How Sinch Sees AI Triggering The Biggest Communication Shift Since SMS

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What happens when the infrastructure behind nearly a trillion customer interactions every year starts becoming intelligent enough to hold conversations, understand context, and even make decisions on behalf of brands? Well, in a world where AI agents are beginning to speak directly with customers, how do businesses maintain trust, personalization, and that genuine human connection? Well, today, I'm joined by Robert Gershman from Cinch, a company quietly powering customer communication for more than a 175,000 businesses around the world. I'm talking everything from banks and airlines to retailers and delivery services. Cinch sits at the center of how modern businesses communicate through messaging, voice, email, and conversational AI.

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And my guest has a front row seat to one of the biggest shifts in modern business communication, so he will share his story there. But today, we'll also discuss why AgenTik AI could increase conversation volumes by three to five times and explore why voice is suddenly become relevant again in an AI era and how businesses are struggling to balance personalization with security and governance. And he'll also explain why different regions are evolving in completely different ways. For example, WhatsApp dominates markets like Brazil and India, and RCS is positioning itself as the next evolution of business messaging in the West. So we got a lot to get through today, such as the growing role of verified messaging, branded communication, in a world increasingly shaped by deepfakes, spoof voices, AI generated fraud.

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But the bottom line is consumers increasingly expect conversations to continue naturally across messaging, voice, devices, and platforms without losing any context along the way. But with fragmented systems and siloed data still creating problems for many organizations, Are you and your business truly ready for what comes next? Well, on that note, it's time for me to officially introduce you to today's guest. So thank you for joining me today. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?

[00:03:00] - [Speaker 1]
Sure thing. So my name is Robert Gersman. I'm the Chief Evangelist and Co Founder of Cinch. I'm also the Chairman of the Mobile Ecosystem Forum, the industry association for our business. So I'm one of the co founders who said Finch, we founded back in 2008 as SMS, a text messaging company, bootstrapped up to $100,000,000 and IPO ed then on NASDAQ here in Stockholm in 2015.

[00:03:29] - [Speaker 1]
So today, at about $3,000,000,000 turnover, we're one of the largest companies founded in Sweden this century together with Spotify and Klarna, about 4,000 people across 16 countries. What we do is we provide APIs and then connectivity to mobile operators, chat apps, e mail inboxes that enable businesses to communicate with their customers globally across all major communication channels, so basically messaging, voice, e mail. And in addition, we provide software on top of those APIs to make it easier for businesses to consume communication services. And more specifically, what I do, so the first ten years, I was MD for our messaging business or CPO, depending a little bit how we chose to organize ourselves. And after we brought in outside management in 2018, I've been our Chief Evangelist, a very free role in midfield.

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What does it mean? I work with the likes of Google, Meta, the mobile operators who kind of set the framework for our entire market and try to understand what they are doing, basically where the puck is going, try to influence them, if possible, to make sure that what they do ultimately is for the benefit of the market and all the companies that want to use mobile communications. And then kind of feed that back into our organization where I work with our leadership team to make sure they understand where the market is going, what strategy we should have, so we can continue to service our customers in the best possible way and get our strategy right. So that's a little bit of who is and what I do.

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And before we dive into all things Cinch, there's something I've got to shine a light on here. I recently spent a little time in Estonia, and I was learning the amount of unicorns that have came out of such a a small country with something like a million people there. And we look at Sweden. And, you mentioned some big names there. Obviously, Cinch is a big name, but and there's so many others alongside it as well.

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What what would you attribute the entrepreneurship, the innovation, the the big tech that comes out of Sweden? What is it that you do differently there, you think?

[00:05:48] - [Speaker 1]
I think it's a combination of many factors. I think culturally Sweden in general, Stockholm in particular, has a things that are modern are embraced. It's a very positive attitude towards doing things in new ways to change. So anything modern is good, almost to the extent that old things aren't. So there's a very progressive underlying culture in Sweden, which I think helps with driving innovation.

[00:06:19] - [Speaker 1]
I think the government in the 1990s were very early in deregulating telecoms, building out broadband, subsidizing home computers. So we had a generation, basically my generation and people somewhat younger than me, really growing up with computers and Internet. And then we had in the early well, in the .com era, a bunch of successful start ups. So you had role models where you could see and that inspired others to what is possible. And plus, you then also got them reinvesting into the ecosystem.

[00:07:05] - [Speaker 1]
So there was all of a sudden the access to capital, angels, seed funds, etcetera. So there's a combination of, I think, all of these things that got the ball rolling and then success breeds success in a way. And that's what I think has made kind of the secret sauce of why Sweden and Stockholm has become this kind of innovation hub.

[00:07:32] - [Speaker 0]
Yeah. And I think a lot of people forget here in 2026, everything's almost cashless now and public transport, etcetera. But you guys led the way, way before most countries had even thought of cashless, right?

[00:07:45] - [Speaker 1]
Yes. I think, I mean, Stockholm after London is, I would say, the start of capital of Europe. We can compete with London. London is the same size as all of Sweden and then some. But still, we I would say Sweden definitely punches above its weight.

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And just coming back to Cincha, you must have seen so many big changes throughout your career. So how have you seen business communication evolve from that simple messaging tools into AI powered customer engagement infrastructure that is now shaping how brands build trust and even loyalty? Tell me about that journey that you've been on.

[00:08:21] - [Speaker 1]
Yes. So really backing up the tape all the way to 2008, SMS was a means to customize your feature phone. So I don't know if you remember the crazy frog and all those purple dancing hippos and all of that good content that was around back then. This was kind of pre the smartphone era. So SMS was used to market this.

[00:08:49] - [Speaker 1]
And then you could also pay with text messaging. Simple entertainment services, would say, that's where SMS started. But gradually, blue chip enterprises started to understand the power of text messaging, that it really has global reach. You can reach any phone anywhere in a matter of seconds. It's very personal.

[00:09:12] - [Speaker 1]
So people tend to care what ends up on their in their messaging inbox. So gradually, banks, airlines, delivery companies, etcetera, started to adopt this technology. So SMS grew, but SMS has always been a one way medium. Yes, you can reply, but it's clunky at best. So even today, if I look at Singe, our traffic on the SMS side is probably 99% outbound from the business to the consumer, very little kind of conversations going on.

[00:09:48] - [Speaker 1]
Then we had the rise of chat apps. So WhatsApp being the most relevant in Europe and The Americas, and a bunch of different channels like Kakotalk, LINE, WeChat in East Asia. And they started as consumer apps, facilitating re conversations between individuals. But then probably ten years ago now, they started to open up for business communications. And all of a sudden, you had you had messaging channels that are rich, not just text, so really going from black and white TV to color TV, and also interactive out of the box.

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And businesses have gradually, I would say, embraced these channels. If you go to a place like Brazil or India, WhatsApp is huge for business complications. Whereas I would say, Europe has this middle position and places like America, Australia, where you have lower WhatsApp and penetration of other chat apps for business use and consumer use, they're kind of, I would say, laggards in this kind of transition from one way to interactive messaging. So that's where we are. And I still think it's a we're on the journey.

[00:11:12] - [Speaker 1]
The mobile operator and yes, and then the last chapter is the rise of new technology called RCS, a rich communication services, which essentially is a I would say, it's a co created technology between Google and the mobile operators, which ultimately will replace the native SMS inbox on our handsets without the consumer having to do anything. And the functionality, to make it simple, is more or less the same as WhatsApp. So rich media and interactivity out of the box. So that's going to be the mobile operator play in this new world. And then at least in the West, they will then compete with Meta for market share and mind share from how the businesses will want to communicate.

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And then if that's the connectivity layer, then on top of that, what becomes central is kind of personalization, trust, identity verification and then really delivering a seamless experience across these channels. So once kind of Meta and the mobile operators have gotten their act together and rolled this out, it's really for the enterprises to create delight delightful experiences for their customers on top of these rails. So yes, it's come a very long way from the Crazy Frog to today.

[00:12:40] - [Speaker 0]
And listening to you describe that journey there from 2008 and the Crazy Frog to 2026. It does feel like we've been on a very gradual journey. But as we've seen over the last two years alone, the big change now is that pace of technological change. It's really ramping up. And before sitting down with you today, I was reading that Cinch has predicted that AI agents will increase conversation volumes by three to five times across industries, which is a phenomenal shift.

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But what does that actually look like in practice for maybe a business leader listening? And are are most organizations technically prepared for billions of simultaneous context aware interactions because it feels like a massive change.

[00:13:23] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. It does. And the short answer is no, they're not. Right? I would think, first of all, things move at different speeds.

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AI has been moving extremely fast, whereas the communications infrastructure has not. As you say, I was at my first kind of GSMA sponsored thought leadership forum for RCS back in 2018. Google launched it as part of Android in 2015, and now it's ten years later. And even Meta, it's even though WhatsApp has moved fast, it still takes years for it to roll out. So AI very fast, comms infrastructure less so, I would say.

[00:14:05] - [Speaker 1]
So that's number one. Are businesses ready? No. So many organizations, they're still dealing with kind of fragmented systems, siloed customer data. So the real challenge here is to support the intelligent interactions is really to get this data layer sorted.

[00:14:29] - [Speaker 1]
Because only like that can they make sure that the conversations that they will be having with their customers feel authentic, are relevant, personalized for you as a consumer, a context aware, what conversations have you had previously with this brand rather than being kind of overly just automated and transactional. So ultimately, trust, I think, depends on the quality of these experiences. And I think it's shown in many in a lot of research that customer experience is ultimately why we, as consumers, kind of return to our favorite brands again and again and why we churn from brands that don't really get this right.

[00:15:18] - [Speaker 0]
And another prediction that stood out to me is the concept that AI agents are going to evolve from just cost saving tools into genuine growth engines. So how are you seeing businesses beginning to use these AI conversations to increase revenue, improve upselling opportunities, and create more valuable customer interactions? And one of the reasons I asked that is I know around every tech project now, there is that big ROI question, and we're focusing more on value and business outcomes, etcetera. So what are you seeing here?

[00:15:49] - [Speaker 1]
So maybe again, taking a step back, I would say businesses leverage communications for four main use cases. So marketing to drive more revenue, kind of customer updates to keep their customers informed, don't forget your doctor's appointment, your package has been delivered, identity and authentication. So all of those onetime passwords we get in order to sign up, sign in, approve transactions, etcetera. And then customer support. I have a question, I have a problem that I need the business to help me solve.

[00:16:24] - [Speaker 1]
So those are the four kind of main categories. So whereas automating support is very much around efficiency, cost savings, but also kind of creating a better customer experience when something has gone wrong. The other side of the house then is the more revenue driving part, where we're seeing businesses increasingly use AI conversations to personalize things like recommendations, reduce kind of purchase friction, create more commercially valuable customer interactions. And really, we think that the next phase of AI adoption from kind of the more operational use cases will be towards revenue growth and then ultimately conversion and improving kind of customer lifetime value.

[00:17:15] - [Speaker 0]
And VoiceAI really does feel like it's entering a completely new phase right now. And we've spent years hearing that younger consumers prefer messaging, and now Cinch believes voice will become the preferred channel for more complex conversations. So I've got to ask, why do you think voice is making such a strong comeback in this AI era that we find ourselves?

[00:17:36] - [Speaker 1]
So AI is really making voice interactions kind of more natural, contextual, responsive. And this is true particularly for complex or emotionally sensitive conversations with tone, nuance, empathy really matter. And I want to highlight, we think both will be relevant. I think what's changed with AI is not everything is going to go to messaging. Voice will have sort of a renaissance.

[00:18:05] - [Speaker 1]
So while younger consumers especially are highly comfortable with messaging, they also value kind of authentic human feeling interactions with brands and really particularly during high stakes, more personal moments where I think voice can create a stronger sense of connection and trust. And AI allows kind of enterprises to because ultimately, today, a contact center experience is typically not very enjoyable for any of us. But if you AI promises to create kind of infinitely scalable experiences, which means kind of wait times go towards zero for these kind of interactions, And you would have all knowing voice bots that both know anything and everything there is to know that's relevant about the company and their services and products. And your personal history with the company. And that combination then, we believe, will transform into excellent customer experience also across voice, which is a problem today.

[00:19:16] - [Speaker 0]
And I think in our personal lives, we all use apps such as Netflix and Spotify and pick up exactly where we left off seamlessly as we drift from phone to tablet to laptop. And I think as customers, we also increasingly expect those conversations to continue seamlessly across channels, devices, and touch points, etcetera. So how difficult is it, though, for organizations to create those seamless connected customer journeys with so many businesses still operating with fragmented systems and the infamous silo data problem too?

[00:19:49] - [Speaker 1]
Yes. I honestly think that this is probably one of, if not the biggest challenge for enterprises who ultimately create this delightful customer experiences. So many businesses very much still operated with fragmented legacy systems. And as you say, customers expect conversations to just continue seamless across channels and touch points and for the company to be context aware. So we're seeing organizations making progress.

[00:20:22] - [Speaker 1]
And the ones that do are focusing on unified customer data, integrated communications infrastructure and kind of connected customer journeys rather than having kind of isolated channels so that if you have a chat with, let's say, a messaging bot, but you need to kind of take the conversations further into a contact center and a human agent, those two need to link. You don't want to repeat everything that you told the bot and got help with from the messaging side in the voice conversation. And we're also seeing that deploying AI customer communication at scale is far more operationally complex than many organizations kind of initially expected. Our latest research found that 74% of enterprises, they've already rolled back or shut down an AI customer communications agent after deploying them due to governance failures. It's a lot of learning by doing right now and teasing problems.

[00:21:21] - [Speaker 1]
And what we then do is we provide the infrastructure and orchestration required to support the deployment at scale, built on then our global kind of messaging voice and then e mail APIs.

[00:21:34] - [Speaker 0]
And at Sync, you work with so many global brands across very, very different markets. And, again, I'm curious. Are companies finally realizing that their communication strategies cannot be standardized globally anymore, especially, I mean, listened to you earlier when platforms like WhatsApp dominate such some regions like Brazil and India, while RCA adoption grows elsewhere. Are they waking up to this that there is no one size fits all anymore?

[00:21:59] - [Speaker 1]
I think so. I think so. I think we have a lot of multinational companies as customers. And I would say today, they are very aware of the difference, different preferences in different markets. So for instance, we're dealing with a large Swedish apparel retailer in India, where they are crystal clear that they need to be on WhatsApp to be relevant.

[00:22:23] - [Speaker 1]
Whereas in America, America is actually the only market where MMS made it really big. It kind of never took off anywhere else. So there, if you want rich experiences today, MMS is often the go to, whereas Japan is all dominated by line. And I do think businesses are very cognizant of this, not just the domestic companies from those markets, but also the multinationals.

[00:22:51] - [Speaker 0]
And trust, of course, is something that feels like one of the big defining issues of the AI world, especially with deepfakes, spoofed voices and synthetic content becoming more and more convincing and difficult to tell the difference between. So how does verified messaging, branded communication, and secure authentication, how do these things become part of the customer experience rather than just a security layer in the background? How do you get that balance right?

[00:23:18] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. Again, going back to SMS, SMS has basically been it's been a fantastic medium, but security, I would say, hasn't been kind of its strongest aspect. It is way too easy for fraudsters to impersonate brands that we know and love. Yeah. The good thing is that both RCS and WhatsApp have much more rigorous kind of security measures in place.

[00:23:50] - [Speaker 1]
So before you are allowed as a company to leverage these channels and start messaging with your customers, you need to go through essentially a verification process where your you need to prove your identity to Meta or the mobile network. So everyone who is on these channels is vetted. Then the branding in the message itself is much, much clearer for the consumer. So you can see that it's NatWest or Wells Fargo or HSBC that you are interacting with a much higher certainty than today on SMS. You have your brand logo, colors, you have a company information page, all part of the kind of, yes, the experience when you are chatting with a brand.

[00:24:45] - [Speaker 1]
So as AI generated fraud then becomes more sophisticated because it's always an arms race when it comes to trust and security, these kind of visible trust signals, like verified messaging and branded communications, are kind of essential for customer confidence. So security, identity verification, authentication really has to be part of the overall customer experience rather than kind of simply a kind of background infrastructure.

[00:25:14] - [Speaker 0]
And another one of your predictions that I love at Cinch is that tomorrow's inboxes will reward relevance and punish generic outreach. And I think this is a big one. But do you think businesses fully appreciate just how quickly consumers are losing patience with irrelevant communication? And and and what is it that separates brands that will earn attention from those that just become digital noise that just gets deleted straight away?

[00:25:38] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. So as you say, consumers, they're becoming way less tolerant Yeah. Of generic kind of high volume communications. They treat it as spam, basically. So and they really increasingly expect relevance, personalization, and timing.

[00:25:52] - [Speaker 1]
And it really comes back to I always say that it's like right message at the right time on the right channel. So it really comes back to what we already spoke about. Businesses need to have their data layer in order. They need to understand the individual customer preference. And ultimately, kind of personalization at scale is really what you want to be aiming for as a company.

[00:26:21] - [Speaker 1]
And businesses will be very they will get the feedback through customer behavior. What are the kind of engagement levels that you're achieving on your, let's say, marketing campaign with consumers? You will be able to measure that and see just how successful you are or are not. So the brands that stand out, I think, will be the ones that communicate selectively, intelligently and with kind of clear value for you as an individual. One example, we have one of our customers, Nespresso, they recently used RCS in France to create an interactive conversational journey around its subscription service.

[00:27:07] - [Speaker 1]
And that delivered significantly higher engagement and commercial rates compared to kind of traditional SMS and e mail campaigns. So measuring the outcome is ultimately what I think how you measure success.

[00:27:22] - [Speaker 0]
And I think that is a powerful moment to end on so many big takeaways for business leaders listening. And for anyone that would like to find out more information, connect with you or your team, etcetera, find out more information about Cinch in general. Where would you like me to point everyone listening?

[00:27:37] - [Speaker 1]
Yes. So I think first port of call will be our website, cinch.com, where we have insights, research, updates and our newsroom. Then we're quite active on LinkedIn. So following our profile there makes sense. And then we're doing a kind of a World Cup campaign.

[00:27:57] - [Speaker 1]
We all love our football, which is long it's launching kind of alongside the tournament where Cinch will debut an AI powered tool that analyzes the football managers' communication styles and then tracks their use of cliches and recurring phrases across all the interviews and press conferences. And this the whole idea is the campaign will kind of generate real time insights and data throughout the tournament, showcasing how AI can be used to analyze communication patterns. So that's going be a bit of fun.

[00:28:31] - [Speaker 0]
Oh, that sounds absolutely fantastic. I will include links to everything you mentioned there, including that World Cup campaign. It's something I'll be monitoring closely throughout the competition too. But so many big takeaways from how business communication is undergoing possibly its biggest structural shift since SMS went global many, many years ago, and, of course, why voice in the agentic era matters more than ever. So I'll include links to everything there.

[00:28:57] - [Speaker 0]
I urge people listening to check that out. But more than anything, thank you for your time today, Robert.

[00:29:02] - [Speaker 1]
Thank you so much, Neil. Appreciate it.

[00:29:04] - [Speaker 0]
Wow. After listening to Robert there, one thing feels impossible to ignore. We're moving into an era where communication itself is becoming part of the AI stack. The infrastructure behind messaging and voice is no longer about connectivity, something bigger than that. It's becoming a real time decision layer shaping consumer trust, brand loyalty, and business outcomes.

[00:29:31] - [Speaker 0]
And what I found especially interesting was Robert's point that voice could actually experience a renaissance during the AI era rather than being replaced by messaging. And I think for years, businesses assumed that everything would move towards chat interfaces and text based automation. But as conversations become more complex and emotionally sensitive, voice could become the channel where brands can create stronger relationships and build greater trust. And I think there was a much wider lesson here about relevance in the conversation too because consumers, they're increasingly overwhelmed by generic communication, automated outreach, and digital noise. And it's the organizations that succeed over the next few years.

[00:30:17] - [Speaker 0]
They will probably be the ones that are not sending the most messages, but the ones sending the right message at the right moment with enough context and trust behind it to actually matter. And as AI agents become the first point of contact between brands and customers, how are you and your business gonna make sense of of all these interactions in a way that feels intelligent, secure, and genuinely human at the same time. Exciting times ahead, a lot of opportunities, and a lot of challenges, but I'd love to hear how you're dealing with these. As always, techtalksnetwork.com. There's 4,000 interviews there and also a lot of ways you can leave me a voice message or a DM.

[00:31:01] - [Speaker 0]
But I have taken up far too much of your time, so I'm gonna go now. I'll be back again tomorrow with another guest, but thank you for listening as always. Bye for now.