As I promised, I'm sharing some of my notes from Zendesk Relate 2026 in Denver, CO. The event, which was aptly titled "A Mile High, A Mile Ahead", had, unsuprisingly the prevalent theme of Agentic AI. Signage throughout the venue literally read "Hard launch agentic AI" and various flavors of that.
One of the key things I hoped to leave with was the ability to articulate the value of Local Measure joining the Zendesk team. For context: Local Measure built Engage for Amazon Connect - a full CCaaS layer on top of Connect - and their acquisition brings that native channel depth directly into the Zendesk ecosystem. With Zendesk Contact Center, the impact is evident.
Some of the key takeaways for me were around the current market landscape for Amazon Connect in the Contact Center. These included:
"Overlays are dying": The overlay model isn't the future. What's an overlay? A custom CCP built on the Amazon Connect Streams SDK - essentially a feature-extended agent softphone that sits on top of the connect CCP (figuratively). These made a lot of sense pre-Amazon Connect Agent Workspaces, especially for customers without a CRM that natively embedded the Amazon Connect CCP and needed added functionality. It's also clear that AWS has not prioritized feature parity between the Streams SDK and Agent Workspace. CRM tie-ins make this even more evident - Zendesk's native Amazon Connect integration and Salesforce's ever-evolving CTI adapter, SCV and CCaaS flavors both demonstrate that the embedded CRM experience is where the market is heading, not custom-built agent desktops. This makes the overlay a situation where custom overlays are chasing a moving target, and the ROI case is getting harder to make.
