Human-centric AI delivered at scale is the NiCE approach to CX

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Last week, I attended NiCE Interactions 2025, a customer experience industry event bringing together nearly 3,000 CX, contact center, operations, and IT leaders from around the world. As NiCE is a leading provider of CX and contact center solutions, the event focused on how business leaders are modernizing their customer care and engagement strategies and how NiCE is helping facilitate that transformation.

At the event, company leaders, marquee customers, and technology partners showcased how NiCE is reshaping service interactions through intelligent automation, empathetic design, and a connected ecosystem. The overarching message was that AI isn’t just about productivity — it’s about improving human outcomes at scale.

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NiCE’s recent rebranding reinforces this shift. The company has repositioned itself not just as a technology provider but as a CX AI platform to drive human-centered CX and business outcomes. The new brand emphasizes the “human side of AI,” a concept that was central across every executive keynote, customer success story, and 1-1 discussion throughout the event.

Leadership

This year’s Interactions was the first user event for the company’s new CEO, Scott Russell. Russell’s conversations with the analyst community prior to the event, alongside his presentations on stage and in person, exhibited that he has a deep understanding and clear vision of the CX space in the age of AI. 

At Russell’s helm, NiCE’s messaging is focused on the practical (and real) side of AI versus hype. It’s easy for technology vendors, especially those in the customer service and CX space, to chase the AI hype by promising buyers full end-to-end automation and worker replacement. NiCE is taking the more difficult but transparent road, setting realistic expectations on AI usage and benefits, and focusing on AI driving measurable outcomes through practical use cases.

CXOne MPower as the relationship orchestrator

Barry Cooper, president of CX Americas, shares that a key pillar of NiCE’s product strategy is CXOne MPower. This AI-native platform is designed to orchestrate entire customer experiences spanning all channels, departments, and devices, rather than just siloed interactions. With over 6,000 active users, MPower ties together automation, workflow orchestration, agent enablement, and real-time intelligence.

The platform is built to evolve how organizations engage with customers, shifting from task-based support, such as opening and closing tickets, to proactive, intelligent service across the customer journey.

Product announcements

Two of the most important product highlights at Interactions were MPower Agents and MPower Desk, each marking a significant step forward in the practical application of AI for enterprise CX.

MPower Agents are AI-powered digital workers that use reasoning, context, and business intent to complete end-to-end tasks within defined operational guardrails. Rather than simply surfacing knowledge or answering queries, these agents can resolve workflows across the front and back office. This gives organizations a scalable, low-code path to automation that augments, not replaces, human agents.

At the event, I participated in an AI lab session where I watched several NiCE users use MPower Agent to build their own AI agents within minutes. The product is a major shift in empowering business users with limited or no technical knowledge to quickly and efficiently build AI agents to execute numerous workflows.

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Meanwhile, MPower Desk is designed to streamline and unify front- and back-office operations in a single workspace — the agent desktop. The company noted that the product is designed to help teams prioritize, organize, and resolve service requests more efficiently. MPower Desk represents NiCE’s vision of seamless service orchestration, where CX is no longer isolated to the contact center but embedded across departments and business functions. It’s also critical to note that MPower Desk provides firms with the ability to connect all internal customer and operational data. This is a major step toward enhancing data hygiene, which is much needed to drive accurate and effective AI outcomes.

Together, these innovations reflect NiCE’s efforts to make AI not just intelligent but operationally impactful and easy to deploy at scale.

Partnership ecosystem extends enterprise reach

NiCE reinforced the critical role of partnerships in expanding the impact of its platform across the enterprise. With the new CEO’s vast experience in the enterprise space, NiCE is rapidly adding and expanding its partnerships to fuel growth and enterprise momentum.

The ServiceNow partnership introduces a turnkey integration between NiCE’s CXOne and ServiceNow’s service management platform. This allows organizations to connect customer service workflows across the front and back office, providing visibility and actionability on both sides of the operation. It’s a strategic step that enables organizations to bridge CRM, case management, and operational tasks within one connected experience.

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NiCE’s collaboration with AWS brings CXOne MPower to the AWS Marketplace, simplifying access to AWS’ enterprise-grade AI tools for customers already operating within AWS environments. This partnership is critical for accelerating procurement and deployment cycles, especially for companies scaling AI initiatives across multiple regions or divisions.

The partnership with Snowflake supports NiCE’s growing focus on data extensibility and intelligence. By integrating with Snowflake’s data cloud, NiCE enables companies to plug external data sources into CXOne MPower. This enhances AI model performance, provides deeper analytics, and supports enterprise-wide observability. It ensures that AI decisions aren’t made in isolation but informed by real-time, multi-source context. Given that most CX and contact center leaders still lack connected data that forms the basis for AI-readiness, this partnership is a crucial step in helping business leaders address data management challenges in the age of AI-enabled CX.

Together, these partnerships elevate NiCE from a standalone solution to a connected layer in the enterprise IT ecosystem, capable of unifying data, workflows, and service operations.

Customers show the blueprint for AI adoption

Also at the event were leading global brands sharing concrete examples of how they use NiCE to drive their CX and contact center activities:

  • Disney highlighted the real-world complexity of AI, emphasizing privacy, compliance, and the need for strong change management.
  • Walmart consolidated CX vendors under NiCE to simplify infrastructure and drive innovation. A pilot program in Mexico using WhatsApp for customer chat showed how small-scale AI deployment builds trust.
  • Carnival UK began its journey with foundational technology and is now expanding into AI copilots and automation. Their takeaway: Treat AI like a new hire — train it, guide it, and manage expectations.
  • Charles Schwab shared how they moved from fragmented point solutions to a unified NiCE platform (CXOne) to gain agility, speed to market, and scalability.

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Practical, proactive AI that drives results

NiCE differentiates its copilots by making them proactive, not reactive. These AI assistants for agents, supervisors, and business leaders actively listen, suggest next steps, and even act. Through reverse prompting, agents can improve future AI behavior by providing feedback after each interaction. Features like voice avatars and background noise suppression are also options for NiCE users looking to enhance call quality for a more seamless customer and agent experience.

NiCE also showcased SmartReach, its proactive outbound engagement solution, which builds on capabilities acquired through its LiveVox acquisition in 2023. Together with MPower Desk, proactive outbound is a key enabler for enterprises to tackle CX not just as a set of channels, but as a system of interconnected actions and outcomes.

Key takeaways

  • NiCE’s rebrand reflects a shift toward AI that’s empathetic, explainable, and embedded into how people work.
  • CXOne MPower is more than a platform. It’s a foundation for outcome-driven service transformation.
  • MPower Agents and MPower Desk demonstrate how NiCE is productizing AI in scalable, measurable, and human-friendly ways.
  • Enterprise partnerships with ServiceNow, AWS, and Snowflake show that NiCE is not just a contact center solution; it’s evolving into an enterprise AI solution designed for today’s ever-changing intelligent CX landscape.

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The conversations at Interactions have made it clear that while many business leaders are tasked with experimenting and using AI, there are now clear expectations for the technology to drive measurable and significant outcomes. Those outcomes are beyond cost control but extend into enhancing the quality and consistency of customer interactions by using technology to elevate human experiences, including those of customers and employees.

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Original Source: zdnet

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