AudioCodes on Voice AI Adoption and Channel Growth

Enterprises are investing heavily in AI, but many still struggle to turn experimentation into measurable business results.

That gap creates an opportunity for channel partners to guide adoption, integrate AI into complex communications environments, and address governance risks such as shadow AI.

In a Q&A with Channel Insider, Mitch Hershkowitz, vice president of channel sales for North America at AudioCodes, discussed how partners can build voice AI practices, improve customer outcomes, and position themselves as long-term AI advisors.

Where do channel partners fit into helping customers move from AI experimentation to measurable outcomes?

Right now, every enterprise is looking at AI and asking the same question: how do I get a return on this investment? From the perspective of voice AI, we find that this is true whether a company is investing in Microsoft, Zoom, or any number of specialized AI vendors.

Partners have a powerful role to play in helping enterprises successfully introduce AI-enabled tools. They know the environment, they know the stack, and they’re the ones who can translate a pilot into something that actually changes how a business runs.

Our role as a vendor is to make sure partners have more than a product to sell. The conversation is moving away from “Here’s a feature” and toward “Here’s how this drives recurring revenue for the partner and improves operational efficiency for the customer.” When partners can connect AI capabilities to a measurable outcome, that’s when experimentation turns into adoption.

Beyond deploying AI tools, what kinds of conversations should partners be having with customers today?

The technology is rarely the hard part anymore. The hard part is change management – helping an organization actually adopt something new, and not just install it. 

Partners need to have conversations about adoption: Who on the customer side owns the initiative? How will end users actually use the new tool in their day-to-day work? What does success look like six months or a year from now, rather than just at go-live?

They also need to be discussing integration. Most of our customers aren’t dealing with one platform. They may have three, four, or five different communications systems, and they don’t always know how to make them work together. This is where the partner’s knowledge of the customer’s full environment really comes into play.

With voice AI being an opportunity for partners, what are the biggest opportunities you’re seeing in that space?

Voice AI is exciting because it’s fundamentally vendor agnostic and is all about bringing the power of the customer experience, regardless of what contact center platform sits underneath. 

If a customer is on Genesys, NICE, or Five9, we can add value on day one. And if they migrate to something else tomorrow, that value moves with them. That’s a very different proposition from a tool that becomes a stranded investment the moment a customer changes platform.

For partners, that’s the opportunity: They can introduce voice AI into a deal without needing to wait for a customer’s broader platform decision, and without becoming disposable when that decision changes.

The specific use cases are broad, too. It could be click-to-call capability for a customer selling on their website who needs to connect prospects to a live agent quickly. It could be text-to-speech for a company serving a global customer base without agents who speak every language their customers need or even voicebots built on our platform that handle first-tier interactions before routing to a human.

Increasingly, the goal is ultimately to help a customer’s contact center integrate with the other communications platforms they’re already running. A lot of enterprises are juggling multiple systems that were never designed to talk to each other, and that integration work is exactly where a partner can prove their value. 

Voice AI is an area where they can rely on vendor solutions architects to help carry that technical load, which means the partner can take on more voice AI opportunities without needing to grow their own team at the same pace.

What advice would you give partners looking to help customers successfully adopt voice AI while minimizing disruption?

Start with what’s already working and build around it rather than ripping it out. Voice AI doesn’t require a customer to abandon their existing contact center investments. It should sit on top of and enhance what’s already there. This lowers the risk for the customer.

The other piece of advice is to lean on vendor expertise for technical enablement. A lot of partners only have a small team dedicated to any one solution, and they can’t scale that on their own. 

Working with solutions architects who specialize in integration work means the partner can focus on the customer relationship and the business outcome, while the vendor supports the heavy technical lifting.

What should IT leaders look for when evaluating AI solutions that will need to integrate into a complex enterprise environment?

Look past the feature list and ask how the solution actually gets supported once it’s live. A lot of enterprises evaluate AI tools on capability alone, but the harder question is who’s going to help your teams integrate it and keep it running and evolving as your environment changes. 

That’s where the partner and vendor ecosystem behind a solution matters as much as the technology itself.

Security and governance also deserve more attention than they typically get in the early evaluation stage. We’ve seen this pattern with every wave of cloud technology: People introduce their own tools outside of what IT has sanctioned, whether that’s a personal note-taker or an AI assistant nobody vetted. 

IT leaders should be asking upfront how a solution handles compliance recording requirements, data handling, and the regulatory obligations specific to their industry, rather than discovering gaps after it’s already in employees’ hands.

Looking ahead, how do you see the relationship between AI, unified communications, and customer experience evolving over the next few years?

Communications itself is becoming an AI platform. We’re already seeing this in specific use cases: higher education institutions using meeting intelligence to improve student retention and graduation outcomes; healthcare and government organizations exploring compliance and recording requirements; and contact centers layering voice AI on top of existing platforms to enhance customer experience and business outcomes.

Over the next few years, I expect the conversation to shift further from “Which tools do we buy?” to “How do we operationalize AI across our entire communications environment?” That’s a much bigger opportunity for partners than any single product sale.

What advice would you give channel partners that want to position themselves as trusted AI advisors rather than simply technology resellers?

It’s important to shift the conversation from products to outcomes. Most partners carry a portfolio with many manufacturers and software providers in it. But the partners who succeed are the ones who can walk into a customer interaction and talk about business transformation.

That also means investing in vertical expertise. A pitch built around a single higher-ed use case, for example, is far more valuable to a partner than a generic technical briefing, because it gives them language their customer already understands.

If you could leave enterprise leaders with one piece of advice about getting real value from their AI investments, what would it be?

Adoption is the differentiator. Plenty of organizations have already invested in AI-enabled platforms. The real question is whether they’ve successfully integrated it into their daily operations in a way that changes business outcomes.

Work with partners who can help you get them from “We bought it” to “Our people actually use it and our business results show it.”