Enterprise Connect 2026 Reveals Finalists for Best of Enterprise Connect Industry Awards and Announces Winners of 2026 Spotlight and IT Hero Awards

Recognizing Excellence And Innovation Throughout The Enterprise Communications Industry

LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Enterprise Connect, the leading conference and exhibition for enterprise communications and customer experience (CX), today announced the finalists for the Best of Enterprise Connect 2026 Awards. The program honors outstanding innovation and measurable impact across the enterprise communications and collaboration ecosystem.

Finalists were selected by a panel of industry experts who evaluated submissions based on criteria including technological advancement, innovation and real-world business value.

Finalists for the Best of Enterprise Connect 2026 Awards

Overall Best of Enterprise Connect

• AudioCodes Meeting Insights On-Prem (MIA OP): Automates the creation of accurate meeting summaries, using AI to extract key insights and action items.
• Crescendo Multimodal AI: Unifies voice, text and visual interactions into one continuous conversation, allowing customers to talk, type and share images or PDFs while preserving context through agentic AI capabilities.
• Genesys: For a product to be announced in February.
• Rime Arcana V2: A high-fidelity, multilingual AI voice model designed for enterprise use, delivering natural prosody, emotional nuance, and on-prem or API deployment for scalable, production-grade voice applications.
• UJET Spiral: An AI analytics hub that unifies 100% of customer conversations and feedback, autonomously detecting product and service issues so teams can resolve root causes and eliminate unnecessary interactions.
• Vonage Agentforce Identity Insights: Uses communications and network APIs to detect fraud, verify identity and validate communications channels in real time, improving productivity, CX and security across Salesforce workflows.
• Zoom AI Companion 3.0: The next evolution of Zoom’s agentic AI solution, combining proprietary large and small language models with trusted third-party models from partners including OpenAI and Anthropic.

Best Innovation for Customer Experience

• Crescendo Multimodal AI: Unifies voice, text and visual interactions into one continuous conversation, preserving context through agentic AI capabilities.
• Cyara: For a product to be announced in March.
• Five9 Agentic Quality Management: Uses AI to evaluate up to 100% of human interactions, transforming quality data into real-time coaching, smarter routing and a self-optimizing customer and agent experience.
• Nextiva XBert: An AI agent for customer experience that resolves inquiries across voice, text and chat, books appointments, answers questions, captures leads and seamlessly hands off to human agents with full context.
• NICE Automated Insights: Converts engagement data into AI agents by analyzing cost to serve, CX, revenue and compliance to identify automation opportunities and generate workflows that drive business value.
• TechSee Connectivity Guru: Visualizes in-home network performance by mapping Wi-Fi and signal strength, identifying interference and placement issues, and guiding verified fixes so problems are resolved right the first time.

Most Innovative Use of AI

• Crescendo Multimodal AI: Unifies voice, text and visual interactions into a single, context-preserving conversation powered by agentic AI.
• Five9 Agentic Quality Management: Applies AI to evaluate and optimize up to 100% of human interactions, driving continuous improvement across CX and agent performance.
• LeapXpert Signals: Transforms WhatsApp and iMessage conversations into detected signals that trigger automated actions, accelerating decisions, reducing risk and scaling operations.
• Rime Arcana V2: A high-fidelity, multilingual enterprise AI voice model delivering natural speech with flexible on-prem or API deployment.
• TechSee Connectivity Guru: Uses AI-driven insights to diagnose and resolve in-home connectivity issues efficiently and accurately.
• UJET Spiral: An AI analytics platform that unifies customer conversations and feedback to proactively identify and resolve systemic issues.
• Zoom AI Companion 3.0: Combines proprietary and partner AI models to deliver advanced agentic capabilities across the Zoom platform.

Best Innovation for AV/Video

• Cisco Workspace Designer: A browser-based 3D platform that enables instant design, validation and deployment of high-performance hybrid meeting spaces, streamlining AV planning from concept to blueprint in minutes.
• TechSee Connectivity Guru: Provides real-time visibility into network performance to ensure reliable, high-quality AV and video experiences.

Best Innovation for Security/Compliance

• AudioCodes Meeting Insights On-Prem (MIA OP): Uses AI to securely generate accurate meeting summaries while extracting key insights and action items.
• Intrado OneAlert: Delivers on-prem unified emergency and non-emergency notifications, enabling rapid, location-aware alerts across phones, email, screens and other channels from a single dashboard.
• Vonage Agentforce Identity Insights: Detects fraud, verifies identity and validates communications channels in real time using communications and network APIs, strengthening security across contact center workflows.

“Nearly half of our sponsors submitted entries for this year's Best of EC, reflecting an exceptional level of innovation that demonstrates how rapidly enterprise communications and customer experience technologies continue to evolve,” said Eric Krapf, Program Chair, Enterprise Connect. “The Best of Enterprise Connect 2026 finalists represent solutions with real potential to shape the future of our industry, and we look forward to giving attendees the opportunity to experience these technologies firsthand in the exhibit hall.”

Best of Enterprise Connect Winners will be announced during an awards presentation at Enterprise Connect 2026 on Tuesday, March 10.

2026 Spotlight and IT Hero Award Winners Announced

Enterprise Connect also announced winners of the Women in Communications Spotlight Awards and IT Hero Awards.

Enterprise Connect’s Spotlight Awards recognize and celebrate women who demonstrate outstanding qualities of leadership and expertise in technology.

The 2026 Women in Communications Spotlight Award winners are:

• Monica Deal, Sr. Vice President, Global Customer Operations, Lexis Nexis
• Lisa Diehl, Director, Customer Care, Freshpet
• Beth Linthicum, Executive Director, Call Quality, Analytics and CX, Aetna/CVS Health
• Millicent McIntyre, Senior Director, Buyer Services, IAA (Insurance Auto Auctions)
• Patrycja Sobera, SVP & GM for Digital Workplace Solutions, Unisys

Enterprise Connect’s IT Hero Awards recognize enterprise IT professionals who go above and beyond their job descriptions and transform challenges into opportunities.

The 2026 IT Hero Award winners are:

• Tabitha Almanza, Director, Procurement, YETI
• Nathaniel Beck, IT Manager, Johnson Controls International
• Andrew Benson, Chief Innovation Officer, Envision Radiology
• Jose F. Hernandez, Communication Systems Engineer, Brigham Young University
• Mattias Liljeberg, Manager, IT Telecom, Louisiana BLUE

Enterprise Connect 2026 takes place March 10–12 at Caesars Forum in Las Vegas, NV. Early-bird pricing for Enterprise Connect expires February 13. Be sure to secure your spot.

For more information on exhibition or sponsorship opportunities, businesses can request further details here or contact Sandra Kupiec at [e-mail].

Press can register via the media registration link here.

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About Enterprise Connect
For over 35 years, Enterprise Connect has stood at the forefront of enterprise communications, collaboration, and customer experience in North America. Delivering an impactful blend of industry-best conference tracks, innovative networking experiences, dynamic expo activations, and year-round digital engagement, Enterprise Connect also provides the very best in webinar hostings, virtual events and newsletters. Bringing together IT executives, vendors, analysts, or channel partners, attendees engage with influential peers and critical innovations across themes like AI-powered systems, CX platforms, cloud migration, and modern workplace strategies. Enterprise Connect is organized by Informa, a leading international events, digital services and academic research group. Informa is a FTSE 100 company, with 14,000 colleagues working in 30 countries. www.enterpriseconnect.com