Why Being Named a Best of Enterprise Connect Finalist Signals the Maturity of AI in UC

The atmosphere leading up to Enterprise Connect 2026 feels fundamentally different from years past, and it’s not about the much-discussed move of the leading conference and exhibition for enterprise communications and customer experience (CX), from Orlando to Vegas. 

As usual, it’s about AI: The “GenAI fever” that characterized earlier sessions has cooled noticeably, replaced by what can only be described as a strategic focus on utility.  

And that’s a good thing. 

Today, LeapXpert was named, for the first time, a finalist for the prestigious Best of Enterprise Connect award in the Most Innovative Use of AI category.  

Sure, being named a Finalist for our new solution, LeapXpert Signals, is a proud moment for our team. But it is also a significant marker for the Unified Communications (UC) industry as a whole. It signals that the market has moved past “AI as a feature” and into the era of “AI as infrastructure.” 

The End of the “Checkbox” Era

For the last two years, the UC community focused on AI as a secondary feature. In 2024, the “Best of Enterprise Connect” was headlined by personal AI assistants like RingCentral’s RingSense, which excelled at individual productivity tasks like notetaking and summarization.  

By 2025, the focus shifted toward NICE’s CXone Mpower Orchestrator, which brought impressive AI orchestration into the contact center. Those were certainly award-worthy achievements for the time.  

But with the maturity of AI, today’s enterprise leaders have moved beyond these benchmarks. They are no longer satisfied by AI that simply “describes” a meeting or manages a siloed support channel. 

Instead, enterprise leaders demand AI that orchestrates business outcomes across the entire communication stack.  

Being named a finalist in 2026 underscores this shift: the industry now values AI that is deeply embedded in the flow of work—triggering decisions and ensuring compliance across every channel, including channels that only recently entered the enterprise stack, such as WhatsApp, iMessage, SMS and other consumer messaging channels. 

Signals & Workflows: Moving from Capturing to Acting

Conversations are not an island. Yet for too long, the insights trapped in mobile and third-party chat apps remained “dark data”—unstructured, unlogged, and disconnected from the rest of the business. 

A bundling of two of our new solutions – LeapXpert Signals and Communication Workflows, changes that paradigm. It represents the transition from “recording what was sent” to “acting on what is happening.” 

• The Signals Layer: We turn conversational events into structured data. Whether a conversation touches on a business topic, identifies a positive shift in client satisfaction, or crosses a risk threshold, the system identifies it instantly. 

• Communication Workflows These signals automatically trigger reviews, alerts, routing, or downstream processes. 

This is the bridge the industry has been seeking. It connects front-office communication directly with back-office systems like CRM and workflow orchestration engines, ensuring that conversations drive business logic rather than stalling it. 

High-Stakes AI: Governance by Design

In 2026, we’ll see a lot less AI experiments with sporadic tools deployed not in production, and without. This is especially true in high-stakes, governance-first environments, such as financial services, public sector, healthcare, and large enterprises. 

Recognition at Enterprise Connect validates our long-term belief that true AI maturity means baking in governance and supervision from the start. 

In these complex environments, accuracy and explainability matter as much as innovation. You cannot “bolt on” governance later. Our approach is governance-by-design, ensuring that every AI-driven insight is transparent and every automated action remains within enterprise control. 

This architecture enables a three-stage maturity model for managing communications: 

1. Continuous conversation analysis: Identifying emerging trends and topics across all channels in real-time. 
2. Strategic intervention: Triggering immediate context for the right stakeholder at the precise moment a pattern, such as a customer satisfaction trend, is detected. 
3. Automated actions: Closing the loop by updating CRM entries or routing high-priority requests to specialists automatically. 

By moving from passive observation to an automated set of actions, we enable organizations to stay ahead of the curve, reducing the critical gap between “intelligence gathered” and “value delivered.” 

A Milestone, Not the Finish Line

Being an Enterprise Connect finalist is a powerful validation of our vision. It proves that the market is ready for second-generation AI use cases – ones that are governed, cross-platform, and business-critical. 

Our solution is an early glimpse of where everyday communications are going next: a future where the tools we use to communicate are the same tools we use to get work done, safely and at scale. 

The Human in the Loop: Maxen

While Signals & Workflows operate at the company level to derive and orchestrate intelligence, the human element remains central. Maxen is our client intelligence application, focused on the employee level. It delivers topic-level insights and productivity analysis tailored to each user, drawing from their internal and external messaging and data sources. By surfacing only what’s relevant in the moment, Maxen empowers employees with real-time context, so signals turn into confident, informed action rather than noise. 

Experience the future of communication data intelligence firsthand.  

Come meet the LeapXpert team at Booth #841 at Enterprise Connect 2026 to see a live demo of LeapXpert Signals, our award-winning product for Microsoft Teams, and other LeapXpert communication governance and productivity solutions.