Tech that had been growing in momentum for years accelerated in 2021. Service providers were faced with an onslaught of demands for Unified Communications solutions. 5G started entering the mainstream. Businesses raced to reshape how they connect with employees and customers.

Behind what touched us on our screens and devices was the rapid evolution of deep tech. 

AI’s Natural Language Processing went mainstream with Conversational Intelligence for business

“By 2025, 75% of conversations at work will be recorded and analyzed, enabling the discovery of added organizational value or risk.” - Gartner

As Unified Call Recording, chatbots and voice enabled interactions grew rapidly, so did the technologies that make use of voice - turning it into a powerful source of data. Building on Natural Language Processing-enabled blocks, 2021 ushered in the rising capability in analysis of conversational data - delivered as a service by service providers to business and government for unlimited use cases. 

Early adopters in this NLP capability have seen an average increase in ROI by 383% (via IBM).

“Natural language processing is the starting point for creating AI-enriched data sets from conversational data - voice, video and chat. For many, this starts with reviewing a transcription but that is just the start. Once converted to data; insights, alerts, notifications and more can be delivered in real-time to enterprises. And for service providers this becomes the engine to create a new source of value for both them and their customers.” - Andy Lark, Chief Customer Officer, Dubber.

Custom business process automations are now powered by low code solutions

“By 2025, 70% of new applications developed by organizations will use low-code or no-code technologies, up from less than 25% in 2020.” - Gartner

Custom automations became business-standard. It’s now no longer an activity that requires developers; instead created within organisations using low code tools. Organisations are orchestrating automation across data silos, without the technical requirements of the past - made possible via solutions with data portability like Dubber.

“The ability to quickly create workflows and automate business activity is a powerful way for service providers and businesses to do more from voice interactions. A call between a sales rep and a customer can automatically trigger manager involvement when containing keywords such as cancel, renew, or unhappy. Data in a call containing delivery information can route to delivery systems. For service providers solution teams this creates a powerful new way to differentiate and deliver new value from every network element. They can shift from simply delivering connections to delivering value from the content on the network.” - Nick Atkin, Head Solutions Architect, Dubber.

Reinvention through cloud-native infrastructure and services 

“85% of organizations will embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025” - Gartner

As digital transformation accelerated across all businesses, service providers had to keep pace by offering cloud-native infrastructure and services, and reinventing legacy services with this design paradigm.

“The days of legacy call recording based on hardware, ever increasing costs and proprietary or siloed data are over. Leading service providers embraced unified call recording as a service delivered from their network just as any other service would be. Critically, it's now a service running across all their networks and opening the door to unlocking the potential of data based on conversations at scale. Whether for compliance, revenue, people or customer intelligence - or just answering the need to improve day-to-day productivity - unified call recording has become a key building block to improving differentiation, retention and revenue for service providers globally.” - Steve Wilson, Chief Technology Officer, Dubber.

This enables a remote workforce, with composable services on a secure and compliant foundation, and infinite room to scale as businesses scale - enabled and managed by service providers.

The end of data and application silos

“With the increased adoption of SaaS applications and services, organizations seek a solution to create connectivity not only between the apps and services, but to enable seamless interoperability with legacy systems, databases, partners, and more.” - Mulesoft

When applications need more manual configuration to extract and transform data, to make it work with other systems, the value of the application and the data itself diminishes, thanks to resourcing overheads. 

This is why highly interoperable platforms, like Dubber, are more fiscally responsible and information efficient. Available across fixed-line, mobile, and UC connections, with an accessible API, Dubber does cross-platform call recording and analysis as a network-native service, without missing connections or requiring manual data transformations. 

2022 will see these and other trends accelerate as new ways of working, communicating and digital transformation continue to evolve.