EM360Tech Q3 2026 Quarterly Impact Index Winners Announced

The votes are in, and the winners of the EM360Tech Q3 2026 Quarterly Impact Index have been decided! Congratulations to Expel, Observe.AI, Eightfold and Dr Joe Perez, who have taken home this quarter's Vanguard, Apex, Catalyst and Authority Awards.

Every quarter, the EM360Tech Quarterly Impact Index recognises the podcasts, campaigns and analysts making a valuable contribution to enterprise technology discussions. It's our way of looking beyond how many people a piece of content reaches to recognise the ideas, expertise and work behind it, and the response it receives from enterprise audiences.

This quarter, there's a particularly interesting connection between our four winners. Their contributions explore different areas of enterprise AI, from cybersecurity and customer service to workforce management and data governance. But each also deals with the practical challenges organisations face when they start using AI as part of their everyday operations.

And as businesses work out where AI fits into their existing systems and processes, those challenges are becoming an increasingly important part of the conversation.

What Stood Out This Quarter

For a long time, much of the conversation around enterprise AI has focused on what the technology could potentially do. Now, as organisations put more of those capabilities to work, they're having to deal with the less straightforward question of how to use them effectively. Security operations provide a good example of this.

AI is giving teams new ways to analyse threats, investigate suspicious activity and respond to incidents. The difficult part is deciding what those systems should be allowed to do independently, especially when a mistake could disrupt important services.

Customer service teams are faced with a similar choice in deploying AI agents that can solve problems or perform duties on behalf of a customer. Employers are also starting to use AI to understand what skills exist in their workforce and to plan for future staffing needs. But when those insights begin to shape decisions about people’s careers, accuracy and transparency become even more critical.

All of these applications also depend on having reliable data and processes in place to manage how the technology is used. And while the challenges vary between departments, businesses are having to answer many of the same questions about oversight, accountability and how to judge whether AI is delivering worthwhile results.

Vanguard Award Winner: Expel

Podcast: Is Your SOC Below the AI Poverty Line?

Congratulations to Expel, our Q3 Vanguard Award winner! The Vanguard Award recognises the quarter's most innovative and forward-thinking individual podcast, particularly those that bring fresh perspectives to enterprise technology challenges or question established ways of thinking.

Expel’s winning episode of The Security Strategist, hosted by Brad LaPorte and featuring Expel CTO Greg Notch, gave security leaders something to think about. They talked about an AI poverty line for cybersecurity, and what it could mean for organisations that don’t have the resources to adopt AI at the same pace as others.

To get a sense of the concern, it’s helpful to take a look at what security operations centres actually do. A security operations centre, or SOC, keeps an eye on an organisation’s systems for any signs of suspicious activity and looks into potential threats.

Analysts can spend a considerable amount of time working through alerts, checking which ones need attention and deciding whether an incident requires a response. AI could take some of that work off their hands.

It can help identify suspicious patterns, bring related information together and handle certain routine tasks, leaving analysts with more time to investigate the incidents that need their expertise. But what happens when some organisations can make that change and others can't? An organisation with access to cutting-edge AI tools may be able to investigate and respond to threats much faster than one that is still heavily reliant on manual processes.

That gap can widen over time, especially when teams are already working with limited resources. The talk also touched on what happens when AI moves from helping analysts investigate incidents to taking action itself.

An automated response can stop suspicious activity before it becomes a larger incident. But the consequences of getting that response wrong can be serious, especially if the system interrupts a service that the business relies on.

Security teams need to be confident about which actions can happen automatically, which require approval and whether employees can intervene when something goes wrong. It's this willingness to examine where cybersecurity could be heading, and what security teams may need to do differently as a result, that makes the conversation a fitting winner of the Vanguard Award.

Apex Award Winner: Observe.AI

Podcast: CX Is Now AI's Proving Ground

Our Q3 Apex Award goes to Observe.AI for its podcast examining one of the most practical applications of enterprise AI: customer experience. Unlike Vanguard, which focuses on innovative ideas and forward-thinking discussions, the Apex Award recognises the quarter's strongest-performing individual podcast.

It considers audience engagement, reach and commercial impact, celebrating content that connects with enterprise audiences and delivers results. Observe.AI's winning episode of Tech Transformed featured a conversation between Ravit Jain and Sneha Iyer, who leads AI value delivery and analytics at Observe.AI.

Together, they explored how AI agents are changing customer service, and why contact centres provide such an interesting environment for understanding whether the technology is actually working. Customer service offers businesses an opportunity to see how AI performs when people depend on it to solve real problems.

A customer contacting a company about a missing order or an account issue wants an answer they can use, preferably without having to spend half an hour explaining the problem to several different people. Whether an AI agent can provide that experience depends on considerably more than its ability to hold a conversation.

Unlike a basic chatbot that responds to a question, an AI agent may be able to complete tasks, retrieve information and make certain decisions as part of a wider process. That could mean helping a customer update their account details, checking the progress of an order or gathering information before passing a more complicated problem to an employee.

For those interactions to work properly, the AI needs access to the right information, and the systems involved need to communicate with one another. Now imagine you explain your problem to an AI agent and get transferred to an employee who knows nothing about what you've just told it.

The customer ends up repeating themselves, the employee has to start the entire process of solving the problem again, and the company hasn't really saved anyone much time. This is a fairly simple example, but it does show why it is so important to integrate AI with existing customer service systems.

Iyer and Jain also discussed the controls businesses need around what AI agents are allowed to do, and how to tell whether the technology is genuinely improving customer service. That means looking beyond the number of interactions an AI agent can automate to consider customer satisfaction, service quality and whether problems are being resolved without creating additional work elsewhere.

Observe.AI's Apex Award recognises the success of a podcast that brought these considerations into the enterprise AI conversation, showing how customer experience can help businesses assess the results of the technology they're introducing.

Catalyst Award Winner: Eightfold

Eightfold takes home the Q3 Catalyst Award for its campaign exploring how AI is changing the way organisations recruit, develop and manage their workforce. The Catalyst Award recognises the strongest-performing multichannel campaign of the quarter, looking at how effectively a campaign brings its message to audiences across different platforms and formats.

For Eightfold, that message centred on an area of AI adoption that affects almost every part of a business: its people. AI has already become a familiar topic in recruitment, where organisations can use the technology to help process applications, identify relevant qualifications and match candidates with available positions.

But Eightfold's campaign looked beyond hiring to explore how AI could influence the wider talent lifecycle. The talent lifecycle covers everything from recruiting someone to helping them develop their skills, progress into new roles and eventually leave the organisation.

Managing all of that requires employers to understand the people they already have, what they're capable of and where they might need additional skills in future. Most businesses have plenty of information about their employees, but it isn't always particularly useful for understanding their abilities.

Job titles, qualifications and previous positions can tell an employer quite a lot about someone's experience, although they won't necessarily reveal everything that person knows how to do. An employee working in customer service, for example, might have the analytical skills needed for a role in another department.

Unless those abilities have been documented or recognised by a manager, the employee could miss an opportunity to progress, while the business continues looking externally for someone with the same skills. AI could help employers identify these connections by analysing workforce information and highlighting skills that might be useful in different roles.

It could also support internal mobility, where employees move into new positions within the same organisation, as well as helping businesses plan training and development. Eightfold’s campaign explored these possibilities along with the changing demands AI itself places on employees.

As organisations bring more AI into their operations, the work people do and the skills they need could change. That makes workforce development part of the AI adoption process, rather than something businesses can address separately once the technology is in place. The campaign included a Tech Transformed discussion between host Dana Gardner and Meghna Punhani, Chief People Officer at Eightfold AI.

Their conversation considered how AI is influencing hiring, employee development and workforce planning, including the potential for AI agents to take on tasks previously carried out by people.

Of course, there are responsibilities involved in using AI to make recommendations about employees. A system might identify someone as a good candidate for promotion or suggest that another employee needs more training, but those recommendations could affect people's careers. Employers need to understand what information the system has used, particularly when incomplete employment records or inaccurate skills profiles could influence the opportunities someone receives. Punhani’s comments brought the discussion back to the human side of workforce planning, including the need for trust and transparency when introducing AI into decisions about employees.

Employers therefore need to consider how AI recommendations will be reviewed, what information employees can access about decisions affecting them and how managers should use those insights. HR and technology teams will also need to work together to make sure the systems fit existing processes and are being used appropriately.

By looking at recruitment, employee development and workforce planning together, Eightfold gave its campaign relevance beyond any single HR function. That broader perspective, carried across the campaign's different formats, reflects what the Catalyst Award is designed to recognise.

Authority Award Winner: Dr Joe Perez

Congratulations to Dr Joe Perez, who has been named our Q3 Authority Award winner! The Authority Award recognises analysts whose contributions have helped inform enterprise technology conversations throughout the quarter.

Rather than recognising a single podcast or campaign, it considers the relevance, depth and influence of an analyst's work across EM360Tech content. Dr Perez is a Senior Systems Specialist and Team Leader at the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, with expertise spanning data, analytics and technology.

His Q3 contributions included an EM360Tech Analyst Spotlight examining the relationship between people and technology, particularly as organisations work through the opportunities and responsibilities associated with AI adoption. It's a subject that connects several areas of enterprise technology, although one of the most important is data.

Organisations rely on information to understand what's happening across their operations and make decisions about what to do next. AI can help analyse that information and identify connections that might otherwise be difficult to recognise, but it still depends on the quality of the data it's given.

An AI system might produce a convincing recommendation based on incomplete information without making the problem immediately obvious to the person using it. If that recommendation influences a business decision, the organisation needs some way to establish where the information came from, whether it's accurate and whether the system was allowed to use it in the first place.

Those responsibilities fall under data governance, which covers the rules and processes organisations use to manage their information. This includes who is allowed to see certain data, how the data is maintained and what limits there are on its use.

For businesses deploying AI, those arrangements become especially important when systems can pull information from multiple sources or apply it to aid decisions. Dr Perez’s contribution also looked at the ethical questions around AI, including the need to understand how technology is being used, and what responsibilities remain with the organisation.

These aren't concerns that can be addressed through technical improvements alone. Businesses also need employees who understand the information they're working with, managers who can question the results and processes that make it possible to identify problems before they affect important decisions. 

Dr Perez's Analyst Spotlight brought these responsibilities into the wider discussion about AI adoption, drawing attention to the people and organisational practices behind the technology. His Authority Award recognises the value of that perspective and his contribution to enterprise technology discussions throughout the quarter.

What Happens Next

Now that we've announced our Q3 2026 Quarterly Impact Index winners, we'll be taking a closer look at the work behind their awards through a series of dedicated case studies. We'll explore the podcast discussions that earned Expel and Observe.AI their respective Vanguard and Apex Awards, the multichannel approach behind Eightfold's Catalyst-winning campaign, and the analyst contributions that secured Dr Joe Perez the Authority Award. 

Each case study will examine what made the winning contribution stand out, including its approach, audience response and relevance to enterprise technology discussions.

Final Thoughts: Enterprise AI Impact Goes Beyond the Technology

Expel, Observe.AI, Eightfold and Dr Joe Perez each approached enterprise AI from a different direction, but their contributions have something important in common. They helped enterprise audiences understand the decisions, responsibilities and practical challenges that come with putting new technology to work.

That's the kind of contribution the EM360Tech Quarterly Impact Index is designed to recognise. Across every quarter, we're building a picture of the podcasts, campaigns and analysts whose work gives enterprise audiences something useful to take away, whether that's a fresh perspective, a better understanding of a problem or a clearer idea of what to do next.

Congratulations again to Expel, Observe.AI, Eightfold and Dr Joe Perez, our Q3 2026 Quarterly Impact Index winners!