August 7, 2026 • 12 min read
Salesforce Open CTI End of Life: What Are My Options?
Director of Content & Market Research
August 7, 2026
"The room would go completely silent."
That's how Kyle Finke, Contact Center Solutions Practice Lead at Kenway Consulting, described telling clients that Salesforce is retiring Open CTI. For many, it was the first time they'd heard the news.
Some of these clients were content with their existing infrastructure and had no plans to move at all. Others were less surprised, seeing the value of investing in AI and stronger integrations.
However, whichever camp the organization is in, the advice is the same: don't wait.
With 2027 budgeting underway, now is the time to plan. As Jim Marascio, Principal & CEO at Equals11, warned, waiting until next year’s budget cycle will leave businesses with only a few months to migrate.
But let’s first step back and ask: when exactly is the Open CTI end of life, why is it happening, and what are the options? Here are the answers, with advice from four industry experts.
When Is the Open CTI End of Life?
The Salesforce Open CTI is currently in maintenance mode, with no new features or enhancements being added. Its official end-of-life date is February 28, 2028. After that, existing Open CTI implementations will simply stop working.
Additionally, no new Agentforce Service customers can implement Open CTI. Existing organizations can keep using it until the retirement date, but Salesforce is explicit that development effort should now shift to Salesforce Voice.
Why Has Salesforce Announced the Open CTI End of Life?
Salesforce's official line is that it's "committed to delivering a unified, secure, and AI-powered agent experience," and that retiring the legacy CTI clears the way for Salesforce Voice.
That being said, four major motivations jump out when reading between the lines:
- Improve the User Experience: Salesforce wants to replace iframe-based third-party integrations with a more consistent, native telephony experience under its own control.
- Support its AI Strategy: Open CTI's limited ability to bring voice interaction data into Salesforce makes it insufficient for powering AI capabilities - from Agent Assist to conversational intelligence - which rely on real-time interaction data.
- Pull More Data Into Its Ecosystem: With voice on its platform, Salesforce can extract more reliable insights into customer sentiment and stress levels, which it can share across its Agentforce 360 ecosystem.
- Strengthen its Commercial Model: Moving customers away from Open CTI and toward Salesforce-managed alternatives helps preserve, and potentially increase, licensing revenue associated with telephony integrations.
While some customers may question these motivations, the reality is that the change is already underway, leaving businesses with only a limited number of options.
What Are My Options?
Currently, there are four possible next steps for contact centers. Others may come. For instance, some vendors are trialing simpler embedded-app or click-to-dial style connectors. These will likely be less seamless than the Open CTI, but will avoid a full telephony migration.
Nevertheless, realistically, service teams will opt for one of the four paths forward to connect their contact center platform with Agentforce Service. Which one fits depends on how deeply the organization is in the Salesforce ecosystem, existing contracts with contact center partners, and in-house skills (more on this later).
1. Salesforce Voice / Salesforce Voice for Partner Telephony
Salesforce Voice (formerly Service Cloud Voice) first came to market in partnership with AWS, bringing the same telephony that powers Amazon Connect natively into Agentforce Service.
At the same time, Salesforce sent out APIs to its other contact center partners, enabling them to support Bring Your Own Telephony within the same framework.
Since then, many CCaaS providers have built a native Salesforce Voice integration of their own, but there are exceptions.
Pros:
- Salesforce controls the core UI, so the experience is consistent and consolidated, with room for extensions via custom Lightning Web Components
- The integration enables real-time transcription inside Salesforce, a prerequisite for AI assistants that can join conversations, recommend actions, and automate agent work
- The natural default for organizations already committed to Salesforce as their digital engagement hub and can be fast to deploy
Cons:
- Salesforce charges $50 per user, per month for Salesforce Voice for Partner Telephony. Open CTI was free.
- Businesses already well-established on a CCaaS platform have to reimagine their channel configurations for Salesforce.
- Not all CCaaS providers offer a Salesforce Voice integration. While many are likely developing one, brands locked into multi-year contracts with providers that lack this capability could be at risk.
2. Bring Your Own CCaaS
Launched in 2024, Bring Your Own Channel for CCaaS is a program several contact center providers signed up for to offer a new type of integration to customers.
These integrations embed not only voice and call controls into Agentforce Service, but also digital channels and omnichannel routing. That allows businesses to keep their existing channel configurations and logic with their CCaaS provider.
Examples include the Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect, the CX Cloud from Genesys and Salesforce, and Five9 Fusion for Salesforce.
This type of integration may offer the best path forward for organizations heavily invested in a specific contact center platform, like the three above.
Pros:
- Preserves existing telephony investment, numbers, and channel builds
- Gives service reps a consistent Salesforce experience even when a partner system processes routing
- Unifies customer data across channels
Cons:
- Potential friction when choosing which features to leverage from either vendor
- More complex to implement than a straightforward Salesforce Voice connector
- Works best only if a company is already well established on a CCaaS platform
3. Agentforce Contact Center
This is Salesforce's own native CCaaS product. An administrator can enable it directly, provision a phone number, start routing calls, generate reports, and and apply a Help Agent for self-service, all inside Salesforce.
The trouble is, it only launched in March 2026, and is (as of August 2026) only available in North America. As such, it’s still maturing and not yet ready for large, global enterprise requirements. However, that may well soon change.
"I expect Dreamforce to showcase a number of early adopters, perhaps a dozen or so. Next year is when I expect adoption to accelerate significantly."
Pros:
- Plays well with other Salesforce components, such as Agentforce Voice, Help Agent, Salesforce Knowledge, etc.
- Converges the customer service stack and data
- No connector fee dynamics working against it
Cons:
- As of writing, it is only available in North America.
- Not yet at feature parity with mature, dedicated CCaaS platforms
- Not an immediate option for customers with CCaaS contracts exceeding 18 months.
4. Migrating from Salesforce
Technically valid option, but it's a huge project, since for many businesses Salesforce isn't just a customer service tool; it's the operational backbone of the company. As such, it’s mostly confined to very small organizations.
How Do I Know Which Option Is Best for Me?
There's no universal answer, but there are a few clear decision factors. Below are three key examples.
1. Consider the Role of Salesforce Moving Forward
Decision-makers should ask themselves: Is Salesforce the company’s primary digital engagement platform or just a CRM?
If a business is all in on Salesforce across all channels, Salesforce Voice - or perhaps a longer-term transition to the Agentforce Contact Center - is the logical move.
However, if Salesforce is more peripheral, speak with the CCaaS provider and discuss whether Bring Your Own CCaaS is a viable option.
2. Think About In-House Skills
The in-house skills a brand has and wishes to maintain should factor into the decision.
Consider an organization with Amazon Connect and Agentforce Service. An AWS-heavy team might keep more logic on the AWS side; a Salesforce-heavy team with limited dedicated contact center staff should lean into a deeper Salesforce build they can maintain.
"What you ultimately build should be driven by the skills you want to maintain in-house, or already have in-house."
3. Weigh the Costs, But Not Just at Face Value
Perhaps the big piece of advice is to zoom out before making a decision. After all, it’s easy to look at the additional charge for Salesforce Voice and say: how much more do I have to pay?
However, with Salesforce Voice, contact centers can reduce costs by replacing separately purchased capabilities, such as conversational intelligence and knowledge management, with native alternatives.
Brands that start their journey away from the Open CTI now will have more time to consider this ‘bigger picture’ thinking moving forward and will be best placed to succeed.
Challenges In Migrating from Open CTI
Each option brings its own challenges. Yet, there are some universal hurdles brands must overcome, as shared below.
1. Undocumented Legacy Logic
Open CTI implementations are often 14–15 years old, built by one or two people who may no longer be with the company.
Years of routing rules, screen pops, and workflows run through that integration. As a result, migrating can feel like "reverse engineering the entire solution," noted Finke.
2. Scope Creep
Once a migration project starts, different stakeholders get involved, and a simple transformation can evolve into something much bigger and more time-consuming. With February 2028 as the hard deadline, contact centers must be cautious here.
"Once you start reviewing routing rules with the business, people inevitably begin saying, 'Actually, while we're doing this, let's change that too.' Before long, the project expands well beyond a migration into a redesign, and requirements churn can derail the whole initiative."
3. Change Management
The technology choice is rarely the hard part; it's bringing people through the change. Skip that consideration, and the business risks performance management challenges and increased employee turnover.
"The migration itself usually isn't especially difficult. The bigger challenge is user adoption and adjusting to changes in how people interact with their telephony tools."
4. Vendor Readiness Gaps
Not every CCaaS provider has a Salesforce Voice connector ready yet. Given this, organizations must first seek clarity on what their contact center provider can offer.
5. Compliance and Functional Maturity
Some of Salesforce's native options aren't fully there yet for regulated industries or complex calling needs, which is a real constraint for healthcare, financial services, or multinational operations evaluating Agentforce Contact Center or pure Salesforce Voice today.
6. Internal Commercial Dynamics
There are several Salesforce Account Executives out there. Many are customer-first, and push the option that's genuinely best for the business.
However, some will be focused on protecting commissionable revenue, which can shape the advice customers receive.
3 Best Practices Moving Forward
Alongside universal challenges, there are universal best practices organizations can follow to ensure a successful migration.
Some of these have already been outlined, such as investing properly in change management. However, here are three other salient points raised by the experts.
1. Start the Budgeting Conversation Now
Marascio stressed that organizations should start planning now and get this into the 2027 budget cycle.
After all, strategy and budget approval often take longer than the technical migration itself.
"You don't want to reach Q4 2027 and realize you only have three to five months left, with no budget allocated."
2. Audit and Document Everything
Build a full inventory before touching anything, recommends Finke.
"Documentation is crucial. Take inventory of everything: screen pop rules, case creation triggers, wrap-up processes, speed dials, routing rules, phone numbers…”
With some organizations having old speed-dial lists pointing nowhere and routing rules leading to dead ends, this can be a telling exercise for contact center leaders.
3. Tie the Migration to the AI Roadmap, Not a Like-for-Like Swap
Hutchinson was emphatic that the point isn't replacing screen pop and a softphone.
"The real opportunity is giving contact centers access to automation and self-service capabilities that simply weren't possible a few years ago."
Organizations that treat this as an AI enablement project, not a lift-and-shift, get far more value.
What Does the Open CTI Retirement Say About the Future of the Contact Center Space?
Beyond the mechanics of migration, the consultants saw this as a signal of where the industry, as a whole, is heading.
Increasingly, CRM platforms are becoming the primary customer service interface, not just the system of record behind it, and it's not isolated to Salesforce.
Baker noted that Zendesk and Microsoft Dynamics have followed a similar path. "I wouldn't be surprised if ServiceNow eventually does the same, because they're increasingly competing CRM-to-CRM rather than CRM-to-CCaaS,” he added.
This larger shift is already reshaping how CCaaS vendors describe themselves. For instance, Genesys rarely refers to itself as a contact center company anymore; it's an “AI orchestration company.”
Meanwhile, specialist conversational AI providers - like Decagon, Kore.ai, and Sierra - are increasingly creeping into the picture.
"You still need a telephony platform underneath everything, but increasingly you'll layer specialist conversational AI vendors on top.”
While CRM and CCaaS providers have their own conversational AI solutions, Baker stressed that specialist conversational AI vendors often still have the edge over platforms embedding AI, "because that's what they were built to do."
Yet, in short, the consensus is: Open CTI's retirement isn't really a telephony story. It's a preview of a contact center market being redrawn around AI-ready data, and the organizations that treat it that way will likely enjoy most success with their migrations.