary Bullets:

• Salesforce has integrated Slackbot more deeply into its platform, providing access purportedly to the entire Salesforce ecosystem.

• Despite positives the announcement generates concerns, the most pressing regarding security.

Salesforce has greatly extended the scope of Slackbot, the AI-driven personal work agent built into Slack, claiming it now spans the entire Salesforce platform. The change will add substantial value, keep Slack – the company – competitive with rivals, and cement the starring role Slack has come to play at Salesforce.

The new and improved Slackbot advances if not completes Slack’s emergence as a key member of the Salesforce organization. When acquired by Salesforce in 2021 Slack seemed destined to fall into a black hole, a Jonah being swallowed by the whale. Instead, it has been methodically elevated into a central gateway of the Salesforce platform. Slack has been increasingly embedded into Salesforce’s broader product fabric, positioned as the front end for Salesforce’s AI ecosystem and now evolving into the default collaboration interface for the Salesforce platform. Slack has been granted a new and better life by its parent.

In addition to accelerating its rebirth, the enhanced Slackbot benefits Slack by bringing greater value to users and keeping it neck-and-neck with rivals such as Cisco and Zoom, who are infusing their own platforms with the same type of cross-pollination.

This latest version of Slackbot enables users to get work done far more effectively by serving as a unified front across the Slack and Salesforce platforms. At the heart of the rejuvenated Slackbot lies MCP servers from Salesforce, the fuel behind the Salesforce ‘Headless 360’ initiative which seeks to harness capabilities anywhere in Salesforce and funnel them into Slack. Slackbot now acts as a conductor, overseeing an orchestra consisting of Salesforce products, enterprise data, third-party applications, and AI agents.

At a most basic level, users provide Slackbot a request through a natural language interface, and Slackbot fulfils it by pulling together relevant resources such as conversations, files, and data residing in multiple, often far-flung repositories. Users can, for example, update sales pipelines and surface next best actions, discover whether the marketing team is on track to achieve a forecast, or route a service case to the appropriate individuals. Over time, Slackbot gets to know users better, thus fulfilling their needs with greater speed and accuracy.

Despite the positives, there are some concerns associated with the announcement. The largest involves security. The security posture behind Slackbot is an open question and one with serious implications especially given the pooling and sharing of data which Slackbot facilitates; Salesforce needs to articulate clearly what types of safeguards are in place. Another concern is the lack of contact center capabilities to complement the collaboration capabilities found in Slack; a robust contact center portfolio has become critical for remaining competitive in the market. Last, despite rapidly accumulating AI-driven features on its platform and its association with Salesforce, the Slack name lacks the brand equity enjoyed by competitors. The likes of Cisco and Microsoft were well known in team collaboration well before the pandemic, and Zoom became a household name when it hit. Slack has not achieved the same notoriety.

If Salesforce can promptly address each of these issues, it could merit inclusion among the top players such as Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom.

Google Cloud Summit Sydney: Putting Agentic AI into Action

July 13, 2026July 13, 2026 by siowmeng, posted in Big Data, Cloud Enable, Communicate, Secure

Summary Bullets:

Enterprises are deploying AI agents leveraging Google Cloud’s solutions and achieving positive business outcomes.
Google Cloud offers the full AI stack, and its sovereign cloud and cyber solutions are especially crucial for enterprise customers.

AI agents are no longer an idea. They are now being deployed by enterprises to improve internal workplace productivity and external customer experience. At Google Cloud Summit Sydney (held on June 25, 2026), more examples of agentic AI in operations were presented, moving from deterministic AI chatbots to more autonomous systems. Bunnings, a home improvement, gardening, and hardware products retailer in Australia, upgraded its Buddy AI chatbot that helped customers with product search to an AI agent that takes customers’ descriptions of their projects and fills the shopping carts with the products that they need. Bunnings indicated an uplift of conversion rates and basket sizes when customers engage with Buddy. Similarly, Woolworths supermarket has an agentic AI powered Olive assistant that is able to build shopping baskets from recipe photos and assist with proactive meal planning. These two examples demonstrate how AI agents trained with proprietary knowledge (e.g., Bunnings’s DIY catalog and Woolworths’ recipe catalog) can deliver greater customer outcomes.

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Beyond Subsea: Why Australia’s Next Fiber Race Is on Land

July 10, 2026July 10, 2026 by Brendan Swan, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate

B. Swan

Summary Bullets:

Australia’s digital infrastructure race is moving onshore, with long-haul fiber becoming as important as international subsea connectivity.
Vocus and Telstra are expanding their terrestrial network to meet growing AI, cloud, and hyperscaler demand across key intercity corridors.

Over the last decade, Australia’s digital infrastructure strategy has largely centered on subsea cable investment, from new builds to strategic consortium partnerships. These new international systems have expanded capacity, improved network resilience, and strengthened Australia’s connectivity to the world. However, as artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes data traffic patterns, investment is shifting from beneath the ocean to fiber corridors underpinning Australia’s AI future.

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Racing to AI: Tata Communications Accelerates Its Connectivity Position to Singapore

July 10, 2026July 10, 2026 by Brendan Swan, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate

B. Swan

Summary Bullets:

Tata Communications is strengthening its global network to create an AI-ready digital corridor linking India with Singapore.
As AI workloads grow, the India to Singapore route is becoming one of Asia’s most strategically important connectivity corridors.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping one of Asia’s busiest digital corridors. As AI workloads, cloud adoption and investment by hyperscalers accelerates across India and Southeast Asia, demand for high-speed, low-latency connectivity is rising just as rapidly. Tata Communications’s latest investment in new subsea cable infrastructure between India and Singapore is more than another cable announcement; it reflects a broader strategy to build an AI-ready digital corridor linking India’s emerging data center hubs with the Southeast Asia’s largest cloud ecosystem. With these investments, Tata Communications seems to be quietly assembling one of the region’s most comprehensive AI connectivity platforms.

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Lack of AI Agent Oversight Brings Dueling Approaches

July 8, 2026July 10, 2026 by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in IT Leader

Summary Bullets:

• Fast-growing use of agentic AIs within organizations has triggered agentic orchestration/governance prioritization among platform providers

• Controversy remains over two distinct approaches to orchestration: control plane construct or orchestration frameworks

Enterprises deploying AI in 2026 are turning their attention from deployment of agentic AIs to the management of growing numbers of agents being released across organizations. Companies are struggling with how to manage the hundreds or thousands of individual agents built within their organizations–agents built by different teams, running on different platforms, with inconsistent security and governance. This is problematic, considering most organizations lack visibility into agent inventory, purpose, and authorization.

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EU Proposal for MSS Spectrum Seeks to Balance Bloc’s Commercial and Sovereignty Aspirations

July 1, 2026July 1, 2026 by Ismail Patel, posted in Communicate, Internet of Things, IT Leader, Network

Summary Bullets:

The EU’s MSS 2 GHz proposal strengthens regulation, security, and competition, but implementation through 2027–2029 will be phased, not immediate.
Small spectrum block sizes favor IoT, messaging, emergency services; large-bandwidth applications face bottlenecks.

When the European Commission unveiled its plan late last month to reassign the 2 GHz mobile satellite service (MSS) spectrum at EU-level, it initiated more than a regulatory proposal. With the dust now settled on the announcement, it is clear that this represents a geopolitical and commercial realignment. Signals in the market suggest the framework is firming up around core principles: sovereignty, security, restricted eligibility, spectrum caps, and wholesale access. But beneath those pillars lies a battlefield of interests that will define not just who wins licenses, but which services Europe values the most – IoT or in-flight broadband, messaging or full-fledged device-to-device (D2D) connectivity.

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AI Wars Intensify via Major LLM/Agentic Releases

June 29, 2026July 1, 2026 by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Big Data

Summary Bullets:

• Cycles between advanced AI model rollouts are significantly shortened among leaders in this space

• Developers are gaining access to agentic-injected integrated development environments (IDEs); while knowledge workers gain access to agentic AI assistants.

The second quarter marks a momentous period in the industry’s ongoing AI efforts. Platform leaders shipped next-generation agentic runtimes including autonomous and other advanced capabilities, all while managing a more compressed cycle of new AI models, which are rolling out in a matter of weeks versus months.

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