 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by 5ix9ine. Hello from Orlando, Florida, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. theCUBE has been here at Enterprise Connect 2019 in the booth of our gracious host 5ix9ine for the last three days. Stu, this event is our first time being live here on theCUBE. Your first time here, mine as well, individually, massive event that has transformed a lot. 6,500 attendees, their biggest ever. Well, 140 vendors in this expo hall. What an incredible week. We've had the opportunity to talk to so many people, can even keep track, but this Enterprise Communication and Collaboration space is really, really, really hot. Yeah, Lisa, I definitely learned a lot and had a good time and really always a pleasure to be hosting with you. I feel I am better educated as a consumer now after having gone through this, and I wish as a consumer, I actually knew before I was making some choices on some of the brands whether or not they had some of the technologies behind us that we heard about here because we've all had some challenging interactions with whether it be chats, websites, emails, or trying to call in and hopefully getting to that live person. I've looked at my career and the ebb and flow of changes that have happened from the call center to the contact center. I've always had some empathy. I started out in the call center, my first job out of college, but there should be no excuse for a company not to be able to have a good customer experience if they're leveraging the technologies and the solutions that are available today, especially a lot of those powered by the cloud. Absolutely, it's table six. I agree with you. I definitely feel reset as a consumer, my perspectives, and even understanding the fact that like 5.9 here we are in their booth talking about the Intelligent Contact Center, they have five billion recorded customer conversations a year, and I never thought when I'm calling in, when you hear that it's going to be recorded, we just expect that, but how a company like 5.9 can enable them to actually start to leverage the power of AI and cloud to harness that dark data so that to your point, the customer experience is ideal because as consumers, we have so much choice. Yeah, so we've been talking for a number of years on theCUBE about companies need to be data-driven and still it's early days here in the enterprise communication space. There is a proliferation of everything from the end devices. We just interviewed the CEO of Poly, Long History, Plantronics, Polycom. I've got Long History, understand a lot of those technologies that they have. Huddle rooms and whiteboards and digitization, they're all of these devices and then the software and the cloud and all of those pieces. We use CRM in our business and boy, there's place things that I'd love to be able to tap in even for a small company and have talked to lots of companies as to how they can use these technologies and it was really interesting. And we had a great user discussion today with Carfax. Really enjoyed that, always good to hear as to what they're doing and the blurring of the line sometimes between unified computing and the contact center and where, right, putting that information into their agent's hands or into the sales people hands or we talked to people on the marketing side in marketing clouds to put it in the marketing hands. So data we know is a huge differentiator and I know an area that you were loving is CX was at the center of everything and the role of the agent and the customer is something we need to think about. What were your takeaways about that, Lisa? About that, great question. Initially, everything that I was reading about this event and the industry was all about everyone is talking about customer experience, CX. And when we had Blair Pleasant on with Michael Rose on Monday, the, I think it was a customer satisfaction or service index that they did showed that companies are actually rating employee satisfaction lower than customer satisfaction and I thought, but if I'm an employee and I'm an agent and I'm on the phone or I'm in a chat or whatever channel dealing with what might be a disgruntled customer who probably has a really easy alternative to churn to, my experience needs to be good. I need to have the information, the right content at the right time and be empowered to make a decision. So some of the conversations that we had started to show that really AX agent experience and CX are really blended together. They have to be because to me, they're mutually exclusive and if that agent doesn't have the information that they need, doesn't have to ask a consumer the same question that you've just repeated, the likelihood that that consumer will churn is very high. So the agent is one of those ones, I think at the front lines, I honestly never really thought about it from that perspective and how critical they are to the business. Yeah, and when you dig in and say, okay, what is the life of an agent today? First of all, if I can give them a simpler interface and that's something in both the unified communication and the contact center, if I can do that and then where is their automation or the AI to help me do my job to be able to critique myself and go in there rather than having a manager yelling at you, there's some powerful stories we heard about that as to I can better myself and I'll probably be more engaged and that should translate also into a better customer experience so we're not getting, love the example somebody gave. It's like, you ever call there and they're like, oh, my system's a little slow today or I can't get into this? It's like, we don't want, as consumers, we never want to hear that and that's not a good experience and what we heard is there really should be no excuse in today's day and age that shouldn't be the issue. Absolutely, so we talked about the agent experience, customer experience, some of the other users that we talked about on the program are, for example, Microsoft Teams and this really cool demo, we had Jace Moreno on the show on Monday showing this incredible power of internal teams collaboration and communication and how connected companies can be across geographies, cultures, generations and that internal collaboration is another big piece of the show that the power of cloud, the power of AI, that companies are starting to harness is transformative for a business on every level. Yeah, it's really, you know, I've been to when I go to a Microsoft show or a Google show or an Amazon show, oh, look at the real time, you know, things that are happening, global translation, being able to see sentiment by AI of like what the face is, certain shows you go to, they're like, you can go up and they're like, you know, happy, sad, confused, you know, things like that. So Microsoft gave a great demo, let's see how long it takes for that really to diffuse out and be usable from businesses. We know the power of video that's core of the center of what we do with CUBE, you know, we understand when it can, you know, transcribe and translate, that's really powerful things that we're keeping an eye on and the cloud is definitely driving a lot of animation and that's something that we heard over and over again is that, you know, this show now in its 29th year and it's like, you know, third life with a third different name, you know, cloud has really infused a lot of energy, many new companies here and therefore, there's a nice robust ecosystem with, you know, some blurring of the lines and some competition but for the most part, if it's in the cloud, a lot of times the integrations are happening behind the scenes and I as a customer don't need to put it together with bailing wire and duct tape and zip ties which kind of felt like we had to do things in the old day and it was very fragile. It should be much better. We heard lots of them as to how CRM, especially like Salesforce integrates and, you know, from Microsoft and from many of the other players here, they're saying there is good commitment, there's good working agreement with many of the companies and absolutely from our hosts here at 5.9. We heard from a lot of their partners from the device and the software players as to how they all tie together seamlessly to make sure that their users have a good experience which leads to agent and customer experience ultimately. Absolutely, the partnership and the collaboration in this space was very palpable and it was great to have so much access to 5.9's partners. I think a couple of taglines I'll take away from this as a marketer is Zoom. We had Harry, mostly the CIO of Zoom on this morning and his fireside chat this morning and with us later earlier today, he said, video's the new voice. We've also heard voice is sexy again. We've also heard it's, you know, humans being augmented by machines, it's relationship based. So a lot of really interesting themes that all come together that I hope sort of dispel some of the concerns that either individuals or some business users have about AI taking over. It's this combination of different tools but the human component, the empathy is still absolutely critical. Yeah, and we'll see AI will first be something that's internal to these companies. So 5.9's announced this week. It's the 5.9, I believe Genius is the tool in there. It's helping make their agents help them ramp up much faster, get the data they need and it's AI that's going to actually help infuse them so that they can react faster and they're super agents, give them super powers. We heard from a number of people that external facing AI, we're still a little bit early and everybody's, we'll try to see what some of the early leading use cases will be for that in the future. Well Stu, it's been a great three days co-hosting theCUBE with you at Enterprise Connect 19. I cannot believe how much we've learned and how we've both sort of changed our perspective as consumers. Let's see how long that lasts. Yeah, absolutely, Lisa, you know, so many of the things that we've been hearing for years about cloud and AI definitely translate here and we love really documenting some of those industry transformations and pleasures always to work with you on theCUBE. Likewise, for Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE.