Can AI Turn Workplace Chat Into Revenue? These Companies Think So
From Zoom to Slack, AI is turning workplace talk into strategic insight — and a competitive edge.
When a multimillion-dollar deal falls apart, it's easy to begin a postmortem from the boardroom. But, in many cases, the warning signs often begin in chat threads that get ignored. It could be a missed message, or a client's tone shift, or even a subtle concern raised on WhatsApp that was never escalated.
In most companies, these conversational breadcrumbs — often rich with insight — rarely make it into CRM systems or dashboards. And yet they carry valuable intelligence on critical business insights like why a deal soured, what a customer really felt, or how a competitor was named and shrugged off.
That's the problem communication intelligence — a growing category of enterprise AI that interprets human dialogue in real time — wants to solve. It's part of a shift toward what industry analysts call agentic AI. According to Grand View Research, the global enterprise agentic AI market was valued at $2.59 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 46.2% through 2030. For more context, that translates to a projected market size of nearly $30 billion by 2030 — a big signal that demand for proactive, decision-making AI is accelerating across industries.
Dima Gutzeit, founder and CEO of LeapXpert — the communications intelligence company that recently acquired messaging AI startup StartAdam — explained in an interview that valuable business insights often hide in plain sight within everyday conversations. 'A wealth advisor discussing deal details with a high-value client via WhatsApp typically had limited ability to share that context with their team. Communication intelligence changes that,' Gutzeit noted.
For companies that communicate externally across channels like WhatsApp, iMessage and email — and internally on collaboration platforms like Teams or Slack — there's never been a more urgent need to harmonize the silos that dominate modern communication. It's no longer enough to simply store conversations; organizations must now better understand them, govern them and act on them.
LeapXpert is not the only vendor tapping into this trend. Others include Moveworks, which uses generative AI to support workplace communication; Observe.ai, which helps contact centers analyze agent performance; and Cognigy, which automates conversation flows across customer service teams. While their use cases differ, the underlying thesis is similar: Enterprise conversations are full of data — if only you can capture, interpret and govern it.
Business leaders have long invested in business intelligence dashboards and CRMs — customer relationship management systems — to extract value from structured data. But the bulk of human communication happens elsewhere, in channels never built for analysis. That disconnect is creating so many blind spots, according to Gutzeit.
'If a company isn't governing consumer-grade tools like WhatsApp or Signal, it's leaving a huge risk in its knowledge and compliance management,' he told me. The cost, he continued, is more than regulatory exposure; it also makes teams duplicate work, lose situational awareness and miss high-value signals from clients.
Communication intelligence aims to fix this by using AI to interpret conversation data as it happens — flagging risks, detailing key themes, or summarizing action items into CRM records. Done right, it turns daily chatter into strategic feedback. But done the wrong way, it could move an organization's communication channels from chaos to anarchy.
LeapXpert's AI layer, Maxen, is one of a growing field of agentic AI tools that don't just respond to queries but proactively participate in workflows. That means suggesting next steps, reminding employees to follow up, or detecting compliance violations in real time.
'Agentic AI actively participates in conversations like a smart assistant,' explained Gutzeit. 'It summarizes key points, logs them into CRMs, and enables real-time collaboration — all without manual effort.'
The broader enterprise AI ecosystem is headed in this direction. For example, Zoom AI companion now offers real-time meeting summaries and sentiment tracking. Microsoft's AI copilot is also embedding conversational intelligence into Teams. But while copilot and Zoom are great AI tools for internal use of one platform, Maxen takes a different approach, functioning like copilot but for all your channels in one place, whether internal or external.
For many business leaders, the question is no longer whether AI can understand dialogue. It's now more about what to do with that understanding.
In highly regulated industries like finance and healthcare, communication intelligence also offers a pathway to compliance. AI tools can flag language that violates policy, surface disclosures, or create audit trails across consumer messaging platforms.
But there's also a fine line between governance and overreach. Many AI skeptics and critics have raised concerns that deep analysis of workplace conversations could blur ethical boundaries, especially when AI summaries misinterpret tone or context.
To address this, vendors are building in transparency features. Maxen, for example, anchors every AI summary to source threads so that users can verify claims. 'Nuance is preserved through multiple layers of verification,' Gutzeit noted. 'Summaries quote directly from Slack, Teams, WhatsApp and CRM systems.'
As vendors race to build agentic AI tools that scale, integration and context will be key differentiators. LeapXpert's acquisition of StartAdam, for instance, adds Slack-to-WhatsApp bridging, Discord support and native syncing with Salesforce, HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics. The idea isn't just to govern communication but to also make it intelligent enough to drive decisions.
As Gutzeit noted, that shift will eventually make communication intelligence as essential as CRMs or BI tools — a bold claim when you think about it, but one that may likely happen. 'Rather than just reporting sales numbers, leaders will increasingly say: 'Here's what our client conversations told us about what's coming next.''
It's not hard to imagine a near future where strategic planning doesn't begin with spreadsheets but with transcripts, where what was said, how it was said and who said it becomes a company's most valuable data.
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