Communications provider Mitel Networks Corp. today is rolling out a new artificial intelligence-powered customer experience platform to help businesses optimize customer interactions by integrating with existing communication tools.

Launching in the spring of 2025, Mitel CX is part of the company’s broader effort to modernize its contact center offerings. While most of the industry has pivoted to an as-a-service model, Mitel remains one of the few that delivers its product as an on-premises workload, in a private cloud and as a software-as-a-service offering.

The platform is part of Mitel’s Common Communications Framework, which connects various communication tools into a unified system, including phone systems, messaging and video conferencing. Mitel CX enables businesses to tailor their customer experience tools to fit company needs. It includes prebuilt integrations to industry tools and open application programming interfaces. This is especially useful for large companies that have strict rules around data security, compliance and privacy, since they can run the platform on their own servers to maintain control over sensitive information.

Mitel’s current contact center offerings, such as MiVoice MX-ONE, MiVoice Business and OpenScape, include tools for managing outbound interactions and reporting. However, Mitel is now focusing on its existing unified communications customers who may lack a contact center solution or are using competitors’ systems.

“The main message is that this is Mitel’s next-generation CX platform,” said George Despinic, senior product marketing manager for Mitel’s contact center portfolio. “It’s got all the bells and whistles. You can deploy it how you want, pay for it how you want, and make it work and operate as you wish.”

To support contact center agents directly, Mitel CX offers real-time guidance, such as prompts and suggested responses, which resolves issues on the first contact. Customers can engage with agents via omnichannel interactions, spanning voice, video, chat and social media, seamlessly switching among those channels based on their preferences.

Finally, Mitel CX has features like customizable workflows that allow managers to automate tasks without coding expertise and AI-powered virtual agents to handle routine customer inquiries. Additionally, Mitel CX uses AI to analyze customer calls and interactions data, so managers can make quicker decisions based on real information.

Though AI is a significant component of the platform, Mitel is cautious not to brand it as “AI-first.” Instead, Mitel is leveraging its expertise in unified communications and contact centers, incorporating AI to increase efficiency, automate routine tasks, and improve how businesses interact with their customers, according to Despinic. For example, Mitel has partnered with Talkative, a U.K.-based firm specializing in AI-driven customer engagement solutions, to incorporate virtual agents, live chat and AI-driven analytics into the Mitel CX offering.

The growing focus on AI across industries prompts companies to rethink how they manage their data and deploy technologies. Major vendors such as Nvidia Corp. and VMware Inc. are leading this trend. As AI adoption accelerates, businesses are becoming increasingly concerned with maintaining control over their data — something that’s harder to achieve with fully cloud-based, service-oriented solutions.

This shift is pushing companies to reconsider the pure cloud contact-center-as-a-service or CCaaS model in favor of hybrid deployments that blend cloud and on-prem. Companies seek models that offer greater flexibility and data security as AI becomes more integrated into contact centers. The focus on hybrid solutions is gaining traction, particularly as major tech firms stress the importance of data sovereignty and customized AI deployments. Therefore, companies are increasingly favoring solutions that allow them to leverage AI while retaining control over their infrastructure.

The ongoing geopolitical issues have spotlighted data and sovereignty issues, particularly in Europe, where Mitel has some straight from its acquisition of Unify, formerly Siemens Enterprise. With an as-a-service model, customers cannot meet in-country compliance mandates, making private cloud and on-premises deployments the preferred model.

“CCaaS has plateaued,” said Despinic. “Now, the recognition is that there’s still a massive market for hybrid cloud. Our main differentiation is around the hybrid cloud. Mitel CX itself is hybrid because it has the Talkative channels, whereas the rest of the product is installed either on-prem, private cloud, public cloud or single instance. It’s just ingrained in the company’s whole philosophy.”

Mitel is taking a targeted approach for the new platform to expand its presence in the market. In addition to focusing on customers without a contact center solution, Mitel plans to strengthen ties with current partners and attract new ones to broaden its reach. The goal is to establish Mitel CX as the go-to contact center solution for midsized and large companies, with the platform capable of supporting up to 1,200 agents per cluster. In cases where customers need even more capacity, multiple clusters can be deployed to scale up beyond that limit.

The company is also expanding its professional services to help businesses with setup, customization and support directly. Rather than relying solely on partners, Mitel will use its team to provide these services, catering to the complex needs of enterprises.

On a related note, I’ve been asked whether this affects Mitel’s relationship with Zoom Video Communications Inc. and wanted to clarify it does not. Zoom’s partnership with Mitel is focused on unified communications, where this product launch strengthens Mitel’s contact center portfolio. There is a small bit of overlap, but nothing that should cause friction in the relationship.

The CCaaS industry has seen tremendous growth, and I expect that to continue, but it’s not a suitable deployment model for everyone. This is well-timed for Mitel as Avaya LC, the only other provider with a private cloud and on-premises contact center, has chosen to focus on the enterprise segment.

Mitel now uniquely addresses the needs of small and midsized businesses that want on-premises contact centers. Although this might not seem like the most exciting go-to-market, Mitel will be well-positioned as the cloud industry pivots to multicloud.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE. 

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