CCaaS in Flux: Market Growth, AI Acceleration, and Strategic Opportunity
The contact center as a service (CCaaS) market, one of the top-performing segments within the broader customer experience (CX) industry, continues its rapid growth, even amid predictions that intelligent bots will replace human agents in the coming years. CAI solutions – both for agent augmentation and customer self-service – are advancing quickly and reshaping how service is delivered. Still, human agents will remain essential over the next 5 – 10 years, although their roles, responsibilities, and compensation will evolve and improve.
AI is the leading trend in customer experience, benefiting CCaaS vendors, users, and customers alike. By improving agent efficiency, enabling smarter self-service, and delivering more in-depth customer insights, AI solutions allow organizations to deliver a faster, more personalized, and less expensive customer service experience. Looking ahead, AI, particularly Gen AI and agentic AI, will continue to transform the CX by enabling predictive, proactive, and highly personalized support. At the same time, AI will reshape and enhance how CCaaS vendors code and enhance their solutions, accelerating innovation, development, and implementation.
The CCaaS market, with over 200 providers, remains highly competitive and full of opportunity. While the market continues to grow and evolve, few new entrants have emerged over the past 12 months, highlighting the challenges of breaking into a mature and crowded IT sector. At the same time, the large number of providers offering similar capabilities suggests that the industry is ripe for significant consolidation. This is harder than it sounds because when two CCaaS vendors merge, the best practice typically involves consolidating onto a single platform, which can be highly disrupting and can create the opportunity for competitors to attract customers who are dissatisfied or facing migration challenges. However, in cases where the companies primarily service different geographies, maintaining both CCaaS platforms to support regional needs may provide a viable alternative, at least temporarily.
While the CCaaS market is mature, having existed for over 25 years, it’s notable that it only accounts for an estimated 31.8% of all contact center seats as of the end of 2024. Although CCaaS growth is robust and the market remains healthy, many organizations continue to rely on 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,” but for CCaaS vendors to win the many enterprises that have not yet migrated their contact centers to the cloud, they need to address their concerns about security and reliability and provide more flexible deployment options, including dedicated cloud environments.
To gain a detailed understanding of the highly complex and dynamic CCaaS marketing and its leading and contending vendor: 8 x 8, Bright Pattern, Call Center Studio, Five9, NICE, UJET, and Vonage – consult DMG’s 2025 Contact Center as a Service Product and Market Report. (Avaya is covered at a high-level.) This 350-page comprehensive industry report provides the technical, product, functional, innovation, best practices, pricing, etc. information you need to select the right vendor for your company.
To learn more about his report, please visit us at https://www.dmgconsult.com/reports/2025-2026-contact-center-as-a-service-product-and-market-report/ or reach out to Deborah Navarra at Deborah.navarra@dmgconsult.com.