NiCE and Customers Prove Success from AI at NiCE World
ORLANDO, Fla. -- Artificial intelligence technology has advanced rapidly in a short amount of time, and despite the fact that many companies have yet to see the returns expected from AI, that is not an issue for NiCE and many of its customers, speakers highlighted during the first full day of the NiCE World conference Tuesday.
"Five billion transactions are hitting our platform every year," NiCE CEO Scott Russell said during his opening keynote. "Every single interaction and opportunity are moments [when] we didn't just resolve a problem, we learned from it. The next one goes faster, the AI gets sharper, and the human agent gets better support. Somewhere downstream, maybe in your business, it's running better, a customer becomes more loyal."
One customer experience becomes one smart interaction, fueling the next 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, 1 million, making everything it touches just a little bit better, Russell added. "Those are real people. Those are real moments...Moments like these are happening in 25,000 companies around the world, in every industry imaginable."
AI is already making a significant impact across the healthcare, financial services, healthcare, insurance, and retail industries, with the last of those likely where it is seeing the most impact, according to Russell.
There are challenges as well, Russell acknowledged, noting that some companies don't have the resources to keep up with the opportunity while others are trying to move past pilots to implementation while he underlying technology continues to evolve.
To keep up, many oganizations buy more tools, often from multiple vendors, creating problems throughout the tech stack, according to Russell. He urged companies to consider how their AI will react when volume spikes and whether the AI seems smarter or dumber than what is available on the phone.
Point solutions often break down because they can't scale, Russell said. "We are in the AI era, and this is our opportunity to lead."
When AI handles the work at scale, human support becomes more valuable, especially when human agents work together with AI to solve customer needs.
With AI working with human agents, companies are redesigning how work gets done, Russell said, resulting in benefits across major business metrics, lower current and future costs, higher revenue, and improved customer satisfaction. "AI has already made customer experience the center of value of how companies grow, differentiate, and win, or better. That means what you do, what your teams do, has never mattered more than now. Customer experience is the heartbeat of your organization."
Among the customers to benefit from the NiCE AI solutions is financial services provider Citi.
"I was looking for a solution that can actually work at our scale with our complexity, zero room for error,," said Mia Carraro, head of customer service excellence at Citi. "What I've learned is this: When you have a complex problem, when the stakes are high, when there's a need to get it right, complexity isn't the reason to wait on AI, it's the reason you can't."
Citi's results have been outstanding, she said, noting that 90 percent of customer complaints run through automation, there's been a 150 percent improvement in complaint identification, and savings have totaled more than $7 million.
CX is one of the biggest value pools for enterprise AI, according to Russell, emphasizing NiCE's capabilities, particularly after last year's acquisition of Coginy. "We're doing real things with our customers, 9,500 interactions every minute."
The acquisition and integration of Coginy was instrumental in the development of NiCE Labs, a dedicated AI innovation lab established to conduct advanced research, benchmarking, and prototyping at the leading edge of agentic customer experience. NiCE introduced the lab at the conference.
NiCE Labs will operate as NiCE's incubation and innovation engine so its AI experts can collaborate with customers and partners to use AI to solve CX challenges.
"The pace of AI advancement is extraordinary, but raw AI capability and enterprise CX leadership are fundamentally different," said Phil Heltewig, NiCE's chief AI officer and Coginy founder. "NiCE Labs is how we close that gap. It brings together deep CX domain expertise, rigorous research and benchmarking discipline, and a rapid prototyping culture."
The goal is to ensure that NiCE and its customers are on the leading edge of agentic AI, Heltewig said.
NiCE Labs is set to do the following:
- Domain-specific research into how agents reason, learn, and operate reliably at enterprise scale.
- Benchmarking that independently evaluates models, architectures, and orchestration approaches against real-world CX scenarios.
- Prototyping and incubation inside NiCE's Agentic Portfolio through a continuous experimentation cycle.
- AI advocacy that publishes research, perspectives, reference architectures, and benchmarking insights.
NiCE Labs was driven by a fundamental shift in customer experience, company officials maintained, noting that with agentic AI at the core of its platform, enterprises can now run AI agents, human teams, workflows, data, and systems as one intelligent operating model.
NiCE also used the conference to unveil the Workforce Empowerment Suite, with one operating model to manage, govern, and empower human employees and AI agents at scale. It provides a single framework to deliver CX operational excellence across human and AI workforces, helping companies optimize customer and employee experiences, maximize profitability, and manage compliance as the workforce scales.
Since all work runs on one model, the same rules, goals, and quality bar apply, whether an interaction is handled by a person or an AI agent, the company said further, noting that AI-powered forecasting, scheduling, and a new Copilot for Workforce Managers are designed to work together.
"Every enterprise is now running a hybrid workforce of people and AI agents," said Jeff Comstock, NiCE's president of CX product and technology. "NiCE's Workforce Empowerment Suite lets them govern, coach, and scale that workforce as one so every customer gets the same experience, whether they reach a person or an AI agent."