Solving the Specialized AI Paradox: How UCXM Unifies the Multiagent Future

By Yaniv Masjedi, Chief Marketing Officer at Nextiva

Business leaders should heed a warning from Gartner before they pour significant capital into new technology this year.

In total, AI spending is forecast to reach $2.5 trillion in 2026, a 44% jump from last year, the business insights company says. But a big chunk of that spending could exacerbate a problem businesses are trying to fix.

Gartner’s report, “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2026,” says technology leaders face a pivotal year, in which “disruption, innovation and risk are accelerating at unprecedented speed.” The changes underway involve “more than technology shifts — they are catalysts for business transformation, demanding a C-Level response.”

One of the biggest changes is an explosive new level of interest in multiagent systems. Gartner found a whopping 1,445% increase in inquiries over a year ago. “Multiagent systems (MAS) use collections of specialized AI agents that collaborate to complete complex workflows,” the report explains.

Often, these systems are “narrowly specialized,” Gartner notes. That seems to offer big benefits. Executives considering tech investments like the idea of having tools trained to carry out hyper-specific functions relevant to their industry and their daily operations.

But these specialized tools all too often don’t play well with others. If organizations go on a spending spree for lots of different tools, they end up with even more data silos. The proliferation of these tools increases “coordination complexity,” Gartner says.

In general, the more systems a business adds to its tech stack, the more silos its information gets stuck in. One of your units might love how quickly a tool processes the information it needs, but those results often remain hidden from the rest of your company.

Businesses are already trying to end data silos. The last thing they need is to create new ones. So they‘re facing a paradox: Specialized agents meant to solve complex problems end up creating new ones by fragmenting the data they were meant to master.

Fortunately, there's good news. It doesn’t have to be this way. Since my company, Nextiva, offers a multiagent system, I know that businesses can have the best of both worlds. They need a unified platform that anchors these agents.

Unification with Expertise

There should be no competition between domain expertise and information sharing. AI has the power to combine both advantages in one.

Gartner describes this as being a “synthesist.” Businesses can orchestrate “diverse technologies to create adaptive, intelligent ecosystems that drive innovation across workflows, products and experiences,” the firm says. It cites “unified software stacks” and recommends that an organization “favor unified platforms.”

The best business communication platform is a unified customer experience management (UCXM) platform. When built right, it offers a wide array of systems designed for complex tasks relevant to any given industry, from financial services to legal, hospitality, facilities management and more.

A unified customer experience management platform also automatically combines information into a “single source of truth.” Everyone across the company can access and add to the record in real time. That way, all functions work with the same information. The platform also redacts and anonymizes where necessary for privacy and security.

A UCXM platform operates at any scale, making it the best unified communications system for large organizations, smaller businesses and startups.

Customer-centricity

We designed our multiagent system to do all this in the most impactful way: by putting customers front and center. “Unified communication” can be a hollow promise if it doesn’t optimize the customer experience.

When you interact with a customer across any channel, your cloud communications technology should operate based on a deep, detailed knowledge of both the customer and the topic at hand. To do that, it must know about every interaction the customer has had with your brand, across every touchpoint, and incorporate data about how similar issues have been resolved for other customers.

Gartner is right to warn people about “coordination complexity” in their tech stacks. Fortunately, UCXM offers coordination simplicity.

With a well-designed, AI-powered UCXM platform, businesses can achieve more specialization, greater collaboration, and the best customer experiences they’ve ever had. It’s a safer, smarter investment -- and paves the way for a more successful year ahead.