The Best Bits From Cavell Enable December 2025

*This article is sponsored by Imagicle.

As you walk into any Cavell event, you’re greeted with the friendly faces of the event team who recognise you and have your badge (and directions to coffee) ready. This simple pleasure is one of the major wins this event has over larger events in our industry.

You walk through to the exhibition floors and people say hi and tap you on the shoulder. It’s a far more intimate atmosphere than something in the Excel Centre or abroad with thousands and thousands of people. When you settle down for Dom Black’s opening talk and Patrick Watson’s latest research about the cloud telephony (and extended) markets, you feel right where you’re supposed to be.

This edition’s write up is made possible by the good folks at Imagicle. Please take a moment to review their latest announcements below:

Imagicle Advertisement

Today, Customer Experience is shaped by key trends with AI and automation at the core, and rising customer expectations setting the pace. Customers not only demand faster responses but also seamless, consistent interactions across multiple channels, and the ability to resolve simple issues on their own. That’s why omnichannel support is no longer optional, it’s essential.

Modern Contact Center and Businesses must deliver a truly omnichannel experience that handles everything, from the simplest queries to the most complex issues, ensuring customers receive fast, efficient, and consistent service at every touchpoint.

This is where Imagicle comes in, offering AI-powered solutions for Calling and Contact Centers that enable a truly unified omnichannel experience. The result is not only an enhanced customer journey, but also empowered teams who can collaborate more effectively, resolve issues faster, and deliver consistent, high-quality service every time.

With Imagicle, organizations can:

Simplify daily workflows with Attendant Console enabling smooth call handling and Agent Omnichannel Console designed for managing both voice and digital interactions with customers through email, SMS, WhatsApp, and more all from one place.
Deliver 24/7 support with the AI Virtual Receptionist to automate the front desk —answering and routing calls—and AI Virtual Agents to manage personalized, advanced workflows across voice and digital channels (WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, SMS, email, and more) integrated with CRM, ERP, HR, and other business systems.
Gain real-time visibility with supervisor tools that monitor agent performance, manage queues, and track conversations—while ensuring compliance through Call Recording and benefiting from AI Voice Analytics for sentiment analysis and transcriptions.

But it doesn’t stop here—everything is powered by the Imagicle UCX Platform, a complete suite of applications designed that also include Call Analytics, Digital Fax to empower your communications and elevate the calling platform experience.

All of this comes with full support for cloud, on-prem, and hybrid deployment, and seamless integration with Webex Calling MT, DI, Cisco UCM, and Microsoft Teams—even in mixed calling environments.

To learn more about Imagicle, visit the website and book a meeting with an expert for a dedicated walk-through of the best solution for your customer service.

Key highlights and learning from Cavell Enable 2025

1 – How important voice is in the enablement marketplace

With collaboration marketplaces like Operator Connect (Microsoft) and Cloud Connect (Cisco) prominent routes to market for many resellers and managed service providers, it might come as a surprise that voice still plays a leading role.

Taimoor Husain, Global M365 Strategy Lead at Microsoft, emphasised we’re no longer talking about dial tone like everybody used to. Today, it’s more about how we connect.

Sonu Arora, Director of Product Development at Cisco, agreed that voice is as strong a component as ever. In fact, Cisco’s acquired BroadWorks install base remains the biggest element of its calling portfolio — and has grown around 7% year on year. Even Cisco’s on-premises Unified Call Manager product still has 33 million users.

Sonu stressed the importance of the Cloud Connect program. Partners need help with customer journey requirements and flexibility with how customers are consuming telephony. “They’re not always looking at direct connections. It’s inevitable that telephony is going to be consumed through an aggregated marketplace”.

This type of program allows a much closer relationship between platform and partner and strengthens the value add services play for customers and ecosystems — including contact center.

There do remain challenges when it comes to voice enablement, however:

Commercials
Operational requirements
Too much choice
Limited differentiation

Suggested solutions to these challenges included “try before you buy” options and focusing on not trying to make voice sexy again. To avoid a race to the bottom, we must instead focus on good marketing.

2 – Microsoft remains all-in on AI (even with voice)

Continuing the voice theme (who knew we’d still be talking about voice come the end of 2025?), Tamioor presented what’s new in Microsoft Teams, following the recent Ignite announcements.

While he briefly flashed up a slide of new features, it was interesting the one he zeroed in on was Audio Recap for Teams meetings.

Instead of having to read through meeting summaries for all the meetings you don’t attend, you can get a podcast-esq meeting by meeting catch up for when you’re on the move.

Other notable feature announcements include:

Unified Microsoft 365 Copilot experience in Teams
Teams Mode for Microsoft 365 Copilot (Public Preview)
Enhanced Channel Agents
Smarter external collaboration (guest chat via email, external Loop/file sharing, trust indicators)
Pop-out navigation for core Teams areas
Searchable Teams settings
Persistent collaborative spaces (pages in chats/channels)
Collaborative notes in 1:1 and group chats
Forwarded-message traceability

Meetings, Webinars & Events

Enhanced Facilitator Agent
Meeting recap templates (Speaker Summary, Executive Summary, custom templates)
Branded reactions (Private Preview)
Improved screen/window sharing on Mac
Town Hall upgrades
Immersive event enhancements (VR, accessibility improvements)

Teams Phone & Calling

Copilot-powered post-call summaries
Shared call-line pickup on mobile
Set Teams Mobile as default calling app on iPhone
Third-party ISV compliance recording support in call queues

3 – What buyers favor isn’t price (or AI)

A culmination of two sessions —one bolstered by Cavell’s own in-house research and another with first-hand insight from customers from enterprises representing law, healthcare, and aviation industries — drew the conclusion that it’s value rather than price they’re after.

In fact, many considerations came above price:

Reliability and performance
Ease of use / familiarity of platform
Ease of integration

In enterprise markets, we also introduce other buying criteria, like:

Complexity in difficult markets (e.g. providing voice in India, China, Kuwait, Ukraine, etc.)
Lengthy, large-scale pilots (BAE Systems ran a 3,500-user pilot)
Contact center routing (Royal Marsden NHS Foundation has 1,600 users)
Migration help and simplicity (admins and architects want to deal with telephony as a commodity rather than a complex service)

So, what about AI? Real-world examples suggest the average enterprise isn’t adopting AI in a widespread capacity.

In fact, the reported extent of AI usage was limited to use cases like call routing (self-service IVRs) and help with productivity tools like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

A similar sentiment was shared for mobile usage of voice services. Despite the growth of Teams Phone Mobile in recent years, enterprises report sometimes they don’t need or can’t use the extra benefits Teams Phone Mobile brings. “We don’t necessarily want more than what we already have — mostly due to other people’s data.”

About Cavell Enable

Cavell Enable is a one-day event focused on the rapidly evolving enablement markets within the top collaboration platforms. With a growing number of PSTN telephony users now being onboarded via specialised marketplaces like Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex and Zoom, service providers and operators face a new set of challenges as they transition from open market dynamics to these new platform-driven environments.

Cavell Enable provides an unparalleled opportunity to explore these challenges in detail, bringing together the world’s leading platform vendors, telcos and service providers.

About Imagicle

Imagicle is a Zucchetti Group company (founded 2010) with 130+ people across 7 offices in Italy, France, the United States, and the Middle East. Imagicle builds simple, secure AI and UC apps that make calling and contact centres easier for enterprises. The Imagicle UCX Platform unifies AI, unified communications (UC), digital channels, and collaboration to enhance cloud platforms and modernize on-prem environments across four pillars: welcoming services, automation, compliance, analytics. Find out more at https://www.imagicle.com/en/

Additional menu