The Best Contact Center Infrastructure: The 2026 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

Research firm Gartner has seen the market for on-premises contact center infrastructure shrink over the past few years as companies opt instead for cloud-based options. Other research and analyst firms have seen the same trend, noting that the contact center-as-a-service market has grown rapidly in recent years. The Business Research Company, for example, expects cloud contact centers to grow from $7.9 billion in 2025 to $9.4 billion this year, at a compound annual growth rate of 18.8 percent, and to reach $18.8 billion in 2030, at a compound annual growth rate of 19 percent. This growth, it said, can be attributed to remote agent adoption, artificial intelligence-driven automation, personalization of customer interactions, and the growth of digital customer channels.

Systems are also moving past basic chatbots toward autonomous AI agents capable of end-to-end task resolution. Buyers also prioritize platforms supporting intelligent routing, intent detection, and real-time agent assist.

The Top Five

Being part of Amazon gives Amazon Web Services’ Connect contact center suite some real advantages, including a strong cloud architecture, powerful AI capabilities, seemingly endless scale, and huge investment potential. Its “AI-native architecture, consumption-based pricing, and cloud data gravity make it the natural choice for enterprises assembling their own agent stack on top of carrier-grade infrastructure,” says Derek Top, a vice president and research director at Opus Research. “The company’s aggressive investment in the Connect product has allowed it to grow into a system with market-leading capabilities,” asserts Max Ball, a principal analyst at Forrester Research.

Five9 has undergone a major executive overhaul under new CEO Amit Mathradas, who took the reins in February. A month earlier it signed a groundbreaking deal with Google Cloud to launch a joint Enterprise Customer Experience AI solution combining the Five9 Intelligent CX Platform with Google’s Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience, Gemini models, and Vertex AI to unify contact center workflows, analytics, and AI assistance. Analysts took notice of both these developments. “The new leadership and Google partnership are really taking hold at Five9, upleveling both its value proposition and customer delivery,” says Rebecca Wettemann, founder and CEO of Valoir. Top says the company is “positioned to own the real-time decision and escalation loop,” while Ball hails it not just for “strong core contact center capabilities,” but also for “a focus on extending value to customers through their investment in an agentic framework that provides a variety of AI services.”

Genesys surpassed the $2 billion annual recurring revenue milestone for its Genesys Cloud platform in 2025, making it the first contact center-as-a-service vendor to achieve this record. The company has since continued its rapid expansion and is using some of that capital to build out its AI capabilities. “Genesys provides a broad solution and has invested significantly in AI across the board,” Ball observes, noting that it also “provides strong analytics capabilities and partners in a variety of ways to enhance their offerings.” Genesys, Top says, has “the deepest field-proven orchestration story, with agent copilot, predictive routing, AI scoring, and agentic virtual agents delivering documented outcomes.”

NiCE completed its acquisition of conversational AI technology provider Cognigy a year ago, and that deal solidified its top spot in the contact center infrastructure market. Its CXone suite was already an industry leader, and it’s only gotten better. “NiCE has always differentiated with a broad offering set,” Ball says. “The company has a strong overall AI story that has been enhanced with the acquisition of Cognigy. As a result, “CXone Mpower is now a complete AI-era platform,” Top adds.

Talkdesk has invested heavily in its contact center technology in the past year or so, and that has moved it into an industry leadership position this year. “Talkdesk’s investment in vertical solutions is deeper than others in the market,” Ball observes. “The company is also investing heavily in its AI solutions and agentic AI framework.” As a result of those investments, Talkdesk has advanced with “AI-first innovation velocity, vertical execution playbooks, and prebuilt, industry-specific workflows that translate agentic ambition into deployable outcomes,” according to Top.

Ones to Watch

ContentGuru, RingCentral, Salesforce, Verint, Zoom