The VienerX Newsletter

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By: Jordan and Wayne Viener

For more than three decades, VienerX has worked to deliver excellent service to its clients. Recently, our executive team took on an important challenge: defining exactly what makes that service different. Since our founding in 1991, we have believed that strong technology support is about more than solving technical issues, it is about how those solutions impact the people and businesses relying on them every day. We believe that philosophy can be defined through four core pillars:

People First IT

VienerX works to understand how employees, managers, and business owners rely on technology in their daily operations. By focusing on the human and operational impact, we ensure that systems support productivity, communication, and real work of the organization.

Ownership of the Outcome

First class service requires responsibility for the results, not just the completions of technical tasks. When clients choose VienerX, they expect the their request to be taken in the full context of the business and applied to create a real solution.

Whole Process Thinking

By thinking through the entire process, we help customers avoid short-term fixes and build technological environments that support the long-terms success of the business. Technology decisions affect security, reliability, cost, and long-term business performance. VienerX evaluates technology as part of a larger operational system rather than a collection of isolated components.

CIO Guidance and Forward Vision

VienerX provides ongoing CIO-level guidance that helps customers understand the changes and challenges of the technological landscape. Technology environments are constantly changing. New security risks, emerging technologies, and rapidly changing business requirements require leadership that looks beyond the immediate issue.

What Does This Mean For You?

VienerX will continue striving every day to provide the highest level of service possible and work to improve our craft.

VienerX is a Nextiva Partner. The following is an independent product review.

By: Jordan Viener

I’ll be the first to say: I have not been an AI believer. When it comes to replacing people, I have had doubts, to put it mildly. My perspective on the topic began to shift last week as I attended an event hosted by our corporate partners at Nextiva to demonstrate their new project, XBertAI.

XBertAI is a branded version of what has become known as “AI receptionist software.” This product category is exactly what it sounds like: an AI bot hosted on a cloud server that can answer a VoIP phone. These bots have been around in some form for years, with call trees and automated attendants tracing their roots back to the 1980s. Their latest evolution, essentially a custom chatbot built for an organization, really broke onto the scene in early 2024 as part of the AI boom.

I have had limited interaction with them, and like a lot of people, they have made me slam 0 and scream, “speak to a representative.” One particularly frustrating experience that really soured me on them occurred in September of last year. My flight was delayed the morning I was flying to Madison, Wisconsin, and I knew I had to change my rental car pickup time. I called a widely used car rental agency and talked in circles with the chatbot for, and I do not exaggerate, 20 minutes. I had all the information I needed, but it simply could not figure out that I should be allowed to move the pickup time even though it was only a few hours away. Eventually the bot gave up and kicked me to a real person, who told me in under 30 seconds that they had already moved the pickup time when they saw the flight delay. Safe to say, I was not pleased with my AI bot experience.

All of that is why, when I heard XBert in action, my first thought was: “Wow, that is something new.” XBert did not try to sound human; it tried to sound functional. While still friendly, the bot was informative, and as the presenters moved through live demos across different use cases, I found myself increasingly believing this was something that could work. What really stood out was its ability to shift conversation topics quickly, even when interrupted. That, combined with CRM integration and strong intent recognition, created the picture of a product that feels more capable than many earlier attempts in this category.

There are caveats. First, I did cringe when the presenters spoke about the cost of the AI bot versus a human employee. Call this the opinion of one semi-recent college graduate, but I still have real moral concerns about replacing more people with machines, particularly at the entry level. Second, this was still a product demo, and as our team here at VienerX tried it ourselves, it became clear that the system would require training and tuning to truly perform at a high level. That said, even in demo form, it already appeared leagues ahead of the rental car bot from a multi billion-dollar company that frustrated me only months ago.

All of this leads to what was perhaps the most jaw-dropping part of XBert for me: the price. The product starts at $99 a month for 99 interactions, with the per-interaction cost dropping when larger volumes are purchased. If monthly interactions exceed the planned amount, additional interactions are charged at 99 cents each. This is another major area of advancement for AI products in this category, which were previously priced at much higher rates, particularly when overages occurred.

Whether products like this fully take hold remains to be seen, but the broader direction of the technology is becoming difficult to ignore. AI phone agents are improving quickly, and for the first time, I came away from a demonstration thinking the category may finally be approaching practical usefulness rather than novelty. If that trend continues, businesses may soon have to think less about whether AI belongs on the phone line and more about where it fits best.

By: Jordan Viener

As a younger professional, I am well aware of the rise of ambient noise. The Background Noise genre on YouTube, is one of the platform’s most popular categories. Well-known sociologist and science communicator Hank Green estimated that channels in the genre collectively pull in millions of dollars in revenue each month. I was not aware of a particular subcategory of this popular genre that, until our CEO Wayne brought it to my attention, had quietly and seemingly out of nowhere begun to gain traction: Office Noise.

Yes, you read that correctly, busy office noise has quietly and suddenly begun to pull in millions of views on YouTube. A simple search on the platform will reveal several videos with millions of hits and others with hundreds of thousands. While most videos in the Background Noise genre focus on calm, relaxing sounds: beach waves, rain, white and brown noise, office noise has become a major player. What is going on here?

There are likely several factors at play. First and foremost, it’s hard not to immediately think of the isolation of working from home. While there are several benefits to flexibility, for many people, isolation can make it difficult to focus without the mind wandering. Office Noise helps simulate an environment where people are accustomed to being productive.

The second factor is media exposure. Younger viewers, who are statistically more prone to seek out background noise, may not be as familiar with working in a crowded, loud, and busy office. However, what they are accustomed to is TV shows and movies set in these environments. This helps trigger the perception of the environment where they are supposed to get work done, even if they never experienced it firsthand.

The third and final point is broader: the disappearance of the office as a cultural symbol. As much as the “return to office craze” is being discussed, offices are still on the decline. United States office occupancy remains at about 54% of pre-pandemic levels nationally, according to Axios. The Barings real estate group reported last month that 20% of commercial office space is vacant, a historic high, and this trend shows no sign of reversing even six years after the pandemic.

While many people have and continue to complain about the office, it now represents a time gone by. The pre-pandemic era had its flaws, but it also represented a different, in-person, more social, and community-oriented way of working. For the millions of people (myself now included) who occasionally tune in to office sounds, there can be a comforting, slightly nostalgic feeling in hearing the clamor of phone ringers, keyboards slamming, and people chatting.