2025: Innovating at Warp Speed

When we started Dialpad, our mission was simple, “make business communications great.” It obviously wasn’t great or we would have never left our great jobs at Google working on Google Voice to go attack this opportunity. We looked at all the competitors in the space and saw legacy tech, built for a world that no longer made sense. We believed we would win by being the most innovative company in the world in this market. It was a big bet then (as most enterprise CIOs didn’t even trust the cloud for their email, let alone their phones), but we believed eventually every business would move to the cloud for their communications (vs. on premise) because it added so much flexibility and productivity to any business (our first billboards were about “Work from Anywhere” and “Kill the Deskphone”).

We built the first entirely cloud based platform in the industry. We won TechCrunch Disrupt. We added every feature and product into that single, beautiful, cloud platform that you could imagine: voice, video, messaging, social, contact center solutions, sales team solutions, workforce management, and of course, real time AI way back in 2018.

As I look back on all the innovations, features, products, releases and bug fixes of 2025, that incredible pace of innovation is unmatched by any of our competitors. They move slowly, they got fat in a world where innovation wasn’t valued, they are held back by legacy platforms that have had a number of incongruous products bolted onto them via one off acquisitions.  

Not us. We push new builds of our products every single week. We continually innovate. We will never face “the Innovator’s Dilemma" as we live for innovation. When we acquire companies, we acquire modern companies built the same way as us that are quickly added to the core of our platform. 

As we look at the incredible opportunity for the Agentic future that truly begins in 2026, I know for a fact that we are ready for it and here to win.

Constant Innovation

“Constant Innovation” isn’t just a slide in a deck. It’s 283 entirely new features launched in 2025 and 9,165 improvements, bug fixes and tweaks to existing products to ensure they continue to adapt and provide great value for our new and existing customers. Check out our 2025 year in numbers here.

We’re grateful for the recognition along the way: 

• Dialpad was named a Visionary in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for UCaaS. 

• We received the first‑ever Honorable Mention in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for CCaaS. 

• We were also honored on the Inc. 5000, reflecting 141% three‑year growth. 

• We were ranked #38 of the Cloud 100, measuring the best SaaS private companies in the world. 

The real headline, though, is staying true to that original mission to make business communications great and truly living that and caring about that every moment of every day.

AI Agents and the DAART Team

All of the work that came before was just a prelude to the biggest announcement of the year, which was launching Dialpad’s Agentic Agents for Customer Support, which we announced in October. While others were dithering on whether Agentic would actually work, we set about building a startup inside of Dialpad, to go build this. We put together the DAART (Dialpad Agentic AI in Real Time) and their mission was to dedicate 100% of their time taking all the great AI capabilities we had in house already, and use that and our large moat of proprietary training data to build the best Agentic AI solutions in the world. That team is now pretty massive and is working non-stop to bring these solutions to market (look for an announcement early Q1).  

We could not have pulled this off, at scale, had we not already been mastering real time AI since 2018. We have our own ASR (speech to text), our own Machine Learning (understanding the conversations), and our own SMALL LLM (DialpadGPT). We’re at 1 billion generative call summaries and have more than 12 billion minutes of conversations that have already run through our real time AI engines.  We were uniquely positioned and ready for this opportunity.

The Look Ahead: 2026 and the End of the Phone Tree

Here’s my prediction for 2026: you’ll never press a button on a business call again.

The era of “Press 1 for Sales” is over. It’s a yesteryear system. By the end of 2026 you should be able to dial any business phone number and talk to the company. Instead of “press 1 for Sales, press 2 for support” you should hear “hello, this is ABC Company, how can I help you?” and go from there, regardless of why you are calling (support, sales, inquiring about a job, needing to speak to the finance department, etc).

The best part is that it will only continue to improve. Every interaction will make the AI smarter and your human agents sharper. Coverage compounds. And guess what?  If the AI doesn’t know the answer or can’t handle your request, it will hand it off seamlessly to a human agent who will already know exactly why you called, what your issue is and will be immediately working to solve your problem without you ever having to repeat yourself.

What makes this work at scale is architecture: skills‑based agents, seamless human‑in‑the‑loop, and one data plane across calls, contact center, and collaboration. As agents permeate every call, meeting, and message, the UCaaS–CCaaS line disappears - and a single AI brain can finally drive outcomes everywhere.

To Our Customers and Partners

None of this happens without the 30,000+ customers and partners - like T‑Mobile, Google and Softbank - building with us every day. You’ve pushed us to prove that AI belongs in the real‑time flow of work, not bolted on after the fact. You’ve driven us to show the true value of automation before ever going live with it. You’ve requested and tested use cases and integrations that we’ve never done before. You are the reason we care so much about “making business communications great”...it literally improves your lives and your bottom line. We love that.

The future isn’t coming; it’s here. And it’s ready to act.

Craig Walker
CEO & Co‑Founder, Dialpad