8x8’s Q1 2027 financial results were impressive in their own right, but it was the company's AI metrics, rather than its revenue figures, that dominated the earnings call and offered the clearest insight into where the customer experience market is heading.
The company reported total revenue of $190.2 million and record service revenue of $185.3 million, both up 5% year over year, its fifth consecutive quarter of growth. Results beat guidance on revenue, operating margin and cash flow, and 8x8 raised its outlook, lifting full-year service revenue by $18 million to $725–745 million and total revenue to $745–765 million.
Much of the earnings call, though, focused less on those numbers and more on how customers are putting AI to work, with management presenting customer deployment as the company’s primary growth story. This reflects 8x8’s recent product strategy. Over the past few months, it has extended AI-driven skills matching beyond the contact centre with AI Routing, and brought critical communications tools to frontline and deskless workers with the launch of Resolve.
Deployment, not capability
For years, contact centre vendors measured AI progress by announcing new assistants, copilots and automation features. Increasingly, investors want evidence customers are deploying those tools at scale and paying to use them.
This quarter provided precisely that evidence. Customer uptake of AI Studio and Intelligent Customer Assistant grew 121% year over year and 68% quarter over quarter, with voice AI interactions up more than 106%. A year ago, many organisations were still experimenting with AI agents. Today, 8x8 is reporting thousands running in production, a sign the market is moving beyond proof-of-concept.
Samuel Wilson, CEO of 8x8, said the figures reflect how quickly customer numbers are building: “Just three and a half months after official launch, more than 200 organisations are building agents with AI Studio, and they have created more than 2,900 AI agents. More than half of these customers have moved beyond experimental stage and have become paying customers.”
Hunter Middleton, 8x8’s chief product officer, echoed the same message in a separate announcement, saying uptake is “showing up in live customer conversations, not pilots.”
Expanding accounts, changing margins
One clear example came from 8x8 Engage, whose customer base for frontline and non-desk workers grew more than 247% year over year, a sign AI is deepening existing accounts rather than only winning new ones. The company’s integrated-platform pitch echoes the case management made for open architecture as AI began reshaping the contact centre.
Those deployment figures also help explain another theme from the earnings call: AI is changing how 8x8 makes money. Platform usage revenue, including CPaaS, digital channels and AI, grew 63% year over year. It now accounts for roughly 26% of service revenue, up from 17% a year ago. This shift pulled GAAP gross margin down from 66% to 61%.
At first glance, a lower margin might look like a warning sign. CFO Kevin Kraus argued, however, that as customers use more AI, they generate more usage-based revenue, which carries a different margin profile but brings in more profit dollars as it scales.
The bottom line
The current phase of competition in customer experience software is no longer defined solely by which vendor launches the most AI features. Increasingly, success depends on demonstrating that customers are deploying those capabilities at scale, integrating them into everyday operations and generating revenue from their use. 8x8's latest results suggest that shift is already underway.