MetriNote – NiCE Annual Analyst Summit: Execs Highlight Multitude of Changes in 2025 Guiding Strategy for 2026 and Beyond

Author: Robin Gareiss, CEO and Principal Analyst What's the news? November 10, 2025 – NiCE kicked off its annual analyst summit with a team of new executives, a significant acquisition, and predictions of where the artificial intelligence (AI) and customer experience (CX) markets are headed. The event, held Oct. 20-23 in Vienna, Austria, also included discussions with customers and partners, as well as detailed overview of the company’s products and vision. One of the best attributes of NiCE’s annual event is unfettered access to executives; this year was no exception—but even more important given the swift change in executive leadership. Scott Russell, who joined NiCE as CEO on Jan. 1, gave his inaugural keynote to analysts (though he’s been on much bigger stages throughout the year with customers, partners, and sales teams), with the following takeaways:

• Market leadership and a history of CX innovation is what drew him to NiCE from his previous role as chief revenue officer at SAP.
• He emphasized “speed is a choice,” and frankly, he has followed that mantra this year with new executive hires, including Michelle Cooper, CMO; Jeff Comstock, president of product and technology; Arun Chandra, COO; and Philipp Heltewig, GM NiCE Cognigy and chief AI officer for NiCE. The latter resulted from NiCE’s acquisition of Cognigy—another relatively fast move for a new CEO—to accelerate NiCE’s leadership in AI. “It doesn’t mean everything has to be fast and reckless. Be purposeful, precise, and move quickly. Even if you have to change direction, you do it quickly,” Russell said, adding that he is ingraining that view into the company for product roadmap, competitor assessment, customer journey, and how to create new experiences.
• He highlighted strategic partnerships with AWS, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Snowflake. If NiCE executes on its strategy, it will not only become the CX leader, but coexist with the aforementioned companies, he said.
• Russell said he is obsessed about growing NiCE internationally and is already seeing solid year-over-year growth.
• He described this time as an “AI-first CX era,” shaped by six trends that are fundamentally reinventing how companies and even departments within companies work together. Those trends are:
  1. Agentic AI takes over CX, specifically with tier 1 and 2 interactions
  2. Human engagements take on a new role, highlighted by customers paying more to talk to humans in industries like luxury services, and new jobs emerging
  3. System of record and contact center as a service (CCaaS) converge into AI-dominant customer engagement platform (CEP)
  4. AI melts the organization chart by automating services beyond the contact center
  5. Millions of independent AI agents create and consume data, leaving organizations to shift from managing employees to managing AI workforces
  6. Machine-to-machine interactions permeate CX in how AI handles transactions behind the scenes and organizations automate customer service through machine-to-machine automation
• AI self-service will increase to 24% to 28% of interactions by 2029, Russell predicted. (Of note, this is actually lower than our research shows. In our Customer Experience Optimization 2025-26 global study of 656 companies, Metrigy asked what percentage of their customer interactions would be managed fully by AI with no human involvement by 2029. The answer: 59.7%)
• Russell said he believes AI should be entrenched into the fabric of what NiCE delivers; thus, the acquisition of Cognigy. “People are more likely to buy AI capabilities to deliver self-service from a CCaaS provider that has world-class AI capabilities,” he said.

NiCE’s revenue is $2.9 billion, with cloud revenue making up $2.2 billion. Keep in mind that NiCE also includes its Actimize and public safety businesses, which make up most of the difference in the two figures. AI adoption is growing rapidly at 42% year over year. With the Cognigy acquisition, NiCE has 10,000+ employees now. Taking the stage, Heltewig spoke about the company’s plans for agentic AI, and highlighted three reasons it’s a game changer. First, it enables faster development. Companies will be able to create an intelligent AI agent in a matter of minutes and also add transactional tools. Second, it will deliver multimodal CX, with voice, text, and images, to significantly increase problem-resolution. And third is its composite approach by seamlessly combining AI agents with human interactions, self-service, knowledge bases, or any other system. What’s more, NiCE Cognigy offers an AI Agent Simulator—an increasingly in-demand capability within CX, according to the above-mentioned Metrigy study—where AI agents test AI agents before general rollout. Basically, they simulate thousands of conversations to understand AI agents’ performance. In fact, 42.6% of companies conduct or plan to conduct generative AI assurance testing and optimization, while 50.1% are doing the same with conversational AI agents, according to the research. Carmit DiAndrea, head of AI data management, discussed NiCE’s focus on Automated Insights, which provide companies with important information to improve agent performance and customer success. For example, the offering can look at agent tasks and highlight where which tasks are happening most frequently. It also evaluates agent performance variability, comparing peer groups and uncovering statistical outliers. With that information, the tool can find repetitive tasks and identify areas to add AI copilots. Other areas of focus at the event included the AI-ready data foundation to power customer experiences, orchestration to intelligently connect end-to-end workflows, and workforce augmentation that helps to drive operational excellence from both AI and human agents. Key takeaways include:

• Automation delivers full value only when it’s intelligently orchestrated
• Orchestration connects customer intent seamlessly through fulfillment
• The future isn’t AI or humans; it’s both working together