UC has become the backbone of modern enterprise collaboration, but managing these dynamic environments at scale is no small feat.
As organizations continue to adopt hybrid work models and integrate new technologies, the complexity of UC service management grows exponentially.
IT leaders are now tasked with not only ensuring seamless communication but also delivering operational efficiency, security, and a consistently high-quality user experience.
The UC landscape in 2025 is shaped by rapid advancements in automation, AI, and the move toward unified management platforms.
These shifts are driving both unprecedented opportunities and new challenges, from managing multi-vendor environments to ensuring compliance and anticipating user needs before issues arise.
The pressure is on for service providers and enterprise IT teams to adapt, innovate, and future-proof their UC strategies.
For our latest UC Round Table topic, “UC Service Management,” we wanted to see what exactly service providers were facing and so spoke with experts and executives from NUWAVE, IR, GoTo; Kurmi, VOSS and AudioCodes about the trends reshaping UC service management, the most common blind spots, the role of automation and AI, and what the future holds for this critical area of enterprise IT.
What are the major trends impacting UC service management in 2025?
Mark Bunnell, Chief Operations Officer and Co-Founder of NUWAVE Communications
Bunnell emphasizes that the industry is undergoing a fundamental shift away from fragmented point solutions toward comprehensive platforms that provide unified visibility and control across the entire UC ecosystem.
“The most significant trend is the industry’s shift away from fragmented point solutions toward comprehensive platforms. Organizations are no longer satisfied with single solutions that manage just one aspect of their communications ecosystem.
“What NUWAVE is seeing is that regardless of where customers are in their UC journey – whether implementing OEM licensing, migrating from legacy systems, expanding global communications, managing multiple UC platforms, or enhancing security and compliance – they need a single pane of glass to manage their entire UC lifecycle.
“This holistic approach through a unified platform is replacing the traditional model where different vendors handle different parts of the UC lifecycle, creating unnecessary complexity and inefficiency. Other key trends include a heightened focus on security compliance frameworks and the push for operational efficiency through intelligent automation that doesn’t require specialized expertise to implement.”
Michael Tomkins, CTO at IR
Tomkins highlights that rising customer expectations are driving significant changes in the UC service management space, with demands for better user experiences, innovative solutions, and future-proofed environments.
“We’re seeing a lot of shifts in the space, all driven by the overarching theme of customer expectation. Customers today expect more from their service providers, it’s not enough to just deliver stability. They want better user experiences, ensuring communication is seamless and intuitive across every touchpoint.
“They want innovative solutions, like Agentic AI and conversational interfaces, where chatbots and voice assistants help manage UC environments, troubleshoot issues, and streamline support. And they want help future-proofing their UC environment, like figuring out the right cloud configuration for their organisation. Service providers need access to deeper insight and real-time intelligence to deliver meaningful outcomes at scale.”
Damon Covey, General Manager of UCC at GoTo
Covey notes that AI integration, UCaaS adoption, and the push for more proactive support capabilities are transforming how organizations approach UC service management.
“UC service management is undergoing a major shift in 2025, largely driven by the integration of AI and automation to streamline operations, improve service quality, and enhance user experiences. The growing adoption of UCaaS platforms reflects a broader move toward cloud-based, scalable communication solutions that support hybrid and remote workforces.
“Organizations are focusing on smarter, more proactive customer support features such as AI-powered sentiment analysis along with suggestions on how best to address these issues beforehand, preventing further customer dissatisfaction and escalation.
“Additionally, there’s a rising emphasis on quality management, with AI being used to analyze, score, and optimize user interactions based on a set of predetermined quality metrics. As UC becomes more embedded into critical business operations, service management is evolving from reactive troubleshooting to predictive, data-driven assurance.”
Pascal Moindrot, Kurmi Co-founder & COO
Moindrot identifies three dominant trends: continued cloud migration, multi-vendor management challenges, and the growing importance of advanced automation to support increasingly complex UC environments.
“We’re seeing three dominant trends in UC service management right now: continued cloud migration, multi-vendor management, and advanced automation. Around 50% of organizations have yet to migrate to cloud comms systems like Webex Calling, Microsoft Teams and Zoom. This shift requires tools that can support hybrid environments during the transition. At the same time, enterprises are, almost as a rule, using multiple vendors to meet diverse business needs, which introduces considerable complexity.
“To manage this effectively, IT teams need a centralized platform that provides control and security across their entire UC and CC ecosystem, which, in addition to core phone systems, includes compliance recording, e911, SBCs, and more. Finally, automation is no longer optional—it’s a mandate for large enterprises.
“UC and CC admins need workflow automation tools, intelligent provisioning, bulk change management, and AI APIs to reduce manual tasks and minimize errors. These trends are driving a new era of UC service management that is more like total systems management for UC/CC technologies. This is more comprehensive, more scalable, more secure, and far more efficient.”
Mike Frayne, CEO, VOSS Solutions
Frayne observes that the transition from legacy systems to cloud providers, declining traditional voice services, and AI adoption are fundamentally reshaping UC service management priorities.
“The shift from legacy on-prem UC suppliers to modern cloud providers, the decline of traditional voice services, and the rise of AI are fundamentally transforming both what needs to be managed and how it’s managed. As a result, UC service management is being reshaped by several powerful, converging forces. AI is driving smarter operations, enabling predictive insights, automated resolution, and proactive service optimization.
“Hybrid work remains dominant, requiring more flexible, resilient, and user-centric communication tools. New, disruptive technologies are transforming user expectations and workflows. Meanwhile, macroeconomic pressures are forcing enterprises to scrutinize costs and prove ROI across all IT investments.
“This is driving demand for consolidated platforms that reduce complexity, improve visibility, and automate manual effort. Regulatory and security concerns are also intensifying, especially as UC environments expand across geographies and devices. Enterprises need service management strategies that are cloud centric, agile, cost-effective, and future-proof.”
Roy Wizeman, Director of UCaaS Platform & Solutions at AudioCodes
Wizeman identifies three key trends transforming UC service management: AI-driven insights and personalization, smarter automation for operational efficiency, and heightened security focus as organizations transition to cloud-based services.
“We see three key trends. Firstly, the impact of AI and Agentic AI, to leverage AI-based insights to gain deeper insights into UC services to improve performance and issue resolution as well as AI-driven enhancements to provide a more personalized and engaging user experience.
“Secondly, we see smarter automation of onboarding and management processes to streamline operations and reduce admin.
“Thirdly, as organisations transition to cloud-based UC services for greater flexibility and scalability, we see an increasing focus on security and compliance to protect UC services from potential threats.”
What are the most common blind spots organizations face when managing UC services at scale?
Mark Bunnell, Chief Operations Officer and Co-Founder of NUWAVE Communications
Bunnell points to migration planning and the management of hybrid environments as critical blind spots that can lead to unexpected costs, operational disruption, and security vulnerabilities.
“Migration planning stands out as one of the most critical blind spots in UC service management. Organizations frequently focus on the destination platform without adequately addressing the journey from their current state, leading to prolonged transitions and operational disruption. This shortsightedness often results in unexpected costs, extended timelines, and frustration for both IT teams and end users.
“Another significant blind spot is underestimating the complexity of managing hybrid environments at scale. Through mergers and acquisitions, companies inherit diverse UC ecosystems – Microsoft Teams in one division, Zoom in another, and legacy on-premises systems elsewhere.
“Without a unified management approach, these fragmented environments create operational silos, inconsistent user experiences, and significant overhead costs. Security becomes exponentially more challenging across these multi-platform environments.
“Organizations implement robust security for their primary platforms but often leave gaps in others, creating inconsistent protection. Most concerning is the lack of visibility across platforms – you can’t secure what you can’t see. This is where a comprehensive management platform becomes essential, providing both the visibility and centralized controls needed to maintain regulatory and compliance standards consistently across the entire UC ecosystem.
“For example, NUWAVE has implemented ISO 27001, 27017, 27018, 27701, and 42001 to meet global industry security standards when using NUWAVE’s iPILOT Multi-UC Platform.”
Michael Tomkins, CTO at IR
Tomkins highlights that many organizations lack complete visibility across their UC environments, creating challenges for effective service management and issue resolution.
“Many providers aren’t getting the full picture – they either think their management tools are more comprehensive than they really are, or they know they have blind spots and try to patch them with multiple tools or through manual processes. Neither of these scenarios are sustainable when you’re managing multiple, complex environments.
“The visibility gaps add up fast and teams end up firefighting or finger pointing instead of fixing the issue. Unified insight across vendors, platforms, networks, devices and all the components of an ecosystem is critical.”
Damon Covey, General Manager of UCC at GoTo
Covey identifies inadequate visibility into end-user experiences, inconsistent service monitoring across communication channels, and fragmented quality management as key blind spots for organizations managing UC at scale.
“A key blind spot is the lack of real-time visibility into end-user experiences, especially in remote and hybrid environments where variables like local networks and hardware vary widely. Another challenge is inconsistent service monitoring across communication channels—voice, video, messaging—leading to fragmented incident response. Many organizations also underestimate the complexity of managing UC integrations with other business applications and systems.
“This can result in reactive troubleshooting and missed opportunities for optimization. Additionally, without centralized quality management tools, teams may struggle to capture and act on data that could reveal systemic performance or user satisfaction issues.”
Pascal Moindrot, Kurmi Co-founder & COO
Moindrot points to security requirements, expertise shortages, and multi-vendor management as the top three blind spots that can significantly impact UC service management effectiveness.
“The top 3 common blind spots we see when organizations manage thousands of users across their UC and CC systems are 1. Underestimating the challenges of security requirements; 2. understaffing of expertise on mission-critical comms systems; and 3. The challenges of managing many vendors, often with migration as an exacerbating factor.
“Security considerations–who has access to data, what rules must be enforced by country, audit, industry compliances, etc.–are usually non-negotiable, therefore key. Expertise is required to provision systems, and backup expertise is required, or time zone expertise.
“Often this becomes a crucial issue during a downsizing or reorganization when skills are lost. Multiple vendors require more expertise but also create inter-vendor dependencies and other requirements for structured interactions that get harder as more vendors are added or when a migration occurs.”
Mike Frayne, CEO, VOSS Solutions
Frayne emphasizes that organizations often underestimate the complexity of UC management at scale, particularly regarding visibility across diverse environments and the limitations of manual processes.
“Organizations often underestimate the complexity of managing UC, at scale. A key blind spot is the lack of visibility across multi-vendor, multi-tenant, hybrid environments, which leads to delayed issue resolution, user frustration, productivity loss, and unnecessary spending.
“Many still rely on manual processes or simple vendor supplied admin tools, which can’t keep pace with growing complexity and the demands of dispersed teams. This creates bottlenecks, slows down response times, and contributes to spiraling operational costs.
“Another challenge is not capturing or analyzing data effectively, which limits the ability to identify trends or prevent incidents before they escalate. Without integrated automation, observability, and actionable analytics, enterprises struggle to manage UC services at scale.”
Roy Wizeman, Director of UCaaS Platform & Solutions at AudioCodes
Wizeman focuses on the challenges of troubleshooting in complex environments, maintaining regulatory compliance across diverse networks, and ensuring robust disaster recovery as critical blind spots in UC service management.
“The complexity of large-scale UC environments can result in several challenges for an organization. Downtime and service disruption can hinder workplace productivity. Troubleshooting the exact cause of any service disruption, for example jitter or packet loss, can be very difficult as organisations may lack full visibility across all of the elements that make up their UC service (PSTN, carrier, PBX, UC applications etc).
“For multi-national organizations, maintaining regulatory compliance (emergency, GDPR, PCI etc) across a diverse and complex network is another challenge that has to be considered. Also, it is critical that organizations have a robust disaster recovery plan to ensure high availability, geo-redundancy, back-up and restore, to maintain their UC service continuity.”
What role should automation and AI play in UC service assurance and incident management?
Mark Bunnell, Chief Operations Officer and Co-Founder of NUWAVE Communications
Bunnell advocates for an approach to AI and automation that prioritizes security and adaptability, allowing organizations to implement these technologies according to their specific needs and risk tolerance.
“Automation and AI must be implemented with security and versatility as the primary considerations. Every organization has different security requirements and risk tolerances, meaning AI implementations cannot follow a one-size-fits-all approach. The most effective strategy is providing customers with granular control, enabling them to determine exactly where AI assists their UC operations and where traditional human oversight remains.
“Some organizations might embrace full conversational provisioning for efficiency, while others may restrict AI to analytics while keeping all operational changes under manual control. The key is implementing these technologies within a secure framework that maintains data sovereignty and ensures AI systems can’t compromise communications integrity.
“As NUWAVE continues to develop these capabilities, we focus on creating secure partitions between AI functionality and critical infrastructure, allowing customers to adopt at their own pace without compromising on security or operational reliability.”
Michael Tomkins, CTO at IR
Tomkins sees automation and AI as essential for handling the heavy lifting in UC service management, improving accuracy and speed while freeing up human resources for more strategic initiatives.
“Automation and AI should be doing the heavy lifting, improving accuracy, consistency and speed, and making connections that humans might miss. Agentic AI is set to transform IT service management by autonomously resolving incidents and automating service request workflows. That means less noise, faster problem resolution, and keeping clients and customers connected without disruption.
“It also frees up your people to focus on bigger challenges and more strategic initiatives, without compromising quality of service.”
Damon Covey, General Manager of UCC at GoTo
Covey views AI and automation as foundational components for modern UC service management, enabling more effective anomaly detection, incident response, and predictive analytics.
“Automation and AI are foundational to modern UC service assurance and incident management. AI-powered quality management tools can continuously analyze vast amounts of data to detect anomalies, flag potential issues, and suggest resolutions before they affect end users. This shift toward predictive analytics reduces the burden on IT teams and minimizes downtime.
“Automation also enables consistent, rapid responses to common incidents—streamlining workflows, ticketing, and escalation processes. By integrating AI into service management, organizations can achieve a higher degree of precision in identifying root causes, prioritizing incidents based on impact, and enhancing overall service reliability.
“Importantly, AI doesn’t replace human oversight but augments it, allowing teams to focus on strategic improvements rather than repetitive troubleshooting.”
Pascal Moindrot, Kurmi Co-founder & COO
Moindrot describes automation and AI as complementary forces in service assurance, with automation providing precision in execution and AI offering valuable insights for decision-making during incidents.
“Automation and AI are two sides of the same coin (they go together nicely) for service assurance when incidents occur. It is key to automate the precise workflows to use in response to an outage or another service-affecting incident. At the same time, AI is an invaluable tool to assess the totality of data points before issuing instructions – still often requiring human validation – to address an incident.
“Automated workflows have the value of 100% accuracy in the actions to be taken – a very high bar to achieve and higher than is possible using AI for automation. However, AI is very nicely suited to parsing large amounts of disparate information and arriving at actionable conclusions.”
Mike Frayne, CEO, VOSS Solutions
Frayne positions automation as foundational for effective UC service assurance, with AI enhancing this foundation by adding intelligence, adaptability, and predictive capabilities to the process.
“Automation is foundational for effective UC service assurance. It replaces time-consuming, manual tasks with consistent, proven, rule-based processes – ensuring accuracy in provisioning, configuration, policy enforcement, and user lifecycle management. In incident management, automation enables rapid detection and remediation of known issues, reducing human error and improving mean time to resolution (MTTR).
“It also supports proactive monitoring and scheduled maintenance, helping IT teams maintain service quality at scale while focusing on strategic priorities. AI enhances automation by bringing intelligence and adaptability into the process. It analyzes large volumes of UC telemetry data in real time, detects anomalies, allows effective trend tracking, identifies root causes, and prioritizes incidents based on impact. AI adds predictive capabilities, helping prevent outages before they occur, and it also powers smart assistants, streamlining IT operations and improving user experience.
“Together, automation and AI transform UC service management from reactive firefighting into proactive, intelligent service assurance.”
Roy Wizeman, Director of UCaaS Platform & Solutions at AudioCodes
Wizeman emphasizes the transformative potential of AI and automation for UC service management, highlighting their role in proactive issue prevention, efficient incident resolution, and overall cost reduction.
“A massive role! AI can enhance proactive management and predictive maintenance though data analysis to help predict potential issues before they escalate, improving reliability and minimizing downtime.
“As well as automating repetitive tasks such as incident logging, categorization and resolving common queries, AI agents and tools can swiftly prioritize incidents, assign them to the right person to resolve the issue, suggest solutions and provide real-time updates to users. Together, AI and automation help speed up issue resolution and reduce UC service maintenance costs.”
Looking ahead, what do you see as the next frontier or biggest innovation area in UC service management?
Mark Bunnell, Chief Operations Officer and Co-Founder of NUWAVE Communications
Bunnell envisions the future of UC management as centered on adaptive platforms that accommodate different organizational preferences and adoption rates for new technologies while delivering consistent outcomes.
“The most significant innovation will be creating UC management platforms that truly adapt to how organizations want to work, rather than forcing them into predetermined workflows. The platforms that succeed will be those that combine advanced capabilities while still respecting that different organizations will adopt at different rates.
“Some will embrace full AI administration, while others will prefer traditional approaches. NUWAVE is currently working with these systems, and our goal is to offer this flexibility while still delivering consistent outcomes. This means developing platforms where conversational AI, traditional dashboards, and automation tools coexist seamlessly, allowing customers to use whatever combination best suits their operational model.
“The future isn’t about forcing everyone down a single technology path – it’s about creating adaptive platforms that deliver the same high-quality results whether a customer is ready for full AI implementation or prefers a more measured approach to innovation in their communications infrastructure.”
Michael Tomkins, CTO at IR
Tomkins believes predictive intelligence represents the next major evolution in UC service management, with AI capabilities expanding to cover security, compliance, and deeper integration with broader digital experience platforms.
“The next big leap is predictive intelligence – not just reacting to issues but preventing them altogether. The integration of AI into almost every aspect of UC service management will be at the heart of this evolution. As models get more sophisticated, we’ll see AI used to detect suspicious activity, identify potential threats, and ensure compliance, all in real time.
“Beyond that, we’ll see UC management fully integrated into digital experience platforms, blending user satisfaction, performance metrics, and business outcomes into one view. The future as we see it isn’t just about tech – it’s about enabling better, smarter ways for people to work, communicate and connect.”
Damon Covey, General Manager of UCC at GoTo
Covey anticipates that hyper-personalized, AI-driven support and improved cross-platform interoperability will define the next frontier in UC service management innovation.
“The next frontier in UC service management lies in hyper-personalized, AI-driven support that anticipates user needs in real time. Innovations will focus on embedding AI more deeply into the UC ecosystem – not only to resolve technical issues but also to adapt services based on individual user behavior and preferences.
“Additionally, cross-platform interoperability and unified data insights across collaboration tools will become a competitive differentiator, enabling teams to integrate with the solutions they are already using to capture customer data, feedback, and information automatically without the need for wasteful time spent analyzing multiple different systems.
“As UCaaS continues to evolve, the ability to combine performance analytics, automated workflows, and user-centric design will define the most innovative service management solutions.”
Pascal Moindrot, Kurmi Co-founder & COO
Moindrot sees intelligent, policy-driven automation and deeper integration with ITSM platforms as the key innovations that will transform UC service management in the coming years.
“The next frontier in UC service management is intelligent, policy-driven automation that adapts in real time and allows organizations to maintain control over their entire UC estate–all the systems that work in concert to deliver comms services. As UC environments grow more complex—with hybrid deployments, multiple vendors, and evolving user needs—IT teams need smarter tools that go beyond static workflows.
“The biggest innovation will be systems that can make context-aware decisions, dynamically apply policies, and automatically resolve (or suggest resolutions) to issues. A second huge innovation is about how UC Service Management systems are implicated.
“Previously, and still for many organizations, the interface was a custom application in a web interface. This is moving quickly towards deeper integration with ITSM platforms and identity management systems to create a truly unified, end-to-end service management experience where the interface is the much more broadly used ITSM or Identity system.
“The future is about proactive, adaptive UC management that keeps pace with the business—not just reacting to change but anticipating it.”
Mike Frayne, CEO, VOSS Solutions
Frayne predicts that the future of UC service management will focus on delivering hyper-personalized, AI-driven experiences through real-time service optimization that prioritizes user outcomes over infrastructure management.
“I believe that the next stage for UC service management is all about delivering hyper-personalized, AI-driven experiences through predictive, real-time service optimization. As environments grow more complex, the focus is shifting from simply managing infrastructure to intelligently orchestrating user outcomes – experience, productivity, and business impact.
“We are working closely with our customers to support this evolution. By combining advanced automation, real-time observability, and AI-powered insights, we enable customers to move from reactive support to intelligent, predictive UC management that delivers real value.”
Roy Wizeman, Director of UCaaS Platform & Solutions at AudioCodes
Wizeman focuses on Agentic AI as the transformational force for UC service management, enabling autonomous issue resolution, personalized experiences, and optimized costs across complex environments.
“The emergence of Agentic AI will be transformational for UC service management. Unlike conventional AI, Agentic AI is autonomous, proactive, and self-improving. It can resolve incidents intelligently, learn from interactions and prevent issues before they happen.
“This will help further improve the proactive management and predictive maintenance of UC services through sophisticated data analysis and anomaly detection, allowing organizations to rapidly predict and address potential issues before they escalate. We will also see Organization AI-based lifecycle management in onboarding/offboarding employees and visitors, with AI tools offering the ability to tailor the onboarding experience to an individual’s role, experiences and preferences, building a sense of connection and belonging.
“AI will also impact UC service costs through AI-based least-cost routing. AI will help optimize call costs in multi-vendor and multi-regional environments by evaluating call costs in real-time and selecting the least-cost routing option.”
This post originally appeared on Service Management - Enterprise - Channel News - UC Today.