Weekly

Sierra and Meta introduced Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard for how consumers' own AI agents deal with businesses, with Genesys, NiCE, and Zendesk signed on and Decagon publishing a consent protocol of its own. The same week, Automation Anywhere agreed to buy Boost.ai, and Cisco Webex, Fin, and Zendesk shipped new AI agent releases.

The UK tax authority HMRC chose Salesforce over Pegasystems for a CRM contract worth up to £2.4bn, built to sit beside its NiCE CXone contact center program. The same week brought four acquisition deals (TCN and Abstrakt, CallTower and Momentum, Inworld and Ultravox, Salesforce and Listen Labs) and a run of voice AI launches from Decagon, Telnyx, and Zendesk.

Salesforce timed Agentforce Contact Center for the UK and EU in October, with workforce management still on the way, while Zendesk and Sierra told HumanX that AI agents should be billed for outcomes. The same week, Five9, Zoom, Talkdesk, and Webex told a contact-center summit that containment is the wrong scoreboard.

At Dreamforce on 15 Sep, Salesforce introduced AIforce so CRM context and governed actions can run inside Claude, Slack, and Lightning. The same week, Talkdesk launched Talkdesk for Stores, and Bandwidth said it will carry Salesforce's native Contact Center into more than 25 countries.

Salesforce completed its acquisition of Fin on 10 Sep, months ahead of the original fiscal timeline. The same week, Zendesk launched Specialized Agents and Real-Time Voice Translation for CCaaS voice.

SoundHound AI closed its LivePerson acquisition on Sept. 4 after stockholders approved the deal two days earlier. The same week Genesys launched Navigator, Orchestrator, Contextual Intelligence, and an AI Control Plane at Xperience 2026, while Amazon Connect and Decagon shipped builder tools for agentic self-service and outbound.

Stockholders meet at 10am ET. Gartner looked at 432 AI service use cases. A quarter make money.