NICE Interactions 2024 - CX AI Realized

At its annual Interactions customer event, NICE presented its vision for the future – and yes, AI is front and center. As usual, CEO Barak Eilam wowed the audience with his flawless keynote and amazing graphics, as he discussed the history of innovation. NICE has long been at the forefront of innovation, and there was certainly plenty to showcase at Interactions 2024.

Some of the announcements made the event include:

• A “mega win” in the APAC region with a total contract value of over $100M, displacing several legacy incumbents with NICE CXone. The customer chose NICE as “the only platform that could address this organization’s need to deliver exceptional customer and employee experiences across digital and voice channels at scale.” NICE did not disclose the name of the customer, but I suspect that it’s Services Australia, which recently signed a very large contact center deal with Optus. Optus Cloud Contact is powered by NICE CXone, so we can put two and two together…
• 1CX, a fully featured communication suite, providing unlimited telco usage at a “market-shattering price" of only $5/use/month. With 1CX, NICE has expanded its offerings and now offers an integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solution with voice, messaging, and video collaboration services. As I wrote in an article about 1CX, customers are increasingly looking for a single vendor solution for UCaaS and CCaaS, and NICE now has a solution for both internal and external communications.
• The biggest news was CXone Mpower, the “world’s first and only CX-aware AI platform.” It combines NICE CXone with Enlighten Copilot, Autopilot, and Actions to provide seamless collaboration between human agents and AI. Every consumer interaction picks up where the last one left off regardless of channel, and each experience is personalized and informed by the customer’s history with the company.

Walking through the solutions hall at Interactions, you can see how CXone Mpower is not a product, but is rolled into several products, providing insights and advanced capabilities. While Generative AI has no memory and forgets who the customer is after the interaction, Mpower lets the AI pick up the conversation where it left off to create seamless journeys powered by past experiences.

Mpower provides memory-driven AI, using “continuous Experience Memory based on historical experiences and derived customer preferences to inject contextual insights at precise moments and utilize interconnected data and applications to inform optimal outcomes for unparalleled CX awareness.” In other words, using everything you know about a customer – their preferences, previous interactions and history, and more – to provide a continuous and personalized experience.

Mpower uses interaction data and meta data to create a 360-degree view of each customer, with experience memory to ensure the interaction picks up where it left off regardless of channel, overcoming the lack of continuity that is so frustrating to agents and customers. It goes beyond remembering past interactions to personalizing the next best action and proactively making suggestions. This is really the next step in CX.

Mpower addresses three areas for CX organizations:

• Immediate Augmentation: Augmenting agent and employee performance with copilot and automation capabilities infused with intelligence memory-driven AI.
• Advanced Skillability: Dynamic skill transfer between humans and AI through “skillability” and reverse-prompting. Virtual agents can understand consumer intents, remember their preferences and resolve issues, and can continue learning and improving based on customer interactions and agent feedback. 
• Fully Aware Proactive Service: CXone Mpower connects to every touchpoint and application in an organization and provides personalization by proactively recommending actions, optimizing processes, and devising creative solutions.

And kudos to whoever came up with the name of Mpower. While the “M” represents experience memory, Mpower also “empowers” agents, supervisors, business leaders, and customers.

Demos Galore

While the keynotes and breakouts were very interesting, the demos in the solutions hall really brought home the power (no pun intended) of Mpower. I had a chance to view several demos, and recorded three of them, available here to view.

The video below shows a demo of CXone Mpower with Enlighten Actions, which “enables CX leaders to unlock complex data with generative AI, taking data-driven action with conversational questions and answers.” Enlighten Actions lets CX leaders analyze and act on unstructured data, helping them understand what’s going on and take action in order meet their goals. Enlighten Actions uses LLMs to give data a voice and can perform complex analytical operations in minutes rather than days. It helps CX leaders understand their operations and take action by leveraging Enlighten's highly specialized AI models for CX.

The video below shows a demo of Enlighten Copilot to assist agents. Copilot provides conversational knowledge, real-time guidance, task automation, personalized coaching, and brand-specific prompts to promote smarter guided interactions. For example, it can present knowledge articles and links to agents, create agent interaction summaries, prompt agents to show empathy, and more.

This final demo video is about Skillability, enabling dynamic skills exchange between employees and AI agents through "skillability" and reverse-prompting. Skillability can be used to make the AI and virtual agents even better using “reverse prompting” where the virtual agent asks what it can do to improve future interactions. This is truly unique.

Hearing from Customers

One of the best parts of going to customer events is speaking with and hearing from customers. I had some great discussions with customers who are in various stages along their CX and AI journeys. Some are eager to get started with AI but realize they don’t have the internal staff and skills, and need to identify how to bring in the right skills. Others are migrating from an on-prem contact center system to the cloud and need to figure out how best to manage the migration in order to make the transition seamless for their agents. Others are in the process of figuring out which digital channels to add and how to help agents move to these new channels.

The Last Hurrah for Eilam

This will be Barak Eilam’s last Interactions conference as NICE CEO, as he’s stepping down as CEO after 10 years. Thanks to his vision and passion, as well as his deep understanding of the CX market, he helped lead NICE to become a true CX leader, and will certainly be missed. I look forward to seeing what’s next for Barak and NICE’s next chapter.