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.
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.