NiCE Interactions 2025 – A New Era

NICE recently hosted its annual customer event, NiCE Interactions, drawing an impressive 3,000 CX leader attendees from 20 diverse industries. The central theme, "Creating a NiCE world through the power of AI," underscored how businesses can leverage NiCE solutions to achieve greater profitability, enhanced efficiency, and increased customer satisfaction.

This year's event featured several notable changes and announcements. First, NICE is now NiCE, representing the new branding and focus on AI. Attendees also had their first opportunity to hear from new CEO Scott Russell, who infused the event with palpable energy and excitement. The event also marked the final Interactions for CMO Einat Weiss, who has played a pivotal role in establishing NICE as a market leader. While her contributions to NICE will undoubtedly leave a lasting legacy, her presence will be missed.

CEO Scott Russell Welcomes Attendees to Interactions 2025

Reimagining Customer Experience

In a high-energy presentation, CEO Scott Russell elaborated on his decision to join NICE and the company's mission to "create a NICE world, where every experience feels human and personal, and every connection creates value." Russell explained that he was drawn to the opportunity to blend human connection with the power of technology, transforming human engagement by enriching it, not replacing it.

Russell noted that while real progress is being made, many organizations are still uncertain as to how best to leverage Ai and innovation to transform customer experiences.

Russell asked the audience:

·      What if customers didn’t have to find service – it found them?

·      What if issues could be resolved before customers knew they had a problem?

·      What if interactions create new opportunities?

He answered that in a NiCE world, every experience feels human and personal; every connection creates value, and the power of AI is proactively used to turn knowledge into action, fusing automation and human empathy to make experiences matter. Human and AI agents interoperate within the same interaction in a way that feels as cohesive as a single pane of glass.

The key and foundation to all of this is NiCE’s platform, CXone Mpower. CXone was recently rearchitected to CXone Mpower, “an AI platform to make a NiCE world a reality.” CXone Mpower is a purpose-built AI-based end-to-end platform built on an open cloud infrastructure, with workflow orchestration in a single ecosystem.

CXone Mpower combines three key elements:

·      Workflows

·      Knowledge

·      Agents

It centralizes AI knowledge in one place to improve experiences, and provides workflow orchestration, empowering (pun intended) customers to automate their workflows, while blurring the lines between front-, middle-, back-office teams.

To discuss the event and the changes taking place, I spoke with VP Corporate Communications, Chris Irwin-Dudek.

CXone Mpower Agents

The biggest announcement at the event was the introduction of CXone Mpower Agents, AI-driven assistants that adapt, learn, and scale with a business. Based on reasoning, context, goals, and guardrails, these AI agents can be created and deployed in seconds and work across the front, back, and middle office to automate service workflows. CXone Mpower Agents are built for CX and trained on billions of interactions. They use real-time reasoning based on a business’s data to automate customer service workflows, enabling these agents to operate fluently across the front and back office, executing tasks and triggering reactions.

In this video, VP of Product Marketing, Andy Traba, describes these AI agents and how they work.

After presenting an impressive demo on stage, Jennifer Wilson, Director of Product Marketing, sat down with me to discuss the power of NiCE’s AI agents and copilots for agents, supervisors, and customers, and how they’re being used across the organization. In this video interview, Wilson also describes the new AI Voice Services, including real-time translation, noise suppression, and voice modifications to match dialects, as well as CX Mpower Desk, a new workspace for agents, back-office workers, and others (who I call “engagement workers”).

Orchestration

Another key topic was around orchestration and CXone Mpower Orchestrator, an intelligent command center to manage customer service workflows end-to-end. CXone Mpower Orchestrator takes a holistic approach to provide real-time visibility into work to analyze, unify, optimize, and automate workflows.

In this video, Tim Harris GM, Interaction Orchestration, discusses how CXone MPower Orchestrator helps unify and optimize workflows. He also discusses the CXone Mpower Desk workspace for back-office workers.

In this video, Mike Harwell, Senior Director of Product Management, drills deeper into CXone Mpower Orchestrator and how it works. He explains how NiCE begins with a discovery process to identify existing and inferred workflows, then moves to mapping, publishing and optimizing the workflow using AI, and lastly, executing the workflow.

Key Takeaways

Customers: While it was great hearing from NiCE about their innovations, it was even better hearing from their customers. In addition to the various customers on the big stage (Disney, Walmart, Charles Schwab, Carnival UK, H&R Block, and ALG Vacations), many of the breakout sessions were led by customers sharing their experiences and best practices. Most of the customers I spoke with were experimenting with AI in one way or another, experiencing impactful business benefits. During one breakout session I attended, panelists from Sony and Disney helped attendees identify ways to encourage AI adoption, differentiate from competitors, and get the most out of their AI deployments. Hearing from their peers was very powerful and impactful, and the response from attendees showed how much they appreciated these insights.

Platform is key: The word I heard most often (aside from AI) at Interactions was “platform.” CXone President Barry Cooper discussed the value of having a single platform, encouraging businesses exploring the best way to get started with AI to “start on the platform.” As a single, unified platform and AI foundation, CXone Mpower connects intelligence across the platform to make everything work better together. NiCE customers agree. Anderson Wilkins, Head of Global CCaaS Product for Walmart, noted that Walmart selected NiCE in part because of its single platform to help optimize costs, remove friction, and simplify Walmart’s technology stack. Other customers I spoke with agreed that having a single platform was key to their decision to choose NiCE.

Barry Cooper, President, NICE CXone Division

Openness and partnerships: It was refreshing to hear NiCE discuss technology partnerships and openness. During his keynote, Russell discussed new partnerships to enhance CXone Mpower’s depth and synergies, including ServiceNow, AWS, Snowflake, and others. This is key, as one of NiCE’s challenges in the past has been its limited partnerships, which are essential in today’s CX world.

AI Agents: While the term “agentic AI” wasn’t used as frequently as expected, it’s clear that NiCE is being very aggressive in this area. The demos during Barry Cooper’s keynote on Day 2 really brought home the power of these AI Agents that complete tasks based on the goals that they’re given, and how easy it is to create these agents without any code or programming. Even an industry analyst can do it!

Front and Back Office: It was refreshing to hear about several announcements that focus not just on contact center agents and workers, but also middle- and back-office workers who interact with customers. NiCE presenters discussed how the AI Agents operate fluently across the front and back office, while the new CXone Mpower Desk is an all-in-one workspace to unify and streamline front- and back-office work, connecting frontline agents, back-office employees, and specialists to collaborate in real time. This aligns with concepts I’ve been promoting for many years, including the role of back-office “engagement workers,” who interact with and support customers.

Unified Communications?: While there was a demo booth in the exhibit hall showcasing 1CX, NiCE's UCaaS offering, there was no mention of it during any of the keynote presentations or demos. This is understandable, given that UCaaS is not a priority for NiCE, but a mention on the big stage would have helped to inform customers that this offering is available. While i was at the 1CX booth, a couple of customers noted that they weren't familiar with this offering and didn't know it was available. Perhaps NiCE could be a bit more vocal about having these capabilities.

Closing Thoughts

NiCE always does a fabulous job at its events, with dynamic speakers, impressive graphics and visuals, and educational sessions. This year was no different. Scott Russell did an impressive job at his first Interactions, bringing a dose of Australian energy. I especially appreciated his focus on partnerships and openness, which should help NiCE expand to other areas beyond the contact center. While he certainly will make changes in NiCE’s approach in some areas, he understands what made NiCE a CX leader, and isn’t looking to fix what isn’t broken.

With a new CEO and CMO, there will certainly be lots of changes ahead, but similar to CXone Mpower, the company is built on a strong foundation that will help accelerate growth.

And of course, we all had a great time seeing One Republic perform as part of the Customer Appreciation Event.