21/07/2026
Most vendors sell you a migration and hope the outcome shows up eventually.
is trying something different: sell the outcome first, let the infrastructure stay wherever it already lives.
I sat down with Heather Richards (Verint's Global VP, GTM Strategy) to unpack why that's a bigger bet than it sounds. A few things that stuck with me:
→ "Infrastructure is just plumbing." Verint will bolt its IVA onto anybody's CCaaS. No forced migration.
→ The real product isn't a single AI agent - it's a model-agnostic workbench their own engineers use to prototype bots before shipping them.
→ Change the unit of sale from "cloud migration" to "single automated workflow," and the success metric changes too - from "did the telephony move" to "dollars saved," which is a much easier number for a buyer to defend upward.
→ Voice is the tell: speech-to-speech IVAs look great in a demo, but Richards was candid that production deployments are still rare - because collapsing the pipeline also collapses your ability to control what the model does mid-conversation.
The through-line for her whole portfolio turns out to be knowledge management — the unglamorous layer that determines whether any of this AI actually knows what it's talking about.
Full piece: https://cstu.io/d5cb92/
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