With 25+ years' experience evaluating, comparing, and recommending software, our expert analysis and verified user data combine for a uniquely trustworthy perspective on enterprise software.
At UNBOUND 2026 (formerly INBOUND), HubSpot presented what it described as its most foundational product release in years. The announcements intend to reposition HubSpot from a collection of marketing, sales, service, data, and commerce applications toward a unified “agentic customer platform” built around three elements:
Dreamforce 2026 shows Salesforce adapting to a post-CRM-interface era in which customer work increasingly begins in conversational environments such as Copilot, Claude, Slack, and Gemini. Salesforce’s response is to separate platform value from interface ownership by making its data, semantics, permissions, actions, and workflows available through AIforce and governed by its emerging Enterprise AI Harness. Buyers should treat much of Salesforce’s announcements as directionally important but still roadmap dependent.
K:BOS 2026 showcased Klaviyo’s product velocity, as it builds a marketing-service flywheel to support its autonomous B2C CRM platform.
At No-Code Days 2026 in Orlando, Creatio outlined a five-pillar agentic enterprise strategy combining AI-powered agents, unified CRM, industry-specific workflows, scalable architecture, and ecosystem enablement to advance the next phase of enterprise automation.
At Relate 2026, Zendesk pulled its agentic AI story together under a new “autonomous service workforce” label. Outcome-based pricing isn’t actually new in this market. Pure-play agent vendors have been billing on resolutions for years, so the core distinction is the platform Zendesk has built around the pricing: QA, workflows, audit trails, and admin. The employee service push and the work to integrate six recent acquisitions are both still in progress, and buyers should test the employee service crossover and the postacquisition integration directly before assuming the whole picture is settled.
The Infor Analyst Innovation Summit offered a clear view of what operational readiness looks like as agentic AI moves from experimentation into production. The key takeaway was that success depends less on model sophistication than on foundational discipline: shared semantics, documented processes, clean data, and clear delegation and control.
We keep hearing that enterprise AI spending is up in many organizations, and the results are not remarkable. On April 9, 2026, ServiceNow announced it will no longer sell AI as an add-on, instead restructuring its commercial model to focus on AI and launching new features that let AI agents make organizational decisions without frequent human oversight.
This note examines whether “SaaSpocalypse” claims are valid, based on full-year results from 24 public companies that have significant customer experience (CX) SaaS offerings.
Big change is at hand for CPQ vendors Conga and PROS, as the former acquired the latter in early 2026. Catering to different markets, the two products will remain distinct within the Conga Advantage platform. Conga intends to provide robust functionality across the commerce chain by rounding out existing CLM, CPQ, and document generation capabilities with strong pricing technology and new AI capabilities.
This note provides comprehensive coverage and evaluation of Enterprise Connect 2026, including vendor announcements and market trends.
Conga is making a deliberate bid to become the control plane for enterprise commerce, not just a CPQ vendor with adjacent features. The PROS acquisition closes a structural pricing gap and accelerates Conga's AI roadmap, while the commerce chain narrative reframes how revenue work should flow end to end. If Conga executes well, it will be a default platform for complex enterprises. If it stumbles, it remains a strong but bounded CPQ incumbent.
In a world where understanding of the power of AI is still confusing, ServiceNow has excellent messaging on what AI can actually achieve in an enterprise. Through TV ads and ads in the Wall Street Journal, the messaging has been clear: AI can assist and improve efficiency. With their recent announcement (February 2026) of two major launches – Autonomous Workforce and Employee Works – ServiceNow underscores the shift of AI from “answer engines” to “actually finishing the job.” With this announcement their message is clear: the era of AI experiments is over; AI operations at scale have begun. And ServiceNow wants to be the control tower that runs all of it.
ServiceNow exceeds guidance as enterprise AI adoption accelerates growth, margin, and cash flow. Now Assist ACV tops $600M and heads toward a $1B run rate while customers commit at scale.
ServiceNow positions its CRM as a strategic platform extension, though its capabilities remain narrower than a traditional CRM. Yet, even if ServiceNow CRM is functionally sufficient for an organization, CIOs should be mindful that this platform has broader architectural considerations for organizations’ AI strategy.
Three predictions for 2026 are offered for CX technology markets: 1. No new unified CX category will appear; 2. Speed of adoption for AI solutions (especially agentic AI workflows) will remain slow; and 3. Marketing SaaS will continue to be overlooked in CX and that’s a missed opportunity.
At Ignite 2025 Microsoft announced several major offerings strengthening its agentic AI platform. The ontology-based IQ layer seems to be the most unexpected innovation from Microsoft.
This technology note evaluates Salesforce’s Agentforce 360 launch, asking: Has the Salesforce platform changed beneath the marketing? What market dynamics have compelled Salesforce to adopt this agentic framing? And how should CIOs and CX leaders interpret Salesforce’s product trajectory?
Ignite’s launch of Microsoft Foundry reshapes Dynamics 365’s front-office role; users are being shifted to a Copilot conversational interface supported by AI agents while Dynamics becomes the contextual system operating in the background. The imperative of training a Copilot-first workforce just became even more critical.
ServiceNow is redefining enterprise workflows with Work AI, Raptor DB, and autonomous deployment – streamlining IT, CRM, and onboarding to deliver measurable ROI, unified governance, and faster time-to-value across the entire organization.
AlphaSense now converts documents into cited insights and live Excel models. AlphaSense accelerates research by converting documents into cited insights and live Excel models. Its unified platform fuses broker research, expert calls, and filings through AI agents – reducing earnings and diligence prep from days to hours. The addition of Carousel moves AlphaSense beyond summarization to quantifiable modeling, establishing new speed and quality standards for decision-making in Financial Services and Competitive Intelligence.
Recent geopolitical shifts have renewed interest in digital sovereignty, and the emergence of AI has expanded the concept up the stack to consider the risks of third-party LLMs. At Zoholics Canada 2025, we spoke with Zoho’s Chief Strategy Officer Vijay Sundaram and a customer about their perspectives on navigating digital sovereignty in 2025.