Welcome to Reality. Leave Your "AI Magic" at the Door.

The AI hype train is moving at terminal velocity, but the tracks are missing. We have vendors pitching artificial general intelligence that will solve world peace, and executives panicking because they think a conversational wrapper around a large language model is a strategy. In the latest episode of CRMKonvos, Ralf sat down with Dan Miller, formerly of Opus Research to discuss something that actually matters: infrastructure. Specifically, we are talking about vCons, or Virtual Conversations. It is an IETF standard that threatens to finally bring architectural integrity to the chaotic mess we currently call conversational AI.

TL;DR

If you want to watch the full CRMKonvo, please go ahead here (optimized for smartphones) or here (optimized for tablets/computers).

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The "PDF Problem": Why Your Call Recordings Are Useless

For decades, the contact center has relied on the clunky mechanics of Automatic Call Distributors, green screen terminals, and audio recordings. As Dan rightly points out, a traditional call recording is essentially the conversational equivalent of a PDF. You get a static document or an audio file that you cannot easily manipulate, query, or extract meaningful context from. It captures one part of the conversation at a specific point in time, freezes it, and historically required overnight batch processing just to transcribe it for basic analytics.

These days, we have swarms of AI agents acting on our behalf, yet the enterprise plumbing remains grossly neglected. You are trying to deliver a data stream simultaneously with historical information about that stream to build a customer profile, but the underlying data format is a relic.

Enter the vCon: Plumbing Over Poetry

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is currently finalizing the vCon standard. While the W3C handles how things look on the web, the IETF handles the engineering guts that actually make communications possible. Think of a vCon as a standardized, portable container for a conversation, regardless of whether it happened via voice, text, messaging, or a mix of multiple media over time.

This container defines the content (the literal words spoken or written) and the metadata associated with it. It makes the conversation seamlessly available to CRM and other enterprise systems, CDPs, AI analytics engines, and CCaaS platforms. It is the foundation of the "conversational graph", a neural network-like web of nodes representing the people involved, their ideas, and the resources utilized. This is not sexy generative poetry; it is hardcore data plumbing.

And plumbing is what makes a house livable.

Flipping the Script: From B2C to C2B and the Consent Mandate

I have little interest in the standard B2C relationship where the business dictates the terms of engagement. Similar to MyTerms, the real power of the vCon lies in enabling a C2B (Customer-to-Business) model. The vCon container allows the customer to express preferences and attach explicit instructions regarding privacy and data usage.

Consider the right to be forgotten under the California Privacy Act or GDPR. If a customer wants their data scrubbed after a sensitive call with a pharmacy like Walgreens, the enterprise is obligated to comply. Traditional legacy systems cannot easily isolate what was said, identify the PII, and retroactively throw it out. A vCon makes it possible to pinpoint the exact container holding that interaction's content and instructions, providing an auditable trail for consent and compliance. As Dan noted, you can draw a hard line on what is permitted for AI training purposes based on the customer's explicitly captured preferences.

Revenue Acceleration: The Dealership Reality

Let us look at actual business cases instead of theory, or even science fiction. Dan highlights Strolid  and its spin-off Vconic, a company providing back-office support for automobile dealerships. By capturing conversations across a customer's entire lifecycle within vCons, a sales manager does not just see a phone number; they see a persistent, historical record.

When a customer calls, the system knows they previously inquired about an SUV, understands their past service issues, and detects if they are getting closer to a purchase decision. This leads directly to what Dan calls "revenue acceleration". It qualifies leads, moves deals forward, and stops the customer from feeling like an unknown entity every time they interact with your brand. If your system has had 500 phone calls with a customer and still does not know how they tick, your architecture has failed.

The Reality Check for Buyers: Three Mandates for Enterprise AI

If you are an enterprise buyer looking to invest in conversational AI for CX, stop looking at the shiny front-end and start inspecting the foundation. Here are your three mandates based on the vCon reality.

Fix Your Plumbing Before Buying More AI

Stop buying generative AI wrappers and start looking at your data infrastructure. You cannot train an intelligent system or a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) setup on dirty, siloed data. A standard like vCon provides the necessary container to make your conversational data portable, structured, and chronologically sound across all your systems. If your vendor's idea of data integration is dumping flat audio files into an AWS bucket, show them the door.

Consent is Not a Feature; It is a Baseline Requirement

With regulations like GDPR and the California Privacy Act, you must be able to audit, manage, and delete conversational data with surgical precision. Dan rightly identified "consent metadata" as the most critical non-optional field for enterprise CX. If your current vendor cannot pinpoint a specific multi-channel conversation and scrub the PII upon a customer's request, you are carrying massive, unnecessary compliance risk. Buy systems that respect the C2B dynamic.

Co-working is the Unavoidable Reality

We are not replacing human agents with autonomous swarms tomorrow, even though some are trying. The near future is about co-working. Agents and AI assistants must collaborate, and the AI needs accurate historical context to be useful. Do not fall victim to the "deer in the headlights" paralysis where you buy a disconnected AI tool just to appease the board. Define the playpen, establish the bumper cars, and ensure your human agents have standardized conversational memory (like vCons) to actually get the job done.

The news

IEE just released standard 7012-2025 for machine readable personal privacy terms, nicknamed MyTerms. MyTerms covers interactions and agreements between individuals and service providers they interact with on a network. It defines a way for personal privacy requirements to be expressed as standard-form contractual agreements. 

MyTerms is intended to replace today’s “notice and consent” pattern with a standardized, machine-readable contract handshake between an individual and a service provider. The standard considers individuals true first parties who can proffer privacy terms as contractual terms, typically through an automated agent acting on their behalf.

The system relies on a neutral, non-business entity that hosts a bounded set of standard-form privacy agreements. These agreements are designed to be understandable and usable in practice by humans and by machines. They must be available in plain-language human-readable form, maintain legally meaningful wording, and also exist in machine-readable structured formats with stable identifiers so software agents can select and process them reliably.

When an individual, or their agent, proposes one of these agreements to a service provider, this service provider has a deliberately constrained set of responses to allow model scalability. The service provider may accept the proposed agreement, offer one alternative agreement from the same bounded roster, or reject the proposed agreement. The standard does not expect open-ended negotiation beyond that single alternative choice.

If the service provider accepts, the agreement is recorded so that both sides retain matching, immutable copies, including contextual metadata such as time, date, and location, to support later retrieval, audits, and dispute resolution. In parallel, service providers are required to publicly disclose which of the standard agreements they are willing to accept, which allows agents and users to choose compatible terms upfront rather than repeating consent interactions on every visit.

The bigger picture

(Unwanted) tracking on the web is still the norm although a “consent notice” regime has been established since the EU GDPR became enforceable on May 25, 2028. MyTerms is a direct response to regime with its associated high operational cost for operators, high cognitive load for users, and weak enforcement of user intent (preference signals can be ignored). 

On top of this, many website operators and service providers still manage to keep their tracking-based advertising business running, by ignoring GDPR, by hiding behind “legitimate interests” or by simply making it very hard for people to not agree to tracking and sharing personal data.

Similarly, “Do Not Track” or Global Pricacy Control largely depend on website operators not ignoring the request headers sent by browsers to them. As a result, in spite of all these good intents, the consumer is still at an a very weak position. Privacy is granted as a grace and not as a requirement. The European Union’s Digital Market Act is aimed at large providers and does not address individuals’ right to have their privacy respected by these players. 

My analysis and point of view

MyTerms argues for restoring equity by letting people participate as real contracting parties online.

It addresses some of the problems mentioned above by defining a framework that provides individuals with a means to proffer their own terms in a networked world. These terms, if agreed upon by a service provider, become an enforceable contract.

In my book, this is a very good idea. It is a serious attempt to move privacy from the current one-sided, unenforceable “notice and consent” regime towards a two-party, auditable agreements that machines can execute at scale. It essentially shall make sure that negotiations about customer data are held eye to eye. 

For customers, it can reduce friction and restore agency. For businesses, it can reduce compliance chaos, lower dispute risk, and enable higher-quality value exchange (especially around buying intent), but only if implementation is made cheap, the agreement roster is tightly governed, and adoption is driven with real incentives rather than moral arguments.

From a CX perspective, there are a number of clear positives for customers. The more than annoying banner/toggle circus that we see these days gets replaced by a cleaner privacy contract handshake, which means less consent fatigue and less friction overall. As terms are to be legible, there is a trust impact. The risk of a mismatch between what customers think they have agreed to and what they actually have agreed to, gets reduced. Lastly, there is accountability, an enforceable contract; it changes the game from blind trust to trust but verify. Talking about trust, this is an important conversion lever for businesses. Not all businesses have understood it yet, but trust is a very valuable currency. As Nitin Bajatia said in a recent CRMKonvo, the free customer is more valuable than the captive one. Yet again, too many businesses have not yet got this memo.

Having said all this, there are some adoption risks, the biggest one being too many businesses simply not being interested in giving away their power. Nitin maintained that a good number of businesses do not collect personal data, anyways, but then these are not the ones that need to get governed via a standard like MyTerms. It is the other ones. These need an incentive, or the risk of punishment. And then, there is the whole gamut of MarTech and AdTech companies, many of which will consider MyTerms as an attack to their business model. Another important risk is the infamous chicken-and-egg problem. It needs early influential adopters and an ecosystem. It, therefore, is of crucial importance to win landmark enterprise software vendors as well as some big e-commerce sites as lighthouses. From a an enterprise software point of view, Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, Zoho are probably good candidates – with MyTerms actually being right down Zoho’s alley. Wordpress and other major CMS, as well as e-commerce platforms need to support the standard, and ideally fast. Lastly, implementation must be simple for both sides and implementation fragmentation must be kept at bay.

All in all, MyTerms is a great initiative by IEEE that deserves full support. It will be interesting to see how it evolves, whether the rather influential voices that support it, including Doc Searls, are strong enough to make it lift off. I certainly wish so.

The other day, I had a look at my blog, checking the articles that resonated with you most in 2023.

Today, I'd like to do the same for my YouTube channel, CRMKonvos. Shameless plug - any new subscriber is cordially welcomed - it means a lot to us. "Us" means my colleagues Ralf Korb and Marshall Lager, and I. We run this channel as a joint endeavor.

CRMKonvos are all about fun and friendly one hour conversations with one or more live expert guest about a topic in the wider area of - you guessed correctly - CRM. Of course, this includes related topics, e.g., it is virtually impossible to talk CRM or CX without touching AI. They are streamed to LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and X. In addition, we actively encourage our audience to engage with our guest and us. Again, any new subscriber is more than appreciated. If I am not totally off, you can subscribe by just clicking this link.

But now, what are the CRMKonvos that resonated most with you? Which ones received the most views? 

Of course, we do not want to get the beans spilled immediately, so let's start with the fifth place.

Culture is the most enduring form of capital.

This is a conversation I had with Zoho's Chief Strategy Officer Vijay Sundaram about why a great corporate culture makes all the difference, how it contributes to success and why and how Zoho's culture is different from that of most other companies.

The fourth place is taken by an ISP's journey with Zoho One.

This is an interview with Amit Rai, Chief HR Officer of Tata Fiber. Amit has overseen the implementation of Zoho One at Tata Fiber right from its beginning. He relates the interesting journey the company had and also relays obstacles that he needed to overcome. Moving up the leaderboard, we reach the bronze medalist.

Ulaa, Zoho's new privacy oriented browser is about why a privacy oriented browser is important, especially for businesses.

Tejas Gadhia of Zoho tells us about Ulaa and what sets this browser apart from the pack and gives us an idea of what lies ahead. Ulaa itself is a Chromium based browser that Zoho "de-Googled". If you want to venture a guess how long it took to remove all ET-like behavior ("calling home") from the Chromium engine, add a comment.

Moving on to the runner up. This video is different from the first three in two respects. First, it is a 2021 video. Second, it does not involve Zoho. We asked "What is customer journey orchestration"? Ray Gerber gave us a succinct answer.

This is an important question and who is in a better position to answer it than Ray Gerber, the mastermind behind Thunderhead (n.b., Thunderhead got acquired by Medallia in early 2022 and Ray moved on to Qualtrics).

Which leaves us with the CRMKonvo that caught your interest most in 2023. It is an atypical one. Atypical in the sense that it is not directly about business but about how and why a business set up a school in a very rural area in southern India. We spoke with Akshaya Sivaraman, the head of Kalaivani Kalvi Maiyam about why doing good is good for business.

Kalaivani Kalvi Mayam is a school established by Zoho in a rural area near Tenkasi. Due to its wild success, it also serves Zoho as a template for further education centers.

This was a fascinating conversation with Akshaya Sivaraman, the head of Kalaivani Kalvi Mayam, diving into the school's origin, mission, future, and how it benefits the community as well as Zoho.

To close, let's briefly give a honorable mention to our videos that came up place six to ten:

Adi Mula, CEO of Foodhub relays his journey with Zoho  during ZohoDay 2022. Yes, another video from an earlier year makes it into the top ten.

Prashanth V K talks about how Zoho steadily moves upmarket from the SMB- into the enterprise market and what their strategy is.

You think that AI companies are only founded in the USA (and India and China)? AI made in Germany, winning hedgehog style tells how a German company leverages AI to create a real-time predictive customer view.

In the state of SaaS adoption in the current economy, we discuss how SaaS companies can and do thrive in a post Covid economy that is also plagued by inflation with two SaaS executives.

Last but not least, we assembled a panel of AR pros to discuss how great analyst relations should look like. And by pros, I mean PROs. With Sarita Kincaid, Sandy Lo, Trish Harman and Ludovic Leforestier we got some of the best talking out of the book.

All in all, you guys seem to have a healthy interest in Zoho.

Thanks again for viewing our videos and let me know via the comments if there are other CRM/CX related topics that you would like us to cover.

All the best for 2024.

During Zoho’s signature event Zoholics in Austin, the company announced the availability of Ulaa, the new Zoho web browser. Of course, Ulaa does have a meaning. It is a Tamil word that means journey or path. Tamil is the language spoken in Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu, where Zoho’s HQ is situated.

Similar to Safari or Internet Explorer it signifies that the web is about discovery. Ulaa is a privacy orientated webbrowser that is based on Google’s Chromium engine. It has been built specifically to help users protect their online privacy by offering capabilities to block tracking and website surveillance. According to a study by YouGov, this  is something that two thirds of consumers want, as they feel that tech companies have too much control over their personal data. The 2022 Norton Cyber Safety Insights Report Special Release – Online Creeping even found that globally, 85 percent of internet users want to do more to protect their privacy, while 80 percent say that they are concerned about data privacy. Almost 70 percent say that they are more alarmed than ever.

So, there is clearly a case for privacy-oriented browsers, also one more browser, as there are already some existing ones, like Brave or DuckDuckGo, even Safari.

We had the chance to talk to Tejas Gadhia, Zoho evangelist in charge of Ulaa about the rationale behind Zoho developing a web browser and what the future will bring. You can watch the full interview here.

Why did Zoho build a browser? According to Tejas, there hasn’t been much innovation in the browser market lately. Some browsers came, like Brave or DuckDuckGo, and went (TOR, anybody?), but they seem to be more of wrappers around existing engines with a bit of customization. All of them have their own focus. There are the mainstream ones, like Edge, Google Chrome, and Safari; and then there are the more privacy orientated ones. The companies behind even these browsers make money by ads. They have less intrusive business models than the big surveillance companies but still, they make money by selling ads. And when one wants to create more revenue, privacy and ads are at odds. It needs detailed user data to serve targeted ads, which are the ones that bring most revenue. This doesn’t seem to be a problem now but down the line it very well may become one. 

Additionally, there is some scope for a “proper” business-focused browser. While there are some options already now, this means a lot of extensions. 

For Zoho, Tejas says “it's a little bit different because we're not trying to make money in the browser. We make money from our business apps. This is just a side thing that is an added service that we offer. Anyone that knows Zoho knows that we're all about value. We offer a bunch of different products at a very affordable price, compared to others in the market. And this is just another tool that we offer that is meant to increase people's productivity and also kind of protect their privacy as well.” So, there is no business model behind Ulaa. It is free and available for everyone.

Technology-wise, Ulaa is built out of Chromium, Google’s open-source browser engine. The browser has been in the making for more than 4 years from inception to delivery.

Why that long, you might ask, as it is built on top of an existing world class engine? 

The reason is that there is “there's an insane amount of tracking that happens , from DNS fetching and sharing that back to Google, to fingerprinting, to idle times, to device identifier, you know; by default, ads pop up; a lot of different attributes that are there. So, we basically had to de-Google what should have been a de-Googled version of Chromium in the first place. But they are obviously very smart people, and they hide and incorporate a lot of things in Chromium that you have to go into.” Tejas continues “There's just so much hidden stuff because it is in their business model to hide as much, you know, Telemetry and tracking that they can do inside the open-source version and so it takes a lot of effort. That's why there are not too many other competitors. If it was so easy to build on top of Chrome and make something good, you would see 100 browsers in the market right now. We see maybe 5 to 6 legitimate ones.”

Given that there have been so many changes to the engine, and also given that Ulaa is probably the first browser that got built after GDPR came into effect, what about the user experience?

This has two aspects to it, performance, and modes, as Tejas explains. 

One reason for the original success of Chrome was that it offered far better performance than the then dominant Internet Explorer. When running Ulaa and Chrome instances side-by-side “we generally either fare equal or better in almost every case in terms of performance and battery life.”

Modes are about choice about privacy levels. Zoho is all about privacy. Yet, not all people are. “Some people want privacy, some people don't want privacy, or some people just don't care. And so, for us, we go to the approach of everything should be an option, which can give the consent let people choose should they want to be tracked or not.” Ulaa offers five modes that are isolated from each other. For example, by default, the work mode doesn’t allow social media sites to track work activity, while the private mode doesn’t allow work sites track social media activity. Tejas assures that “ tell them exactly what we're blocking, how we're blocking it, why it's important that it's being blocked for you, and should you want to enable it?” Yet, if people want to change these defaults, they can actively give their consent and change the defaults.

Back to the business part, Zoho has the vision of building a business orientated browser. Ulaa is a young product. What can be expected to come?

According to Tejas, browsers are not really bound into organizational controls. Yes, it is possible to enable management policies, but this is usual quite “enterpris’ey”, i.e., bulky and not readily accessible for SMBs. Consequently, Zoho is looking into management consoles and policies around Ulaa, grouping of tabs around projects or other optimizations around work in general. Another example would be further sandboxing of different modes. There is a lot of room for real innovation for a business-focused browser in terms of management and productivity. Privacy is then “just the icing on the cake.”

Interesting times lie ahead of us.

Data breaches, ransomware, stolen identities, collecting of data for no benefit of the customer, are only some of the things that we do see every day. There does not seem to be any privacy anymore. This makes privacy and data protection hot topics not only for customers, but also for software vendors - or at least should make it hot topics.

Apple put in some privacy controls and got chided for it by Facebook and the rest of the adtech industry. Google, with FLOC, tried to establish a technology that aimed at being able to track users in a post cookie world.

To adapt a quote of the Asterix books: The whole world tracks users and customers. The whole world? No, there is one brave company that doesn't.

All this is reason enough to have a #CRMKonvo with one of the most accomplished and outspoken protagonists of privacy in the enterprise software arena and we were very excited about the opportunity to have an intense and interactive discussion with Raju Vegesna of Zoho

The CRMKonvos gang hat an intensive conversation in the intersection of CRM, CX, customer experience and privacy, which by default makes for a highly interesting one, because of all the conflicting goals that are involved.

Our guest was Michael Hoos. Michael is a highly experienced specialist in the area of security.

With his experience in various industries, using numerous CRM solutions, building compliant customer experiences that respect customer privacy, he has navigated many pitfalls for and with his customers. Now he shapes new solutions with Microfocus.