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Queuing up Change: From CCaaS to Intelligent CX Platform

July 2025

The contact center as a service (CCaaS) market continues to expand rapidly, primarily driven by the digital economy’s strength and AI capability adoption, and it shows no signs of slowing anytime soon. There are two fundamental categories of digital interactions: self-service, where customers are assisted by a bot, and agent-facing, where customers are helped by a live agent. Both categories are growing quickly, a trend DMG expects to continue for the next few years. However, as the effectiveness and flexibility of customer-facing conversational AI (CAI) self-service solutions improve, the proportion of automated bot interactions will increase.   

The adoption rate for multi-tenant CCaaS seats as of the end of calendar year 2024 was 31.8%, up from 27.0% at the end of 2023. While the CCaaS growth rate is strong and the market is healthy, many organizations continue to utilize premise-based solutions, others prefer a software as a service (SaaS) approach implemented in a private cloud, and many use a hybrid deployment. The contact center market has always been slow to change, which is one of the reasons these solutions are “sticky.” 

Cloud-based providers continue to deliver most of the contact center market’s innovation, fueled by hundreds of millions of dollars in financial firm investments over the past decade. Artificial intelligence has become the primary driver of change in the last two years, compelling companies to migrate to cloud-based solutions, as these products generally require the processing power of the cloud. Generative AI (GenAI), and more recently agentic AI, have captured enterprise executives’ imaginations. Both are ideal for contact centers, where they add practical and measurable benefits for customers and employees. CCaaS vendors who have expanded their product portfolios during the last couple of years to include AI-enabled applications are also benefitting from increased consumption-based revenue or higher price-per-seat fees. Below is a list of factors contributing to the CCaaS market’s ongoing strength and success.

CCaaS growth drivers:

  1. Digital interaction volumes are expected to continue to grow rapidly for the foreseeable future
  2. Omnichannel CCaaS vendors processed more calls in 2024 than in prior years 
  3. The total volume of customer inquiries is expected to continue to scale as the population grows
  4. More people around the world have cell phones and can easily ask for help
  5. Consumers are becoming more inquisitive with each passing generation, and this particularly applies as it becomes easier for them to reach businesses
  6. GenAI-enabled conversational AI (CAI) solutions are handling a growing volume of customer interactions in both voice and digital channels; as agentic AI is added to these solutions, the percentage of interactions they fully automate will further increase
  7. Gen Z is more likely than Millennials to call an organization to ask for assistance
  8. Non-contact-center operations supporting digital channels are being converted to contact centers to benefit from CCaaS solutions’ productivity features
  9. Non-traditional contact center seats continue to grow as companies migrate some of their unified communications as a service (UCaaS) seats to basic CCaaS to gain functionality advantages and make more resources available to support their contact centers during peak periods
  10. A growing number of large seat deals are in progress, with more expected in the next 12 – 24 months due to the ongoing migration of premise-based holdouts to a CCaaS model
  11. CCaaS vendors continue to expand their portfolios to include AI-based products such as transcription, automated post-interaction summarization, automated quality management (AQM), and real-time guidance (RTG)
  12. CCaaS deployments in EMEA and LATAM are increasing and are also growing in size

CCaaS Outlook is Strong Despite Concerns

There are many diverse and often conflicting dynamics impacting the CCaaS market, but most have had little effect in slowing the growth rate of this important IT sector. Some in the market consider CCaaS the “pipes” or channels to distribute and manage the flow of voice and digital interactions and inquiries into and out of an organization. Others expect CCaaS vendors to be general contractors, facilitating the delivery and integration of most systems and applications needed in their contact center. And recently, CCaaS vendors have started to be viewed as a source for the AI technology and infrastructure needed to enhance their operation. What’s clear is that many companies are highly reliant on their contact center infrastructure provider, a trend that DMG expects to continue for many years. An important question is whether multi-tenant CCaaS has a lock on this sector, or if it’s just one of many deployment models companies will consider as these offerings mature. DMG expects the CCaaS market to expand to welcome private cloud implementations as many enterprises are still hesitant to use muti-tenant public solutions, but want to benefit from the innovation, flexibility, and scalability of the cloud. 

For a detailed analysis of CCaaS market share and the competitive landscape, please see DMG’s 2025 Contact Center as a Service Worldwide Market Share Report, which was just released.