8x8 sees surging AI demand as usage revenue jumps 70%

8x8 reported rising fourth-quarter and full-year demand for AI customer service tools and communications APIs. Usage-based revenue rose by more than 70% year on year in the quarter.

Usage-based revenue, which includes communications APIs, AI products, digital channels and telecoms, accounted for 23% of service revenue in the quarter, up from 14% a year earlier. The company also highlighted strong growth in AI self-service interactions, voice AI and its Engage product for frontline and non-desk workers.

The figures offer a snapshot of how businesses are reshaping customer service operations to handle higher interaction volumes with fewer staff. They are also placing greater emphasis on messaging channels such as WhatsApp, RCS, Viber, Zalo and LINE as customers move away from traditional voice-only contact.

Across the full fiscal year, interactions through 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant more than doubled from the previous year. In the fourth quarter alone, those interactions rose by nearly 95% year on year and by more than 22% from the previous quarter.

Contracts for Intelligent Customer Assistant, which covers digital and voice self-service as well as AI auto attendants, increased 56% year on year and nearly 8% quarter on quarter. Contracts for voice self-service rose by more than 71% from a year earlier.

Voice AI was another area of rapid expansion. Full-year voice AI interactions increased by more than 3.3 times from the previous year, while fourth-quarter interactions rose 112% year on year and nearly 20% from the prior quarter.

Its Engage software also recorded sharp growth. The number of customers using the product rose by more than 300% in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, while average daily unique active users increased by more than four times.

Digital channels

On the communications API side, total interactions across messaging, voice and video rose by nearly 16% for the full year from the prior year. In the fourth quarter, those interactions increased by more than 8% year on year.

The strongest gains came from messaging and voice. Messaging interactions through its API products grew by more than 218% year on year in the fourth quarter, while API voice interactions rose by nearly 174%. SMS interactions increased by more than 10% from the third quarter to the fourth quarter.

That pattern suggests businesses are broadening the mix of channels they use to reach customers rather than relying on a single route. It also underlines the growing role of usage-based billing in software and communications markets, where revenue rises alongside customer traffic.

Hunter Middleton, chief product officer at 8x8, said the uptake reflected a focus on making AI tools easy to use from the outset.

"The adoption numbers across 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant and 8x8 Engage reflect something we've been deliberate about: building AI into the platform, designing it to be usable on day one, not a separate implementation project," Middleton said.

He also linked the increase in messaging volumes to broader changes in customer behaviour.

"These numbers tell you something important - customers are using this technology because it's actually working for them, not just because it's available. And when messaging API interactions grow 218% year-over-year, that means organizations are reaching customers on the channels their customers actually use," he said.

Product rollout

Alongside the quarterly figures, 8x8 outlined a series of product updates. They included the early availability of AI Studio, a tool designed to let teams build and deploy voice and digital AI agents using plain-language prompts, and the general availability of its Integration SDK for CRM integrations.

New dashboards in 8x8 Work Analytics are intended to give IT teams live visibility into call queues, call quality, unreturned calls and device health. Engage is now generally available, extending the product beyond early users.

Other additions included Focus Time Metrics, which tracks how agents divide attention across multiple digital conversations, and Silent Mobile Authentication, which uses carrier network intelligence for background user verification in markets where network coverage supports it.

8x8 said its overall rating across the Unified Communications as a Service and Contact Centre as a Service markets was 4.7 out of 5, based on 59 reviews on Gartner Peer Insights as of 1 April 2026.