Chapter 6
Communications infrastructure satisfaction is the #1 predictor of AI deployment success. This variable consistently outperforms all others across every statistical method applied to this dataset (correlations, regression models, and cross-tabulations). Not the budget. Not the AI maturity. Not the guardrail sophistication.
Investment alone isn’t enough. In AI customer communications, it all comes down to the infrastructure. And that’s where the race will get decided.
The correlation between infrastructure satisfaction and AI deployment confidence is 0.52 – the strongest relationship across 4,656 variable pairs analyzed in this study. Put simply: How an organization feels about its communications infrastructure is a better predictor of AI success than its investment level, guardrail maturity, or how long it has been deploying AI.
Yet despite 87% rating high-performance communications infrastructure as essential or very important, most organizations say their current provider falls short in at least one meaningful area. 42% report insufficient reliability, 37% cite limited multi-channel capabilities, and 32% mention lack of AI platform integrations.
The gap between what enterprises need and what they currently have is where most of the findings in this report originate.
of enterprises rate high-performance communications infrastructure as essential or very important to their AI strategy. (Sinch, 2026)
of respondents report insufficient reliability for AI at scale from their current provider. (Sinch, 2026)
of respondents cite limited multi-channel capability from their current provider. (Sinch, 2026)
of respondents report a lack of AI platform integrations from their current provider. (Sinch, 2026)
The issue isn’t how much is being spent. It’s where the money is going. And for most engineering teams, it’s going to building safety infrastructure that the communications platform should already provide natively.
For many of those failures, the root cause is one layer below the governance program. Our research shows that more than half of enterprises (55%) are custom-engineering the ability to preserve customer context when someone switches channels – from chat to voice, from WhatsApp to a phone call – because their platform doesn’t provide it natively.
When a customer has to repeat themselves to an AI agent, they’re not experiencing a model failure. They’re experiencing the infrastructure gap directly, and it’s your brand that pays the price.
Enterprises haven’t fully articulated that diagnosis yet, but their behavior suggests they’ve felt it. 86% have had active or exploratory conversations with alternative providers in the past 12 months, and only 4% have no plans to evaluate.
The two strongest triggers for switching providers confirm where the pain is. 91% of enterprises that have experienced a governance rollback have evaluated or are actively evaluating a new communications provider. And organizations that rate high-performance infrastructure as a top strategic concern are twice as likely.
The market isn’t necessarily shopping because it’s unhappy with a vendor. It’s shopping because AI ambitions have outgrown what the current infrastructure was built to handle.
VERTICAL SPOTLIGHT
Industries shopping for new providers are driven by either ambition or failure.
In financial services, the triggers are specific and measurable. Enterprises citing lack of AI integrations are 2.4x more likely to evaluate a new provider. Those flagging insufficient reliability are 1.4x more likely. The infrastructure gap has moved from general dissatisfaction to precise switching intent.
But not all evaluation is driven by failure. In retail, the most advanced operators – those with the highest deployment rates, highest confidence, and most mature guardrails – are also the most active shoppers: 57% are actively evaluating providers compared to just 10% of retail brands still in early-stage deployment. The organizations most actively shopping for a new provider are the ones already furthest ahead.
The infrastructure gap feels different depending on where you sit. Security leaders are the least satisfied with their security and compliance infrastructure, despite being closest to it. Marketing and CX leaders cite the most reliability shortcomings at 46%, and only 3% of product leaders – the most demanding buyers in the study – say their provider is not falling short.
Globally, though, the priorities are clear. When asked to rank criteria for evaluating new communications providers to power agentic interactions, reliability ranked first: 29% of respondents placed it top, ahead of global reach and compliance capability (23%), and ease of integration (18%).
Security and trust and multichannel capabilities close the top five, ahead of pricing. In fact, pricing ranks eight out of the nine factors evaluated in the survey.
Sinch data (2026) reveals reliability and uptime is the most important factor for 29% of respondents.
Good security architecture doesn’t ask whether to build controls like PII masking, rate limiting, and audit logging. It asks where. The right answer is both layers: platform-native first, with engineering teams adding controls on top. That’s defense-in-depth.
Building without a foundation means engineering teams aren’t making security decisions. Instead, they’re filling gaps, reactively, on every new agent deployment and every new channel. But when a solid foundation exists, these teams are able to build intentional controls on top of something that holds.
That’s where the architectural question becomes a roadmap question. When platform-native controls exist, engineering leaders can see what their team is actually building and assess what adds genuine protection, and what’s just reconstructing infrastructure the platform should already own. That determines whether engineering teams are building toward the next capability or just keeping the lights on.
“Every team needs to decide what controls belong at the platform layer and what their engineers should build on top, because the cost of building custom guardrails compounds over time, especially as the team moves through the product lifecycle. Each new agent, each new channel, each new deployment adds to the pile. And eventually you lose that momentum when it comes to outperforming on the market.”
THE REGIONAL VIEW
The infrastructure gap shows up in every region, but differently. North America is the most satisfied region and is also the most active buyer market. EMEA organizations – the least satisfied on every infrastructure dimension – trail on provider evaluation, with the wave of switching activity still ahead of them.
You’ve seen the data. Now it’s time to act on it. Three questions worth taking into your next leadership review:
• How much of your engineering team’s time is going toward building guardrails from scratch versus building the next customer experience?
• If those guardrails fail in a live customer interaction, would you know before it becomes a trust problem?
• And is your communications provider built for what you’re planning to deploy in the next 12 months, or for what you shipped 18 months ago?
The findings in this report point to where your priorities should sit for the year ahead.
