Luiz Domingos, the Chief Technology Officer and Head of Large Enterprise R&D at Mitel, has built a distinguished career spanning over two decades. Known for his innovative approach and deep technical expertise, Luiz has consistently delivered high-quality solutions in enterprise communication, contact center systems, network management, and cloud services.
In his current role at Mitel, Luiz sets the strategic direction for technology, emphasizing innovation and reliability. He leads the introduction of cutting-edge technologies and ensures the company’s portfolio remains at the forefront of the industry. Before joining Mitel, Luiz served as Chief Product and Technology Officer at Unify, where he successfully managed the entire product portfolio and spearheaded the development of disruptive cloud offerings.
Mitel is a global leader in business communications, providing a comprehensive range of solutions that empower organizations to connect, collaborate, and serve their customers more effectively. Offering everything from on-premises systems to cloud-based communication platforms, Mitel delivers reliable, scalable, and innovative products that address the diverse needs of businesses of all sizes. With a focus on seamless integration and a commitment to high-quality user experiences, Mitel helps companies stay connected and competitive in today’s rapidly evolving workplace environments.
Many companies still rely on legacy communication tools. From your perspective, what are the biggest obstacles that outdated systems present to businesses today?
Many companies rely on outdated Private Branch Exchange (PBX) systems, contact centers, and fragmented collaboration tools. Using legacy tools such as these can lead to a lack of integration and interoperability, as they operate with closed architectures and lack proper SW interfaces. This makes integrating with modern AI-driven solutions, CRM platforms, and cloud-based applications much harder.
When organizations use fragmented, legacy tools, user experience (UX) and productivity can suffer as application implementations are not adapted to modern, flexible work modes – remote, office, or mobile – and don’t provide omnichannel capabilities. Additionally, when too many outdated systems are used, security risks become heightened, leading to increased vulnerabilities and compliance gaps due to evolving data protection regulations like GDPR. Finally, these legacy tools also cause higher product maintenance and service or operational costs, increasing the total cost of ownership.
How do these communication bottlenecks impact an organization’s ability to implement AI-driven solutions effectively?
AI applications rely on real-time data availability, seamless integration across multiple media channels, and automation mechanisms. However, legacy systems tend to store data in internal proprietary formats that AI can not access or tap into, which impairs AI’s true potential and, in some cases, leads to fragmentation. To function correctly, AI requires both structured and unstructured data. Since legacy systems’ data structures are not conducive to that approach, these systems limit AI’s ability to analyze conversations, extract business value, and personalize communication activity.
Furthermore, many AI-driven applications, such as sentiment analysis and speech-to-text, rely on real-time analytics. Outdated infrastructure often lacks the processing power and real-time connectivity needed for such applications, leading to latency and inefficiencies within a business. True AI-driven automation – virtual assistants, workflow automation, etc. – requires deep integration with communication platforms. Regularly used legacy systems with outdated or missing API support create barriers and bottlenecks to integration and further hinder automation capabilities.
Addressing these communication bottlenecks can help organizations unlock the full potential of AI-driven solutions, improving efficiency, decision-making, and UX.
How does Mitel approach communication system modernization for large enterprises transitioning from legacy systems?
Mitel takes a strategic, hybrid approach to modernizing unified communications (UC) tools, helping enterprises transition from their legacy systems. Rather than enforcing a full overhaul, Mitel advocates for and offers hybrid solutions composed of on-premise applications and private and public cloud solutions with full interoperability. This hybrid model integrates telephony infrastructure, SBC/gateway equipment on the network’s edge, UC applications, and cloud-based collaboration apps, allowing enterprises to modernize at their own pace.
As a solution orchestrator, Mitel focuses on creating the necessary integrations and services across all customer-deployed applications. Key principles guiding this approach include:
- Hybrid Cloud Deployments – Rather than a complete rip-and-replace approach, Mitel maintains and updates existing on-premise and private cloud PBX/UC/Contact Centers while integrating modern collaboration tools in the public cloud, ensuring enterprises can evolve without major disruptions.
- APIs and SDKs – Mitel constantly updates and develops APIs and SDKs to bridge the gap between legacy systems and modern applications in collaboration, CRM, and ERP environments. This flexibility allows businesses to gradually adopt new services without causing major disruptions to their daily operations.
- AI Integration with Legacy Systems – Mitel enhances existing communication platforms with AI-driven capabilities such as visual voice mails, virtual assistants/agents, and real-time transcription. These AI functions work with cloud LLMs and also leverage small language models (SLMs) that can be operated without major infrastructure investment or upgrades.
- Security & Compliance-Driven Upgrades – Mitel prioritizes security and regulatory compliance, implementing security standards such as end-to-end payload and signaling encryption and data encryption at rest. It certifies all products to comply with the latest regulations in certain industries and regional laws and regulations.
AI is transforming business communication. What do you see as the next major advancements in AI-driven unified communication systems?
AI is being used to transform UC systems by enhancing efficiency, automating tasks, and improving enterprise communications. It is also being used to strengthen security. Things such as user authentication with voiceprint, continuous vulnerability assessments, and system security auditing contribute to stronger protection measures for enterprises.
At the same time, Agentic AI and virtual assistants are expanding. Organizations are enhancing these AI-powered assistants with multi-modal abilities that support various communication functions, including handling complex queries, automating responses, assisting with scheduling, and information retrieval.
AI is also driving innovations in voice-to-text capabilities, real-time multilingual translations, and sentiment analysis. These enhancements benefit Contact Centers by improving employee productivity and overall user satisfaction.
Furthermore, the use of GenAI for content management is rising as LLMs are being integrated to generate analytics reports, summaries, legal and compliant records, etc. We’ll continue to see more AI adoption to drive the UC space as enterprises use AI-driven language models to organize, retrieve, and share enterprise knowledge to improve collaboration and data-sharing optimization across organizations.
How is Mitel preparing for the rise of AI-powered virtual assistants, automation, and predictive analytics in workplace communication?
Mitel began its AI journey several years before the advent of LLMs, and we continue to integrate AI into our product and technology partnerships. When applicable, we incorporate AI capabilities into our portfolio to enhance customer solutions, with a strong focus on agentic AI, including Virtual Assistants and Virtual Contact Center Agents. Additionally, Mitel offers AI capabilities such as natural language processing (NLP), call and meeting analytics, system analytics and predictive reporting, and low code/no-code workflow automation, which all streamline UC and Contact Center applications.
How is Mitel leveraging AI and large language models (LLMs) to enhance communication and collaboration for enterprises?
Mitel leverages AI and LLMs to improve the overall communications and collaboration experience within an enterprise. As mentioned earlier, Mitel integrates AI and LLM capabilities into its products, leveraging advanced speech and text analysis (specifically NLP and speech-to-text), intelligent virtual assistants with context memory, and task automation. Mitel is also offering a solution for self-help and customer support with AI, incorporating the customer knowledge base via an AI model training process. These technologies enhance real-time communication, optimize customer interactions, ensure system security, and provide cost-effective, 24/7 monitoring and support.
What are the biggest challenges in integrating LLMs into enterprise communication systems, and how is Mitel addressing them?
There are a few challenges when it comes to integrating LLMs into enterprise communication systems, including data privacy, security, latency, and the need for flexible AI integration. As a global organization, data privacy concerns and regulatory compliance (GDPR and the European AI Act) are our top priorities. So, we are ensuring our AI solutions protect customer data at all costs. For enhanced security, Mitel is investigating the usage of SLMs deployed at the customer’s network edge to limit and protect data that could be exposed to public cloud LLMs. In hybrid cloud environments, it is imperative that all products have the proper interfaces/APIs to incorporate AI safely and securely. Mitel has modernized its products to enable AI integrations across on-premise, hosted, and private and public clouds. We are also developing flexible workflow creation capabilities that will allow a “bring your own LLM” (BYO-LLM) approach to avoid vendor lock-in.
Modern communication requires LLM responses to be instantaneous for real-time collaboration tools like voice and video, which creates infrastructure challenges. Mitel’s vision is to rely on Edge AI to process real-time communication and reduce latency for a natural experience and interaction with AI assistants. Finally, Mitel is working on AI models that can be fine-tuned for specific industries like healthcare, finance, and hospitality, ensuring more vertically relevant and context-aware AI-driven communication.
In terms of AI-powered natural language processing, what applications are you most excited about within Mitel’s product ecosystem?
Given the measurable and immediate return on investment, Mitel Contact Center is the most exciting area for AI-driven LLM and NLP solutions. The AI-powered virtual agents with chat and speech interaction can handle customer inquiries and gather information before escalating to a live agent, reducing workload and improving response times. Features such as call recordings with transcription, summarization for compliance, sentiment analytics for customer satisfaction, and agent training all improve operations. Mitel’s UC solutions include visual voicemail, smart search, knowledge management, and noise cancellation for clearer calls.
As AI reshapes communication, how should businesses approach the ethical considerations of AI-driven workplace interactions?
AI is significantly transforming workplace communication and collaboration, introducing new user and customer experiences. However, these changes do not come without ethical challenges. Ethical considerations should be constantly addressed at every stage of AI implementation, including training AI models on diverse datasets to avoid bias and ensure fair decision-making. One of the biggest concerns with AI is transparency and explainability, which requires clear terms and conditions and disclosure of AI use. The use of AI should expand human augmentation and empowerment, but it is not a replacement.
Additionally, security and AI misuse prevention should be considered to protect against deepfakes and manipulation of user data and credentials.
What steps can organizations take to ensure a smooth transition for employees as AI becomes more embedded in daily workflows?
Enterprises must take steps to foster adoption, trust, and productivity to ensure a smooth transition to AI-based solutions. The first step for organizations is to create AI policies and enterprise governance to define AI’s role within the company and then stick to them. Leadership should also align on messaging and advocacy for AI adoption and offer training to all employees on how AI works, its limitations, and how to use it effectively.
Simultaneously, organizations should introduce AI collaboration tools and integration frameworks that empower employees with AI assistance to enhance the decision-making process while maintaining human oversight. Leadership should also address ethical and job security concerns and provide channels to gather employee feedback and measure the incremental value introduced by AI.
By doing all these things early in the AI adoption process, employees will feel more confident using the tools, and organizations will see a faster ROI on their investments.
Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Mitel.
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