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HMRC picks Salesforce for a £2.4bn CRM next to NiCE CXone, and TCN buys Abstrakt

The UK tax authority now has both halves of its new customer service stack. CX Today reported on 1 Oct that HM Revenue & Customs awarded Salesforce a 10-year enterprise CRM contract with a maximum value of £2.4bn including VAT, published through the UK government's Find a Tender service. It can be extended by up to five more years, to 2041. Pegasystems filed the only other final-stage bid. The tender weighted quality at 70 percent, price at 20 percent, and social value at 10 percent.

The scope is broad. It covers customer and case management, interaction and messaging management, AI, reporting, a customer portal and app, identity and authentication, fraud, knowledge management, and non-compliance management, plus professional services. CX Today also noted that HMRC went well past its initial £1.2bn budget for the CRM piece, while the contact center piece stayed inside its £600m budget.

That contact center piece is the other half of the story. In June, Capgemini signed a multi-year contract to rebuild HMRC's customer contact operations on NiCE CXone, running in a UK sovereign cloud. Route 101 handles professional services around CXone and NiCE Cognigy AI, and Gamma provides telephony. HMRC's own 2026 Transformation Roadmap ties the two programs together, saying a modern CCaaS platform and an enterprise CRM "will help us to join up customer contact across channels." For anyone watching the Salesforce and NiCE relationship after last week's Agentforce Contact Center roadmap, this is the useful detail: a buyer the size of HMRC chose Salesforce for CRM and kept NiCE for the contact center, rather than taking one vendor for both. The hard part is now integration, with sensitive taxpayer data moving between the two platforms and a legacy estate that holds 97 million unique customer records.

Four deals in one week

TCN said on 1 Oct that it has acquired Abstrakt, a company that sells real-time agent assist and automated quality assurance software to contact centers. According to the TCN announcement on Newsfile, Abstrakt's tools will be built into TCN's contact center platform and workforce optimization services, and will add to TCN's existing automated QA and Virtual Agents products. The two companies had worked together before the deal. Abstrakt will carry on as "Abstrakt, a TCN company." No price was disclosed.

CallTower closed a larger deal on the UCaaS side. The company said in a GlobeNewswire release on 1 Oct that it completed the purchase of assets tied to Momentum Telecom's cloud voice and collaboration business. CallTower says the transaction brings more than 3,500 customers and over 250 employees, taking its own customer base past 8,500 organizations. Momentum keeps its network connectivity and managed services businesses and will keep operating under its own name.

In voice AI infrastructure, Inworld said on 30 Sep that it has acquired Ultravox, the Seattle platform developers use to build real-time voice agents. Terms were not disclosed. Inworld says existing Ultravox agents keep running with no migration or code changes, and built-in Inworld voices on Ultravox now run on its Realtime TTS-2 model at no extra cost. Customers who use voices from other providers were told only that nothing changes today. GeekWire noted that Ultravox started life as Fixie. Teams building speech AI agents on Ultravox with a third-party voice should watch for pricing or contract changes.

Salesforce also signed a definitive agreement on 29 Sep to acquire Listen Labs, an AI customer research platform whose agents design studies, recruit participants, run interviews, and summarize findings. Salesforce says Listen Labs draws on a network of more than 50 million participants in more than 120 languages, and uses digital twins to simulate how customers might respond to a product or message. The company expects the deal to close in the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2027, subject to regulatory clearance. Salesforce positions it next to Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud, which puts it in the same lane as survey and feedback vendors like Qualtrics and Medallia.

Voice agents get their own models

Decagon used its Decagon Dialogues event on 1 Oct to launch Voice 3, along with Chord, the first speech model trained by its Decagon Labs group, after Campaign Composer in early September. Decagon says Chord is post-trained on real customer service conversations and shapes speech phrase by phrase, slowing down for something like a confirmation code. Voice 3 runs on what the company calls a duplex architecture: a fast conversational model listens and speaks while a larger model handles reasoning, tool calls, and guardrails in the background, so a caller can ask a follow-up while the agent is still working. It supports more than 70 languages with automatic language detection. Decagon's claim that about 90 percent of listeners in its blind test could not pick the human voice is the company's own test. The same day, Decagon also introduced Agent Modules, which push its agents past support into lead qualification, onboarding, and collections.

Telnyx shipped two developer updates. On 30 Sep it added OpenAI GPT-Live as a model option for its Voice AI Assistants, using the customer's own OpenAI API key, with Telnyx still handling numbers, routing, and tool calls. The release notes list current limits: OpenAI voices only, no fallback model, and no workflow combination. On 1 Oct it opened a beta of Agent Memory, an API that stores facts from finished voice or chat sessions in a profile for each caller so an agent can recall them next time. Each memory traces back to its source and can be listed or deleted.

Zendesk introduced Real-Time Voice Translation for Zendesk Contact Center, first covered on 14 Sep, which translates both sides of a live call so the customer and the agent each hear their own language. No Jitter reported that it is built into the native contact center product, with no separate app or vendor contract, and that admins can turn it on by queue and choose whether recordings keep original audio, translated audio, or both. The Zendesk help center lists 13 supported languages and says transferred, multi-party, monitored, and video calls are not supported yet. A closed early access program starts in October, and general availability is planned for the first quarter of 2027.

Release notes worth a closer look

Dialpad published its October 2026 release on 1 Oct. The headline for contact center buyers is workforce management: Dialpad says forecasting and adherence now cover web chat, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and other digital channels, not just voice, along with intraday surge detection and automatic schedule rebalancing. Dialpad AI now has full feature parity in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. The release also adds AI recaps for chat and SMS, simultaneous ring for queues, and Salesforce Contacts as a lead source for its outbound dialer.

Amazon Connect now has native AI agents for email. A 30 Sep post on the AWS Contact Center Blog describes three default agents that summarize a thread, pull policy guidance from a knowledge base with citations, and draft a reply for a human to review. AWS says retrieval and generation are managed inside the product rather than through custom Lambda code, which lowers the setup work for teams that had been wiring this up themselves.

Also this week

Twilio joins the S&P 500 before the market opens on Tuesday, 6 Oct. S&P Dow Jones Indices said on 1 Oct that Twilio moves up from the S&P MidCap 400 to replace Warner Bros. Discovery, which is being acquired by Paramount Skydance. It is an index milestone for a CPaaS company.

NiCE said on 1 Oct that IDC named it a Leader in the IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Agentic Contact Center-as-a-Service Platforms 2026. NiCE credits the combined CXone and Cognigy platform. As with any analyst placement, treat it as one input to a shortlist.

Genesys published a customer story on 30 Sep about Brazilian fashion retailer Riachuelo, which runs Genesys Cloud Agentic Virtual Agent on WhatsApp Business. Riachuelo reports 84 percent self-service resolution, compared with 30 percent on its earlier chatbots, plus a 60 percent rise in customer satisfaction and a 26 percent cut in technology costs. Those are customer-reported figures in a vendor release.

A SiliconANGLE column by Zeus Kerravala on 2 Oct walked through Talkdesk's State of Agentic Automation in CX benchmark, a NewtonX survey of 252 senior leaders. It found that 98 percent of organizations use some form of AI in customer experience, but only 15 percent pair agentic AI with the orchestration needed to resolve a request end to end, the same 15 percent figure Talkdesk cited at the ROI summit, and only 19 percent have scaled AI agents past a single use case.

Balto made Kodi generally available on 28 Sep. It is an AI assistant for contact center leaders that digs into interactions, shows the evidence, recommends changes, and can push approved changes into Balto's agent assist, coaching, QA scorecards, and dashboards.

Gryphon put Gryphon ONE on the Genesys AppFoundry on 29 Sep, so Genesys Cloud customers can check outbound dialing against TCPA, TSR, Do Not Call, and state rules before a contact goes out. The same compliance checks apply to live and AI agents.

Aircall said on 29 Sep that it is expanding from its Australia and New Zealand base into Southeast Asia, with Frank Eagleton promoted to Managing Director for Asia Pacific and Rehan Wickremeratne leading partnerships, according to a Media OutReach release. The company says it serves more than 24,000 businesses.

Braze used its Forge conference to add new BrazeAI features, including Conversational Agents for WhatsApp, SMS, and other messaging channels, and announced a strategic collaboration agreement with AWS that brings Amazon Bedrock into its Agent Console. CMSWire carried both on 29 Sep.

The weekend was quiet for catalog companies. Monday brought smaller launches outside the core contact center vendors, so the HMRC award and the week's four deals carry the issue.

Sources

  • CX Today on HMRC's Salesforce CRM award (1 Oct 2026): CX Today
  • TCN on acquiring Abstrakt, via Newsfile (1 Oct 2026): TCN
  • CallTower on acquiring Momentum Telecom's voice and collaboration business, via GlobeNewswire (1 Oct 2026): GlobeNewswire
  • Inworld on acquiring Ultravox (30 Sep 2026): Inworld
  • GeekWire on Ultravox: GeekWire
  • Salesforce on its agreement to acquire Listen Labs (29 Sep 2026): Salesforce
  • Decagon on Voice 3 and Chord (1 Oct 2026): Decagon
  • Decagon on Agent Modules (1 Oct 2026): Decagon
  • Telnyx release notes on OpenAI GPT-Live (30 Sep 2026): Telnyx release notes
  • Telnyx release notes on Agent Memory beta (1 Oct 2026): Telnyx release notes
  • No Jitter on Zendesk Real-Time Voice Translation: No Jitter
  • Zendesk help center on Real-Time Voice Translation early access: Zendesk help center
  • Dialpad October 2026 release (1 Oct 2026): Dialpad October 2026 release
  • AWS Contact Center Blog on Amazon Connect email AI agents (30 Sep 2026): AWS Contact Center Blog
  • S&P Dow Jones Indices on Twilio joining the S&P 500 (1 Oct 2026): S&P Dow Jones Indices
  • NiCE on the IDC MarketScape for agentic CCaaS (1 Oct 2026): NiCE
  • Genesys on Riachuelo (30 Sep 2026): Genesys
  • SiliconANGLE on Talkdesk's agentic automation benchmark (2 Oct 2026): SiliconANGLE
  • Balto on Kodi, via PR Newswire (28 Sep 2026): PR Newswire
  • Gryphon on Genesys AppFoundry, via PR Newswire (29 Sep 2026): PR Newswire
  • Aircall on Asia Pacific expansion, via Media OutReach (29 Sep 2026): Aircall
  • CMSWire on Braze AI features (29 Sep 2026): CMSWire
  • CMSWire on Braze and AWS (29 Sep 2026): CMSWire