It seems we’ve jumped right into 2025, with February already on the horizon! As we look ahead, we’ve taken some time to reflect on emerging trends and their potential impact on the customer experience (CX) landscape. To gain insights, I had the opportunity to sit down with Anthony “Tony” Uliano, the founder and CEO of AMC Technology. Anthony is no stranger to the evolution of CX—he started AMC in 1995 with a mission to improve how businesses connect with their customers. With nearly three decades at the helm, his passion for innovation and solving complex integration challenges has cemented AMC as a trusted leader in the industry.
Anthony’s interests extend beyond technology; he’s an avid reader and outdoor enthusiast who enjoys exploring the intersections of business, technology, and human connection. During our conversation, he shared his thoughts on how artificial intelligence (AI) is shaping the future of CX and the key trends businesses should watch this year.
What are some of the biggest challenges on-premise telephony customers face when trying to bring in new AI technology?
Tony: Many customers are struggling to identify a path for AI in general. There are so many vendors with AI solutions and strategies, it’s hard to stay focused on what use cases would add the most value to your organization. With on-premise telephony and infrastructure in general, many customers are led to believe they need to fully replace that infrastructure to implement new AI technologies, and that just isn’t the case.
What missed opportunities do these integration challenges create for organizations?
Tony: Since organizations don’t know where to begin in their AI journey, they are told they need to replace their existing infrastructure to gain access to AI benefits. Productivity gains, increased employee retention, and better customer service can be accomplished even with on-premise infrastructure. AI requires substantial data and business logic, and customers don’t realize that premise infrastructure has the necessary building blocks to make the most of AI.
Why is AMC the go-to partner for these integrations, especially touching on Avaya and Salesforce Voice?
Tony: AMC is uniquely positioned to help customers. We have 30 years of experience helping customers implement contact center solutions across a wide range of telephony providers and business applications. Unlike a traditional consulting firm or system integrator, we have taken our experience and built a toolkit platform to help organizations reduce the time, cost, and complexity of integrations. The DaVinci Toolkit, makes it easy for businesses to implement use cases that map to the way they want to do business, while leveraging existing and new technologies.
We have been working with both Salesforce and AVAYA since their inception, helping customers worldwide implement use cases across both platforms. DaVinci has a rich toolset specifically built for both AVAVA and Salesforce Voice.
How does DaVinci’s toolkit help Avaya customers?
Tony: Our DaVinci Toolkit has pre-built integrations to AVAYA across all their offerings, Aura, IP Office, and Elite, that support a wide range of use cases. 3rd party call controls, event handling, and call attached data management allow DaVinci to manage both inbound and outbound interactions. Through our integration to AVAYA’s SBCE via SIPREC, we also can capture voice call media streams for real-time transcription capabilities to power AI-driven use cases, like Agent Assist, Autonomous agents, and AI insights.
How does DaVinci’s toolkit help organizations looking to move to Salesforce Salesforce Voice?
Tony: Salesforce Voice is an AI-driven interaction center that is powered by the real-time interaction data DaVinci generates through our integration with AVAYA and other CTI and CCaaS platforms. The DaVinci Toolkit supports a wide-range of use cases for Salesforce Voice, including agent assist, automatic call notes summaries, call controls, next best action, and omni-supervisor capabilities. Through our unique approach of combining our professional services and our DaVinci Toolkit we support organizations in defining and implementing their vision.
How does AMC’s service offerings help organizations create scalable solutions?
Tony: The DaVinci Toolkit has a robust IAM (Identity Access Management) and Profile Management capabilities, making it easy for organizations to manage and scale their implementations.
With our wide range of DaVinci Apps for major CCaaS and CRM systems, organizations can manage their infrastructure, cloud or on-premise, through one interface.
What are your goals for keeping AMC ahead of competitors in addressing gaps in the marketing with Avaya and Salesforce Voice?
Tony: AI has accelerated an already blazing pace of innovation and organizations are having a difficult time keeping up. Listening to our customers and guiding them with expertise and tools, helps AMC to stay relevant and helpful in an environment crowded with vendors promising results without the successes to back it up.
Specifically for AVAYA and Salesforce Voice, there are no vendors that bring these two platforms together like AMC. AVAYA has powerful solutions, but they are also highly complex. It’s only through our years of experience that gives us the confidence to fully leverage AVAYA and the integration to Salesforce Voice.
What messaging would you give to organizations afraid to move forward with integrations that involve AI?
Tony: I see many companies warning organizations not to jump on the AI bandwagon until you have clear KPI’s, use cases, and expected outcomes. Some even advise waiting until vendors define their offerings before starting your AI projects.
As a business you should start experimenting now and not wait until the vendor community figures out how to charge you for it.
Our platform gives you the toolkit and framework you need to add native AI to any application, with the lightest of wrappers so you can see for yourself what AI is capable of in your business. Some of the best benefits you’ll discover is through sandboxing for yourself.
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t figure out your KPI’s, use cases, and expected outcomes, but without knowing the possibilities first hand, you’re operating largely in dark.
What 3 AI solutions do you see dominating contact centers in 2025?
Tony: I actually see 4 major AI topics dominating 2025: generative AI-based IVA, autonomous agents, agent assistance, and real-time transcription.
With AI, IVA’s using generative AI are more engaging, dynamic, and capable, and the cost of building and deploying IVA has dropped significantly with AI.
AI-based agent assistance will help increase agent retention, augment training, and help agents accomplish more with less stress. Agent assistance will also magnify the strength of supervisor coaching through continuous AI-generated insights, with targeted recommendations for each employee.
Autonomous agents will really gain momentum in the later half of 2025, taking over responsibilities usually done by employees. Generative AI-based IVA deployments will speed up the adoption of autonomous agents, and we’ll begin to see whole workflows being handled by AI.
Real-time transcription is more of a foundational necessity to power AI use cases, but transcribing speech to text across your interactions fast enough to be useful is a critical criteria that many vendors are not able to accomplish today. AMC is investing heavily in identifying approaches and technologies that generate accurate transcriptions very quickly.
What are the biggest overall challenges you’ve seen organizations face when trying to integrate AI in their contact centers?
Tony: Over-analysis, leading to either paralysis or believing you have to tear everything out and start again. AI can be transformational even through an iterative approach.
