Moving on from Open CTI: How to Modernize Your Contact Center for the AI Era

Open CTI helped define an era of contact center innovation. For years, it gave organizations a flexible way to connect telephony systems with Salesforce and build smarter service experiences. Now the next chapter is here.

With Open CTI reaching end of life on February 28, 2028, organizations have an opportunity to do more than complete a technical migration – they can move to a platform designed for AI-powered service from the ground up.

And the teams moving early aren’t just avoiding a deadline. They’re gaining a head start on a new model of customer service — one where AI actively supports every interaction, supervisors have real-time visibility, and every conversation becomes actionable customer data. That’s the shift that a partner contact center makes possible.

Why move from Open CTI to integrating a partner contact center

Modernizing your voice strategy isn’t just about replacing a legacy integration. It’s about unlocking a more connected, intelligent service experience across every channel.

Bring AI directly into the flow of work

Open CTI was built for a different era of customer service. It connected telephony systems to Salesforce through a JavaScript bridge, but it was never designed with AI at the center. Integrating a partner contact center with Salesforce is.

Because partner contact centers are integrated into the Salesforce platform, organizations can use Service Rep Assistant to support service reps during live conversations with:

• Real-time recommendations
• Automated call summaries
• Smarter call routing
• Next-best-action guidance

Instead of spending time searching for answers or documenting calls after the fact, service reps can stay focused on the customer conversation itself. 

Give your service reps one unified workspace

In many Open CTI environments, service reps constantly switch between the softphone and the Service Console while handling customer conversations.

It seems small, but over thousands of interactions, that friction adds up.

A partner contact center brings voice directly into Omni-Channel alongside email, chat, messaging, and cases. Reps work from one workspace with one routing model and one customer view.

That means less toggling, less manual effort, and more time spent delivering meaningful support.

Help supervisors manage operations in real time

Supervisors need visibility into what’s happening across the contact center as it happens — not after the fact.

With a partner contact center, capabilities like:

• Queue monitoring
• Agent presence management
• Live call monitoring
• Handle time tracking

are built directly into the Salesforce platform.

For many Open CTI customers, these insights previously required custom dashboards and ongoing maintenance. A partner contact center with Salesforce reduces that operational overhead so teams can focus more on coaching and improving service quality.

Turn every conversation into actionable customer data

One of the biggest differences between Open CTI and a partner contact center with Salesforce is where the data lives. In many legacy environments, valuable call data stays inside third-party telephony systems. Salesforce only receives limited logging information.

A partner contact center changes that model entirely. Every interaction creates a native VoiceCall record connected directly to the customer’s Contact, Case, and Account records. Transcripts, sentiment signals, and conversation outcomes become part of the Salesforce data model — making them accessible to reporting, automation, and AI. Every call becomes a source of insight the business can learn from.

Open CTI vs. partner contact center: The architectural shift behind the experience

For architects and IT leaders, the migration to a partner contact center is about more than new features. It’s a fundamental architectural evolution.

Open CTI operates primarily as a browser-based integration layer. Telephony systems run externally and communicate with Salesforce through embedded adapters and APIs.

A partner contact center introduces a more connected model. With Omni-Channel managing agent state and routing natively, Salesforce becomes an active participant in the interaction lifecycle rather than just a system receiving data after the call.

That two-way relationship enables:

• Real-time AI assistance
• Unified routing across channels
• Native reporting and analytics
• Shared customer context across service experiences

The result is a platform that’s simpler to manage and better equipped for AI-driven service operations.

What changes during an Open CTI migration

For many organizations, migration is less about rebuilding functionality and more about simplifying what already exists.

A large percentage of Open CTI customizations were created to fill gaps that a partner contact center now handles natively. That means many teams actually remove custom code during migration instead of adding more.

Here’s what that shift typically looks like:

• Custom opencti.screenPop() logic becomes declarative Omni-Channel Flows.
• opencti.saveLog() methods are replaced with Record-Triggered Flows on the native VoiceCall object.
• Custom agent presence management gives way to native Omni-Channel presence controls.
• Embedded softphone iframe components are replaced with Voice Extension Lightning Web Components (LWCs).
• Custom call logging and Task creation workflows become automated VoiceCall records with Flow-based automation.
• Traditional Softphone Layouts are no longer required in a partner contact center.

The overall pattern is consistent: less custom infrastructure, more native platform capability. For IT teams, that often translates into fewer integrations to maintain, less technical debt, and a service environment that’s easier to scale over time.

Choosing the right migration path

The good news is that migrating from Open CTI doesn’t mean every organization has to rebuild its contact center from scratch. Salesforce supports multiple migration paths depending on your existing telephony environment and how much change your team wants to take on at once.

Organizations generally approach migration in one of two ways:

• Keep your existing telephony provider: Many leading contact center providers already offer certified integrations through the AppExchange. For these organizations, much of the integration work is already handled, allowing teams to focus primarily on Salesforce configuration and operational rollout.
• Modernize telephony at the same time: Other organizations use the Open CTI transition as an opportunity to reevaluate their broader contact center stack. While this approach involves a larger transformation effort, it can also simplify long-term operations by consolidating systems and modernizing infrastructure in a single program, such as Agentforce Contact Center.

How to migrate from Open CTI to a partner contact center integration

For many organizations — especially smaller service teams — migration is more approachable than expected when tackled in phases.

1. Audit your current implementation

Start by documenting:

• Screen pops
• Call logging
• Presence handling
• Routing logic
• Custom softphone components

Then map each customization against partner contact center capabilities. In many cases, declarative replacements already exist.

2. Configure partner contact center and Omni-Channel

Set up:

• Service channels
• Queues
• Routing configurations
• Agent presence statuses

Because much of this configuration is declarative, teams can often move quickly through this phase.

3. Replace custom logic with native automation

Use Omni-Channel Flows and Record-Triggered Flows on the VoiceCall object to recreate existing workflows. The key mindset shift is that Salesforce now manages routing and agent state directly.

4. Validate in sandbox environments

VoiceCall records behave differently from traditional Task-based logging models, so testing is critical. Validate routing logic, reporting, automations, and supervisor workflows before production rollout.

5. Roll out in phases

Many organizations succeed with a phased migration approach:

• Run parallel environments temporarily
• Move teams in waves
• Complete clean cutovers by group

This reduces operational risk while giving reps time to adapt to new workflows.

The future of service is already here

Open CTI helped organizations connect voice and CRM during an important stage of contact center evolution. 

Integrating a partner contact center with Salesforce takes the next step. It brings together AI, voice, routing, automation, and customer data into one unified platform — so organizations can deliver faster, smarter, and more connected service experiences.

And with Salesforce continuing to invest heavily in AI-powered service, the long-term direction is clear: the future contact center will be built around unified data, AI-assisted work, and seamless customer interactions across every channel. Partner contact center integrations with Salesforce are designed for that future today.