AudioCodes CEO Shabtai Adlersberg - The AudioCodes journey, Hardware to SaaS to AI

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 voice and service owners, UC partners and channel strategists interested in how a hardware-first voice vendor moved into managed services and AI, and in AudioCodes' Live platform, Voca CIC, SmartTAP and Meeting Insights direction.

Guest: Shabtai Adlersberg — Co-Founder, CEO and President, AudioCodes

Shabtai Adlersberg, co-founder, CEO and President of AudioCodes, traces the company's 31-year climb from voice algorithms and DSP chipsets to gateways, SBCs, managed services and now conversational AI. He explains the strategic bets behind the Microsoft partnership, the shift from hardware to SaaS, and where Meeting Insights and custom AI projects fit next.

Key insights

• Adlersberg's rule from a costly 2006 SBC acquisition in Dallas: when a new market opens, enter with the least complex product at the low end and work upward — the startup they bought had built a large, high-end SBC nobody needed yet. ▶ 7:13
• AudioCodes claims roughly 23% share of the enterprise SBC market against Oracle at around 20%, built on technology they started developing in-house in 2008/9 rather than through acquisition. ▶ 8:15
• The 2010 decision to back Microsoft Lync was made after being wrong about Intel and Microsoft entering voice in the 1990s — the lesson being not to bet against Microsoft's application-led disruption of Cisco and Avaya. ▶ 9:15
• The 'One Voice' move — supplying gateway, SBC, phones, management and recording as a single set rather than best-of-breed points — was, by a rival's own admission, what beat Sonus/Ribbon in the enterprise; Sonus retreated to service providers around 2015. ▶ 11:50
• AudioCodes initially saw Teams as a threat to its Skype for Business business and only got on board around 2018/19 when, as Adlersberg admits, 'the product was not cooked yet'. ▶ 13:53
• The Live managed-services business, started in 2020 to spare multinationals the cost of hiring Teams voice specialists worldwide, is on track for about $65m annual recurring revenue this year. ▶ 16:32
• Meeting Insights launched as SaaS in March and has around 50 customers, adding 10–15 a month; internally about 500 of AudioCodes' 1,000 staff use it across roughly 200 meetings a day. ▶ 25:19
• Positioning against first-party note-takers: speech-to-text at 80–90% accuracy collapses on sector-specific terminology, so AudioCodes tags and narrows the meeting corpus and feeds that constrained, customer-controlled data set to chatbots (Copilot, Gemini, Claude) rather than competing on general search. ▶ 24:48
• An Israeli Red Cross emergency-dispatch project started with 40% transcription accuracy on noisy mobile calls — solving it required telephony connectivity, contact centre networking, recording, device management and an LLM inference layer, which Adlersberg argues few vendors can assemble. ▶ 33:00

Insights summarised by AI from the episode transcript, reviewed by the Empowering.Cloud team.

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