Every organization I talk to wants to be “AI-ready,” but few want to discuss what that entails. It’s rarely a new model or agent. More often, it’s the unglamorous work of ripping out a decade’s worth of infrastructure debt so the network can deliver the bandwidth, consistency and data that artificial intelligence depends on.
Every vendor event has a center of gravity, and at theCUBE Research’s AI ROI in Contact Center Summit, it wasn’t a product. It was a metric this industry is finally ready to abandon. I co-hosted the summit recently with Bob Laliberte (pictured, left), principal analyst at theCUBE Research, and spoke with executives from Cisco Systems Inc., Five9 Inc., Zoom Communications Inc., Talkdesk Inc., and Converged Technology Professionals, an implementation partner.
In Denver this week, Cisco Systems Inc. and its Splunk unit made a bet that the scarcest resource in the agentic enterprise isn’t intelligence or graphics processing units — it’s trust. The Splunk .conf 2026 show themes and keynotes focused less on dashboards, widgets and features and more on who or what is authorized to act in the agentic era. Every vendor conference typically has a center of gravity that serves as a unifying theme.
For years, retail banking strategy followed a predictable script: Shift routine transactions to digital channels, downsize physical footprints and route customer service inquiries to centralized contact centers. The underlying assumption was that physical branches were dying embers of a bygone era. Yet industry data tells a radically different story. According to the 2026 Future of Branch Banking Report by the Digital Banking Report, 71% of financial institutions consider branches mission-critical or very important to long-term growth.
The next phase of artificial intelligence in legal technology will not be defined by a better chatbot or a faster document-summarization tool. It will be defined by whether AI systems can take responsibility for real work that unfolds over days or weeks, spans multiple systems and communication channels, and returns control to an attorney at the moments when human judgment matters most.