When Customers Are Worried Companies Turn to NICE for Answers

“Customers want fast and easy resolutions. AI powers that.”

That’s how NICE CEO Scott Russell sums up the shift underway in global customer service. In a climate marked by economic disruption and shrinking consumer confidence, businesses are being forced to rethink how they engage with their customers and many are turning to NICE to do it.

Headquartered in Hoboken, New Jersey, NICE provides AI-powered customer experience (CX) and compliance software to more than 25,000 organizations worldwide. Its software touches over 20 billion customer interactions daily, a scale that gives it rare visibility into what businesses and their customers actually want.

Navigating Uncertainty with AI

According to Russell, businesses today are grappling with “customers around the world whose happiness is down.” People are cautious about where they spend, and that makes loyalty more fragile than ever. “Companies are really focused on loyalty,” he told CNBC recently. “A resilient customer—one that’s happy, one that’s engaged—is paramount in an uncertain environment.”

AI, NICE believes, is the lever to get there. Not for novelty or show, but to create what Russell calls “effortless, great customer experiences.” It’s about removing friction from call center queues to redundant manual processes and making customer interactions more responsive, predictive, and effective.

But there’s a tension. Automation often raises concerns about depersonalization or job loss. Russell doesn’t shy away from this. He points out that AI can both improve margins and enhance service. “It’s not just about reducing headcount,” he says. “It’s about giving customers faster responses and better outcomes.”

A case in point is Sony, one of NICE’s marquee customers. The company identified that 40% of its customer contact center inquiries could be automated. Implementing self-service AI allowed it to route simpler issues away from human agents freeing them to handle more complex problems while improving customer satisfaction overall.

Strategy Built Around Partnerships and Scale

To meet increasing demand for end-to-end automation, NICE is doubling down on strategic partnerships. In 2025, it announced integrations with AWS and ServiceNow, moves that Russell says are critical to breaking down silos in customer service delivery.

“We own the interactions, 15, 20 billion coming into our platform every day,” he said. “But fulfilling what customers need requires automation across the front, the mid, and the back office.” With AWS, NICE gains tighter access to data across the enterprise. With ServiceNow, it connects workflows that span departments and systems, allowing faster case resolution and better alignment between customer interactions and internal processes.

Barry Cooper, President of NICE’s CX Division, described the vision as a “unified approach” that replaces fragmented customer journeys with connected, high-value experiences. “We’re enabling businesses to streamline their operations,” he said during Knowledge 2025, ServiceNow’s flagship event.

These integrations let NICE’s AI match customer needs with the right agents or automated processes based on real-time intent, sentiment, and service history, dramatically improving resolution speed and agent productivity.

From Reactive Support to Predictive Intelligence

NICE is building a hybrid model where humans and AI collaborate. That’s the premise behind its Xceed AI agents, announced by its financial crime and compliance arm, NICE Actimize. These intelligent agents embed directly into fraud and AML workflows, specializing in tasks like alert triage, backlog reduction, and high-risk case summarization.

Craig Costigan, CEO of NICE Actimize, pointed to the growing threat of AI-enhanced financial crime: “Bad actors are leveraging generative AI to accelerate the sophistication of their schemes.” With Xceed AI agents, the company aims to help financial institutions manage exploding alert volumes and reduce false positives without burning out human analysts. The agents continuously learn from interaction data and analyst feedback, functioning as teammates rather than replacements.

Key capabilities of Xceed AI include:

• Real-time alert optimization to categorize backlogs and prioritize high-risk cases
  
• Closed-loop learning systems to improve fraud detection over time
  
• AI-driven CoPilots that assist analysts during investigations with next-step recommendations
  
• Automated entity creation and clustering to improve accuracy and reduce operational strain
  

All of this is layered into a unified SaaS platform, Xceed AI FRAML, which combines fraud detection and AML compliance into a single workflow environment which was an attempt to make financial crime management more intelligent and less reactive.

Operationalizing Customer Experience

Beyond fraud, NICE has been expanding its Enlighten AI suite, a CX-focused offering that helps companies automate service tasks and measure sentiment at scale. Originally launched two and a half years ago, Enlighten AI now includes features like:

• Enlighten Autopilot, a virtual assistant for AI-powered self-service
  
• Enlighten Copilot, which delivers real-time insights to agents during customer interactions
  
• Real-time sentiment tracking, behavioral analytics, and performance optimization
  

Republic Services, a waste management firm, implemented Enlighten AI to reduce manual call handling. It cut repeat calls by 30%, reduced customer sentiment issues by 33%, and lowered handling times without increasing staff. Meanwhile, tech company Open Network Exchange used it to replace manual quality assurance with full-interaction monitoring, saving supervisors up to five hours a week.

According to NICE, the results speak for themselves. More customers are upgrading their existing NICE implementations to include Enlighten AI, while others are adopting the software outright for its AI capabilities.

From CEO Transition to Strategic Continuity

NICE’s push into AI is also reflected in its leadership changes. In August 2024, former SAP executive Scott Russell succeeded Barak Eilam as CEO. Eilam, who led the company for over a decade, helped expand NICE’s cloud and AI footprint significantly. Russell’s appointment signals continuity, but also intent to scale further.

During NICE’s Q4 2024 earnings call, Russell emphasized that “AI-powered agentic automation” is now central to the company’s platform strategy. Its CXOne Mpower solution—described as an AI-native contact center suite—has already helped secure several “seven-digit” customer deals, according to Russell.

He also highlighted plans to “aggressively expand” partnerships and hinted at entering new business domains. “We are uniquely positioned to lead,” he said, referring to NICE’s combination of CX specialization, platform depth, and financial strength.

What sets NICE apart is the clarity with which it approaches automation not as a futuristic abstraction, but as a tool to solve immediate, real-world problems. Whether it’s reducing call wait times, uncovering fraud faster, or helping analysts focus on high-value decisions, the company’s AI strategy is grounded in operational efficiency and customer loyalty.

In Russell’s view, “What customers really are looking for is to be able to retain and grow their customer base,” he says. “That’s why AI is so critical.”