May 13, 2026
Last month, Smart Communications hosted its North American Innovate event in Chicago, bringing together as many as 250 attendees for a sold-out conference. These attendees reflected the full breadth of the communications ecosystem, including customers, partners, and an expanding Smart Communications team. Customers and partners were also able to meet with several new hires, like Heidi Johnson, who now leads both technology as CTO and product as CPO. For her part, CEO Leigh Segall’s keynote established the conference’s theme, “Be Moved”, by outlining a broader shift in the market and highlighting the new paradigm in customer communications requiring both businesses and their expert partners to evolve beyond traditional communications management and rethink how interactions, data, and processes come together.
Smart Communications’ recent acquisitions help illustrate the point. Its platform is now structured across SmartCOMM for composition, SmartIQ for data collection, SmartPATH for orchestration, and SmartHUB for cloud-based archiving. While this arrangement certainly accommodates a clearer product architecture, I think the most interesting development of the bunch is SmartHUB. Far more than a traditional archive, SmartHUB has the potential to evolve into a governed data layer and “single source of truth” that can build the foundation for Smart Communications’ broader intelligence and AI strategy.
This ties directly into the company’s push toward agentic AI. In the roadmap session, Smart Communications explained how it – and the market’s – focus is shifting away form static, form-based interactions to more conversational, guided experiences powered by AI agents. These agents have been designed not only to generate content, but to reason, guide users, and drive outcomes within governed workflows, something that is particularly important in regulated environments. Within that context, SmartIQ is becoming increasingly strategic. Historically positioned around data capture and validation, it’s now evolving toward intelligent upstream processing, connecting more directly into business processes and enabling conversational data collection. The shift from static, to adaptive, and ultimately to conversational experiences highlights how data collection has become a core lever for automation and experience transformation.
The broader implication is that Smart Communications is moving beyond communications and interactions into process and interaction intelligence. Its representatives doubled down on this message in the customer and partner sessions. Contributors like AWS (an infrastructure partner) and Blue Shield of California showcased how end-to-end transformation can reduce touchpoints while significantly improving customer experience and increasing digital adoption. I actually found this to be one of the most compelling presentations of the conference, not only because Blue Shield has invested in the entire Smart Communications platform, but because its business case was built around CX improvements with ROI following, something that is very uncommon in highly regulated industries like US healthcare.
Overall, I think, Innovate highlighted the fact that Smart Communications is a business in transition, one that’s building the foundations for AI-driven, data-centric engagement while working to remain grounded in the strict realities governing communications for regulated industries. It’s important to note that this is more than just a technological shake up. I got the sense during the conference that this evolution was essential and foundational. Smart Communications has truly entered a new era, moving beyond simply managing outputs to orchestrating intelligent, compliant, and increasingly conversational customer experiences. While forms and critical customer communications remain at the core of what Smart Communications does, in this new era of artificial intelligence, they are no longer sufficient on their own. The Innovate event proves that Smart Communications is clearly stepping up to address this next, fundamental challenge in the CCM-CXM market space.