Q1. José, as we close the year, what stands out to you as a defining moment for Collab in 2025?
The introduction of Agent Assist in production for our clients, with the overwhelming results that were achieved with a very short deployment effort.
Q2. You’ve been part of Collab for more than 20 years. How did this year challenge or evolve your perspective on the contact center industry?
AI was the main challenge: bringing AI to the contact center space as something real, usable, cost-effective, and that provides real efficiencies to our customers and partners.
Q3. This year Collab strengthened its message around “AI with a human touch.” What does that principle mean to you after seeing how customers actually use AI?
Finding the right balance between AI and human touch has always been our objective. The orchestration of interactions to provide that right balance is key to delivering the correct amount of efficiency and automation to the right customers who will really benefit from it in terms of customer experience.
Also, Agent Assist brought AI to the agents, bringing that human touch by providing a “companion” that agents can rely on, while delivering the best and most efficient answers to customers and helping agents stay compliant with each company’s policies.
Q4. Flexibility has always been a major part of Collab’s identity, especially when it comes to cloud, hybrid, and on-prem deployments. Why do you think this approach resonated so strongly with customers this year?
It shows that we are right in providing this differentiator to the market: the ability to deploy our solution with on-prem, cloud, private cloud, or hybrid approaches. One of the most popular hybrid approaches now is disaster recovery (DR) on cloud for on-prem solutions. It brings the right amount of flexibility without the costs of an on-prem DR solution.
This was the year of cloud migrations. Several of our on-prem customers trusted us to migrate their systems to our cloud, gaining efficiencies while maintaining all the functionality they were used to, which shows once again that our approach to the market is the correct one: we don’t force cloud deployments, we allow our customers to decide and evolve when they are ready to do it.
Q5. Looking across telco, banking, government, and retail, what pressures did customers bring to you most often in 2025? And how did Collab help address them?
AI and data analytics. Not only Data Studio, but also Speech Analytics, were paramount in helping our customers gain new insights into their customers.
Q6. Collab invested deeply in tools like Agent Assist and analytics. What did you learn this year about where automation can genuinely improve the agent and customer experience?
First of all, expectations need to be correctly set: not all processes should be automated, there is a need to find the right balance between automation and human touch.
Second, when automating a process, it’s very important to set expectations correctly and to understand if that automation is really going to be more efficient, not only on the contact center side, but more importantly on the customer experience side. If there are no efficiencies for the customer, if the automation process is more difficult to navigate than a human interaction, or if it’s not correctly implemented, the automation will fail.
Last, not all customers should be treated equally in a contact center. It’s very important to segment your customers to separate the ones that will gain efficiencies from automation from the ones that will probably despair, give up, and move to another company. The human touch is paramount for some customers. That’s where our software is key, because it can orchestrate interactions to provide the right balance between automation and human touch.
Q7. Internally, Collab also went through a major brand evolution in 2025. What did this change represent for the company and for you personally?
I’ve been with Collab since the beginning. I was present when the previous brand was launched, and it lasted for 20 years. It was difficult to put aside some feelings of attachment to the previous brand, but when the first drafts of the new branding were developed, I was immediately engaged with it. Also, the company really embraced it, and the new branding was a clear success for the company and for our customers and partners. The launch of the new branding at the CollabXperience event was a really memorable and touching moment.
Q8. Partners continue to play a huge role in Collab’s growth. What message would you like to leave with them as we enter a new year?
Our beloved partners are the cornerstone of Collab’s growth strategy. 2025 was a very good year in terms of partnerships because not only did we grow with our current partners, but we also gained new, very promising ones that will be crucial for 2026.
The new AI features added this year to OneContact were paramount for growth, but also for the evolution and transformation of our partners, helping them change and adapt to this new era where clients are demanding AI. Our partners need to be proficient in that space and use our technology and their expertise to provide the most efficient solutions with the correct set of expectations. Some of the deployment use cases we saw at the CollabXperience event, presented by our partners, were completely mind-blowing and clearly showed the added value of our partners to our technology.
For 2026, the message is simple: our partners can continue to rely on Collab technology and Collab’s support to stay ahead of the competition and provide best-of-breed and more efficient solutions to their clients.
Q9. And to customers, what do you hope they take from Collab’s trajectory this year?
The most flexible solution to bring efficiencies and the best customer experience through our new AI features, built on the base of our cutting-edge contact center technology.
Q10. Finally, if you could summarise 2025 for Collab in one sentence, how would you describe the year we’ve lived and the one we’re about to build?
Total focus on customer experience, efficiency, and orchestration to find the right balance between automation and human touch through our technology, experience, and innovation, together with our partners’ expertise, ideas, and domain knowledge.