Metia iBook

Foreword

Customer experience leaders now using Salesforce Open CTI stand at a crossroads. With Salesforce announcing the retirement of this technology on February 28, 2028, it’s time they plan their transition to alternatives.

With telephony embedded in CRM instead of being integrated like Open CTI, Salesforce Voice offers clear advantages in features and capabilities. Among those are native omni-channel integration, real-time call transcription, next best action, and deeper integration with emerging Agentforce capabilities that enable businesses to harness the power of agentic AI throughout their CX workflows. It also provides a single-console agent interface for easier training and use.

Vonage has been a Salesforce partner for nearly two decades and has helped many organizations deploy Salesforce into their operations effectively and efficiently.

Reggie Scales
President & Head of Business Unit Applications, Vonage

Understanding the Agentic AI Readiness Gap

Metia’s survey of 360 U.S. decision-makers reveals a significant shift in the CRM landscape as Salesforce prepares to sunset Open CTI. While 40% of current Open CTI users remain unaware of this impending change, the vast majority (82%) are already exploring or actively migrating to Salesforce Voice.

This transition is driven by the need for modernization, though it is frequently hindered by challenges such as complex integration, security requirements, budget approvals, and the need for leadership alignment. Despite these hurdles, migration is essential for leveraging agentic AI and businesses that modernize their voice technology now can achieve faster investment returns and greater competitive advantages than those that delay.

An infographic with a central purple circle displaying the large number “360” in white text, labeled beneath as “U.S.-based decision-makers.” Surrounding the central circle are four smaller circular icons connected visually with plus symbols, representing different categories: “Industry” (top left, with a factory icon), “Company size” (top right, with a building icon), “Roles” (bottom left, with a briefcase icon), and “Telephony Technology Used” (bottom right, with a phone and sound wave icon).

Click to explore Telephony Technology used

Seven Themes Affecting Agentic AI Adoption

Using network graph analysis, survey responses were mapped to reveal clusters of closely associated priorities, challenges, and outcomes. Attributes located near one another represent areas buyers frequently connect when making CX technology decisions.

Integrated System

Across the market, the shift toward agentic AI in customer experience organizations is well underway.

With Salesforce announcing the retirement of Open CTI on February 28, 2028, organizations still relying on legacy Open CTI integrations now face a hard deadline for their migration to Salesforce Voice.

Operationalizing Agentic AI

A Structural Transformation

The Cost of Delaying Modernization

A circular infographic composed of numerous small gray dots forming a large, soft-edged circle on a light gray background. Inside the circle, several colored circular icons with plus symbols highlight key themes related to agentic AI. Each theme is labeled with concise text positioned near its corresponding icon.

The topics include: “Scaling Agentic AI for Innovation” (green icon near the upper left), “Putting Use Cases into Production” (red icon near the upper right), “Commercial Expectations for Agentic AI” (blue icon near the center), “Aligning the Organization for Agentic AI” (purple icon on the right), “Overcoming the Foundational Hurdles” (teal icon near the bottom), “Designing the Human-AI Workflow” (pink icon on the lower left), and “Future-Proofing Telephony for Agentic AI” (orange icon on the left).

The layout uses a dotted circular pattern to suggest a connected ecosystem, with each labeled node representing a strategic focus area within agentic AI adoption and implementation.

Back to themes

Scaling Agentic AI for Innovation

Agentic AI must move beyond pilots to realize measurable outcomes.

Organizations already deploying agentic AI capabilities report improvements across several core customer experience metrics within the first year of implementation.

Dive deeper

Agentic AI benefits to Service Cloud workflows

Important Agentic AI outcomes

Explore Related Themes

Salesforce Voice outcomes

Open CTI challenges

Back to themes

Putting Use Cases into Production

Moving agentic AI into production within CX deployments often reveals barriers to progress with integration being the most widely reported.

For many organizations, the question is not whether complexity exists, but how effectively it can be managed while accelerating time to value.

Dive deeper

Barriers to telephony migration

Difficulty to overcome telephony migration barriers

Explore Related Themes

Salesforce Voice outcomes

Open CTI challenges

Back to themes

Aligning the Organization for Agentic AI

Budgets, silos, and buy-in shape AI progress.

Scaling agentic AI across CX workflows often slows not because of technology limits but because of organizational readiness.

Dive deeper

Barriers to telephony migration

Difficulty to overcome telephony migration barriers

Explore Related Themes

Salesforce Voice outcomes

Open CTI challenges

Back to themes

Commercial Expectations for Agentic AI

Agentic AI offers significant investment returns, but expectations and outcomes do not always align.

Agentic AI can deliver meaningful ROI, but the outcomes depend on implementation quality, stable integrations, and workflows that allow AI to operate reliably at scale.

Dive deeper

Operational KPI wins using agentic AI

Experience KPI expectation vs. reality

Explore Related Themes

Salesforce Voice outcomes

Open CTI challenges

Back to themes

Future-Proofing Telephony for Agentic AI

Migration momentum is already building across the market.

For survey respondents now using Salesforce Open CTI, 55% report their migration to Salesforce Voice is either underway or an active initiative.

Dive deeper

Intent to migrate from Open CTI

Target outcomes for telephony migration

Barriers to telephony migration

Explore Related Themes

Salesforce Voice outcomes

Open CTI challenges

Back to themes

Designing the
Human–AI Workflow

Measurable returns begin when agentic AI becomes operational.

Workflow improvements depend on stable integrations, reliable reporting, and an agent environment where AI assistance enhances productivity without introducing new friction.

Dive deeper

Agentic AI benefits to Service Cloud workflows

Important Agentic AI outcomes

Explore Related Themes

Salesforce Voice outcomes

Open CTI challenges

Back to themes

Overcoming the

Foundational Hurdles

Migration readiness exposes structural barriers.

The challenges themselves do not disappear as organizations move toward Salesforce Voice. What changes is how manageable they become when migration aligns with the platform ecosystem and governance structures already evolving around it.

Dive deeper

Awareness of Open CTI sunsetting

Barriers to telephony migration

Difficulty to overcome telephony migration barriers

Explore Related Themes

Salesforce Voice outcomes

Open CTI challenges

Next Steps:
Preparing for Your Agentic AI Transition

The research in this report shows that voice modernization and agentic AI adoption are increasingly linked decisions.

As organizations prepare for Salesforce Open CTI’s retirement and migrating to Salesforce Voice, they must be sure their voice architecture can support AI-driven service workflows. For many CX leaders, the practical question becomes how to move forward in a way that reduces integration friction while positioning the organization for scalable automation and AI-assisted service.

If this describes your situation, several steps can help guide you

Align leadership early

Plan extensible migration

Evaluate telephony architecture

Focus on workflow outcomes

Vonage's Perspective

In today’s hyper-competitive landscape, customer experience (CX) has emerged as the ultimate battleground for differentiation and growth.

The convergence of rising customer expectations, technological advancements, and the retirement of legacy systems like Open CTI has created a pivotal moment for your business. This study highlights a moment best defined by the rise of agentic CX—a transformative approach that combines intelligent automation, real-time insights, and seamless integration to redefine what’s possible in customer engagement.

At Vonage, we’ve partnered with many organizations to simplify this journey, helping them unlock the full potential of Agentic CX. Will your business use the end-of-life of Open CTI to lead the way or risk being left behind?

The Open CTI Deadline

The Risk of Legacy Systems

CX as a Competitive Strategy

Early Results from Agentic CX

Expanding What CX Can Achieve

Operational Performance Gains

The Strategic Benefit

Faster Returns from Modernization

What Agentic CX Is

The Technology Ecosystem

Start your migration journey, talk with Vonage

Independent research by Metia | Commissioned by Vonage | 2026

Vonage Foreword

Understanding the Agentic AI

Readiness Gap

Scaling Agentic AI for Innovation

Putting Use Cases into Production

Aligning the Organization for

Agentic AI

Overcoming the Foundational Hurdles

Designing the Human-AI Workflow

Future-Proofing Telephony for Agentic AI

Commercial Expectations for Agentic AI

Agentic AI as an Integrated System

Next Steps: Preparing for Your Agentic AI Transition

Vonage's Perspective

Foreword continued

Vonage has had a Salesforce strategic partnership that spans nearly two decades. We have helped many hundreds of leading customer service organizations deploy Salesforce Voice directly into their operations effectively, efficiently, and confidently, without speed bumps.

In anticipation of this Salesforce announcement, Vonage commissioned Metia, a leading market research firm, to survey how organizations are navigating contact center modernization. This includes migrating from legacy capabilities and ways to make agentic AI fully operational in a customer experience context.

This report reflects original data on this topic and can be a helpful resource in planning for modernization at your business.

We invite you to read further and learn how survey respondents are moving ahead, ensuring they can meet rising customer expectations and set themselves apart from their competition today and tomorrow.

Reggie Scales, President & Head of Business Unit Applications, Vonage

Understanding the Agentic AI Readiness Gap continued

Nonetheless, the results also show that Open CTI customers, whether they were aware or not of the sunset date, are already moving to Salesforce Voice: 82% say they are exploring options, in early conversations, or actively migrating.

Migration, however, is rarely friction-free. Integration is the most frequently cited barrier in this report, regardless of starting point. Challenges tied to testing, security requirements, budget approvals, and leadership alignment also shape the pace of modernization. What changes along the Salesforce Voice telephony path is flattening those issues as much as possible.

Ultimately, these issues can determine how fast next-generation CX technologies deliver measurable value. The survey results show that many buyers expect step-change improvements within 12 months, especially in workflow efficiency and customer experience metrics tied to time, cost, and quality.

The results also highlight a gap between expectations and outcomes: operational improvements often exceed projections where automation is already embedded, while CX gains can sometimes be overstated.

In sum, the data shows that most customer service organizations using Open CTI are on the road to Salesforce Voice or alternative deployments. By modernizing the voice layer of their technology stacks now, businesses moving to Salesforce Voice will be able to achieve improved customer responsiveness, agent efficiency, and competitive standing with the power of agentic AI. In capturing this next wave of agentic AI capability, these businesses will realize their investment returns much sooner than their peers who delay migration.

Scaling Agentic AI for Innovation

Agentic AI must move beyond pilots to realize measurable outcomes.

More and more, agentic AI adoption is tied to measurable performance outcomes rather than experimentation alone. Organizations already deploying agentic AI capabilities report improvements across several core customer experience metrics within the first year of implementation.

For example, the research in this report highlights several indicators of early performance lift:

CSAT net score: 108.4

NPS net score: 104.3

First contact resolution net score: 101.1

Sentiment shift net score: 100.3

These results and other metrics signal more than incremental efficiency improvements. They reflect growing expectations that AI-driven service models can produce meaningful CX innovation in a relatively short timeframe.

As organizations evaluate agentic AI initiatives, success is increasingly measured not only by automation levels but by how clearly those capabilities improve service quality and operational effectiveness. Not surprisingly, when asked about the importance of 10 different outcomes of agentic AI deployment, increased CSAT ranked first.

Together, these indicators reinforce a clear pattern. Organizations that move beyond pilots and embed AI directly within CRM-driven workflows are more likely to achieve measurable improvements in CX performance.

Scaling Agentic AI for Innovation

Moving agentic AI into production within CX deployments often reveals barriers to progress with integration being the most widely reported.

For 72% of respondents, integration with other systems and tools ranked as their biggest challenge among other issues in turning agentic AI from an ambition to a functioning operating model. Respondents ranked this issue as a 6.4/9 in difficulty among other migration challenges they face.

Testing is a significant migration challenge as well: 29% reported difficulties with the testing process as a barrier and 20% said solving for errors in the testing process was another issue. Interestingly, they ranked the degree of difficulty in addressing these challenges as 6.5 out of 9 and 5.8 out of 9 respectively.

The truth is, putting agentic AI into existing workflows comes with hurdles to overcome. Overall, respondents further along their Salesforce Voice migration journeys tended to report slightly lower barriers to implementation (including testing, security, and budget) hurdles than Open CTI users.

The implication is straightforward. Waiting does not remove the integration and testing work required to deploy new capabilities. In many cases it compounds it as new systems and dependencies accumulate. For many organizations, the question is not whether complexity exists, but how effectively it can be managed while accelerating time to value.

Aligning the Organization for

Agentic AI

Budgets, silos, and buy-in shape AI progress.

Scaling agentic AI across CX workflows often slows not because of technology limits but because of organizational readiness. Internal alignment issues frequently determine how quickly initiatives move from experimentation to operational deployment.

According to the survey, there are three common organizational barriers that respondents identified:

Securing budget to invest: 52%

Different teams operating in silos: 39%

Leadership buy-in: 31%

Budget constraints appear most frequently, while fragmented ownership across teams can complicate coordination among contact center and customer experience, IT and communications, and business operations. Leadership support becomes critical once these issues emerge.

However, these barriers become easier to manage for organizations further along their agentic AI path with Salesforce Voice. Leadership buy-in, in particular, appears more manageable among Salesforce Voice users than among those still operating on Open CTI.

The implication is practical: delaying modernization does not reduce organizational friction. In many cases, it may increase internal decision cycles and slow migration execution.

Commercial Expectations for Agentic AI

Agentic AI offers significant investment returns, but expectations and outcomes do not always align.

Organizations pursuing agentic AI often expect rapid gains in both operational efficiency and customer experience. The survey data shows that investment returns are achievable, but it does not appear evenly across every metric.

The clearest improvements show up in operational performance metrics where AI is embedded directly into workflows, which Salesforce Voice provides. Measures tied to time and cost improve significantly when agentic AI is in place.

Operational (with AI vs. without AI):

Cost per interaction (net score): 93.0 vs. 65.16

Average handle time (net score): 91.63 vs. 64.52

After-call work (net score): 106.97 vs. 86.75

Experience metrics such as CSAT and NPS, however, can sometimes be slightly overestimated in early expectations, as the following data show.

Experience (with AI vs. without AI):

CSAT (net score): 106.90 vs. 110.32

NPS (net score): 103.55 vs. 105.26

The contrast reinforces an important lesson for leaders building agentic AI business cases. The technology produces the strongest and most predictable returns when their efforts focus on operational workflow improvements that can be measured and scaled.

Taken together, the findings reinforce a practical point. Agentic AI can deliver meaningful ROI, but the outcomes depend on implementation quality, stable integrations, and workflows that allow AI to operate reliably at scale.

Future-Proofing Telephony for Agentic AI

Migration momentum is already building across the market.

For survey respondents now using Salesforce Open CTI, 55% report their migration to Salesforce Voice is either underway or an active initiative. Here is a breakdown of the survey’s findings:

Currently migrating: 14%

Actively exploring migration: 41%

Early conversations underway: 27%

Planning migration outside Salesforce ecosystem: 14%

No intent to migrate: 4%

This distribution represents the strongest sense of urgency in the data set. Among respondents, 82% report deciding to migrate to Salesforce Voice. Now the overarching question becomes how to address the migration challenges they face, such as integration (72%), securing necessary budgets (52%), and security concerns (44%).

Expected outcomes from agentic AI modernization are also consistent across respondents. Buyers cite improved customer experience, easier scaling, and a simpler agent environment as among the key milestones they aim to achieve.

Designing the Human–AI Workflow

Measurable returns begin when agentic AI becomes operational.

The clearest path to measurable agentic AI returns runs through expert-driven workflows — where agents and AI interact at scale. Respondents consistently ranked outcomes tied to operational execution as the most important signals of agentic AI progress. Examples include quality assurance across interactions, faster resolution, and reduced handling time.

These priorities highlight where AI stops being an innovation initiative and becomes part of how customer service and supporting contact centers operate. The survey findings point in the direction CX buyers would expect.

That is, within the first year of deployment, respondents report the following improvements:

After-call work improvement (net score): 98.3

Average handle time improvement (net score): 79.9

Cost per interaction improvement (net score): 80.8

At the same time, they assigned the following importance ratings about which workflow outcomes matter most:

QA on 100% of calls: 7.6 out of 9

24/7 actionable resolution: 7.5 out of 9

Reduced average handle time: 7.4 out of 9

These results highlight why telephony architecture matters at this stage. Workflow improvements depend on stable integrations, reliable reporting, and an agent environment where AI assistance enhances productivity without introducing new friction.

Overcoming the Foundational Hurdles

Migration readiness exposes structural barriers.

For many organizations, the urgency of telephony modernization will be framed around the retirement of Open CTI on February 28, 2028.

As mentioned, awareness is uneven across the market: 40% of survey respondents were unaware of this significant date despite many relying on Open CTI as their telephony solution for their Salesforce environment.

But Open CTI’s sunset date is not the only issue its users face. When organizations begin preparing to migrate to Salesforce Voice, survey respondents reported facing foundational challenges including these top-ranked:

Integration challenges: 72%

Budget constraints: 52%

Security, verification, and fraud concerns: 44%

Data architecture and availability: 42%

These issues are not peripheral technical details. They represent the operational foundation required to deploy and scale agentic AI workflows that involve sensitive data and complex customer journeys.

Respondents also ranked the difficulty of these foundational challenges with leadership buy-in emerging as the highest with a 6.8/9 average, followed by data architecture/availability and security concerns at 6.5/9 and 6.3/9, respectively.

The Open CTI Deadline

The retirement of Salesforce Open CTI in early 2028 is not just a technical deadline—it’s a wake-up call for businesses still relying on legacy systems. According to results shared in this study, 82% of Open CTI users are already exploring or actively migrating to Salesforce Voice and a further 14% are considering a shift from Salesforce as a result. This migration is not optional, but the choices that you make are essential.

The Risk of Legacy Systems

Legacy platforms, while once effective, now struggle to meet the demands of omnichannel engagement, real-time orchestration, and AI scalability demanded by your customers. If you delay modernization, you risk falling behind competitors who are already leveraging next-generation CX technologies to deliver faster, smarter, and more personalized service.

Expanding What CX Can Achieve

Agentic CX has fundamentally expanded what you can achieve. No longer confined to pilots or basic automation, agentic CX enables businesses to orchestrate complex workflows, predict customer needs, and deliver proactive, personalized experiences at scale. For example, organizations leveraging agentic CX report a 30% reduction in average handle time and a 20% increase in first-contact resolution. This is the art of the possible: transforming CX from reactive problem-solving to proactive value creation.

The Strategic Benefit

Uniting CRM, contact center, and AI into a single, scalable platform can help you achieve:

Faster Resolutions: Reduced handle times and higher first-contact resolution rates.
Happier Customers: Seamless, personalized experiences that build loyalty.
Engaged Teams: Empowered agents who can focus on empathy and high-value interactions.
Operational Excellence: Scalable automation that drives efficiency and reduces costs.

In the 12 months after adopting agentic AI in Service Cloud [now Agentforce Service], we tracked reductions in average handle time, faster first-contact resolution, lower case backlog, and higher agent throughput, showing meaningful gains in efficiency, responsiveness, and overall support capacity."

 Business / Operations Buyer, Healthcare, Salesforce Voice

A Structural Transformation

The seven themes in this analysis show that agentic AI adoption is not a feature upgrade. It represents a structural transformation spanning production deployment, organizational alignment, telephony modernization, workflow design, and commercial strategy. Sustained CX improvements and investment returns will require these elements to function as an integrated system.

The Cost of Delaying Modernization

As agentic AI becomes prevalent across the customer service industry, organizations that modernize their voice architecture sooner will scale AI-driven workflows faster than those that delay. Slow movers will still need to follow early adopters to remain competitive and cost-efficient, but delaying increases the risk of confronting the same migration work later under tighter timelines.