8x8 foresees AI as foundational layer for CPaaS

“AI will become deeply embedded in how organizations design and run their customer journeys. Our focus is on fusing agentic AI with communications workflows so interactions become more contextual, efficient, and meaningful across every channel,” says Sylvain Chaperon, General Manager, 8x8.

When it comes to Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS), 8x8 has been focused on ensuring its customers are well prepared to deal with the increasing innovation in the industry. As businesses focus on meeting customer demands, 8x8 believes that AI has to be part of the conversation.

In the Asia Pacific region, 8x8 has announced several integrations and partnerships throughout 2025 as the vendor looks to support its growing customer base in the region. Sylvain Chaperon, General Manager, 8x8 shares more about their plans for the region in 2026.

What can customers and partners expect from 8x8 in 2026?

In 2026, we expect the industry to shift decisively from communication tools to intelligent customer experience orchestration. Customers and partners can expect 8x8 to play a major role in that transition - focusing on how AI, intent, and context come together to create complete, seamless journeys. AI will become deeply embedded in how organisations design and run their customer journeys. Our focus is on fusing agentic AI with communications workflows so interactions become more contextual, efficient, and meaningful across every channel.

Asia is shifting rapidly toward messaging-first engagement, and WhatsApp is becoming the new digital storefront. We see the next wave moving toward full-service, AI-powered interactions inside messaging apps, becoming the new operating system for customer engagement.

While AI accelerates everything, voice plays a redefined role as the moment of truth channel. Customers can expect us to strengthen our AI-ready global voice capabilities to support high-stakes, emotion-rich moments where human connection and trust matter.

We expect conversational commerce to move into its “integrated era,” where businesses differentiate not by launching more channels, but by delivering frictionless transitions between AI interactions, messaging flows, and live experts. This fluidity will become a competitive advantage.

Rather than new connectivity standards, the focus is shifting to verified interactions, fraud mitigation, and secure identity flows as AI becomes more proactive in customer journeys. Market changes are accelerating this: financial services in the Philippines are moving away from SMS OTPs and there is a rising demand for verified sender identity across channels. We’re working closely with carriers on next-generation network APIs, including Silent Mobile Authentication, to enable seamless and compliant identity verification.

The lines between contact centre, unified communications, and CPaaS will continue to blur. Customers increasingly expect AI, messaging, voice, orchestration, and analytics to be delivered through a single, integrated platform rather than separate systems. Our roadmap reflects this convergence - bringing these capabilities together so organisations can innovate faster and manage engagement end-to-end with less complexity.

Our commitment to partners is clear: we’re building an ecosystem where they can innovate faster, differentiate more effectively, and deliver predictable, secure, outcome-driven experiences without piecing together multiple vendors or technologies.

Ultimately, customers can expect 8x8 to help them operate in a world where the focus is no longer on sending messages, but on delivering predictable, secure, personalised outcomes across the entire customer lifecycle.

What are the biggest opportunities they are seeing in the region 2026?

Asia-Pacific is entering a phase where customer engagement will be shaped by AI-driven, mobile-native journeys, not by traditional channel strategies. The biggest opportunity lies in enabling enterprises to deliver experiences where messaging, automation, identity, and live interactions blend seamlessly. Southeast Asia, in particular, is redefining mobile-first engagement. Consumers here move faster, adopt earlier, and expect more - especially within messaging ecosystems like WhatsApp, Zalo, LINE, and Viber. This creates enormous opportunities for businesses to leapfrog into fully integrated conversational commerce models.

Sectors such as fintech, retail, logistics, healthcare, and e-commerce will accelerate their shift toward verified, high-trust customer interactions, driven by rising fraud risks and the need to automate at scale without losing humanity or contextual understanding. Government digitalisation initiatives and broader 5G deployment are unlocking new possibilities - from richer interactive journeys to real-time identity flows and AI-assisted service delivery. Partners and enterprises that align early will gain a structural advantage.

The real opportunity is not in adding channels but in orchestrating end-to-end, outcome-led experiences that feel native to the customer and scalable for the enterprise. For 8x8 and our partners, the opportunity in 2026 is to help organisations deliver these cohesive, secure, culturally resonant experiences - and to do so at a speed and agility that matches the region’s momentum.

What will be the biggest hurdle to technology in 2026? Will the AI bubble burst?

The hurdle in 2026 won’t be an AI bubble bursting; it will be the growing gap between AI experimentation and real-world execution. Many organisations see the potential, but only a few are prepared to implement AI responsibly, consistently, and across diverse APAC markets. The region’s complexity - spanning regulatory differences, language diversity, cultural nuance, and inconsistent digital maturity - means AI cannot be deployed as a copy-paste strategy. It demands deep localisation, strong governance, and transparent design.

As AI agents take on more proactive roles, issues of identity, verification, and fraud prevention will intensify. Ensuring that interactions are secure, verified, and trustworthy will become a defining challenge for enterprises in 2026.

A second hurdle will be balancing automation with humanity. Customers still expect empathy, contextual understanding, and emotional intelligence - especially in high-value or high-stakes moments. AI will need to complement, not replace, these human elements.

Organisations that succeed will be those that approach AI with discipline: building secure identity layers, investing in ethical and transparent models, and ensuring interoperability across their ecosystems rather than locking themselves into fragmented solutions.

At 8x8, we see AI becoming a foundational layer of CPaaS, but only for enterprises that treat trust and execution as core competencies. The bubble won’t burst - but the divide between those who implement AI well and those who implement it poorly will become dramatically wider.