Speed, Frankenstein, voice and other takeaways from NiCE CEO Scott Russell’s keynote at Analyst Summit – News

Contact-center-as-a-service leader NiCE Ltd. is holding its analyst event in Vienna, Austria, this week, and it’s the first one with Scott Russell as captain of the Starship NiCE.

The chief executive isn’t the only new leader, as Michelle Cooper is now running marketing and Jeff Comstock takes over as the president of products and technology. Russell, Cooper and Comstock all succeeded some of the longest-tenured and successful executives in communications as Barak Eilam, Einat Weiss and Barry Cooper respectively, all stepped down within the last year. This is also the first analyst event with Cognigy in the NiCE portfolio.

With all these changes, all industry analyst eyes were on the content, with Russell leading off. Below are some interesting takeaways from his keynote.

Speed is a choice – but won’t be for long

Russell opened the session with a comment that “Speed is a choice,” talking about the need to operate fast in the artificial intelligence era. “That doesn’t mean everything has to be fast and reckless, but it means that when you’re going to do something be purposeful and be precise,” he said. “Move quickly to get things rolling but be willing to adjust direction.”

And that includes NiCE: “We are we are obliged to our customers, to our partners, to our shareholders, to all the stakeholders, to be able to seize the moment and move quickly,” he said.

I do believe we are early enough in the AI cycle that speed can still be a choice, but to quote John Chambers, during his time as Cisco Systems Inc.’s CEO, he often said, “Market transitions wait for no one.” For customers this means, since we are still early in the AI cycle, there is time to be thoughtful about AI, but the ball needs to get rolling soon and that should be taken as a warning.

I was at an AI event a couple of months ago where one of the speakers said, “There are no fast followers in AI, you lead and you fall behind.” So right now, speed is a choice, but it won’t be for very long. Get moving with AI now.

Customer experience can’t be ‘Frankensteined’

Customer experience is much more than just contact center. In addition to the core contact center capabilities that enable brands to talk to customers, there are several adjacent functions, such as workforce management or WFM, scheduling and quality management, that are required to operate a contact center. Most of the CCaaS providers partner with companies such as Verint Systems Inc. and Calabrio to fill those gaps. Though this has been effective in the past, Frankensteining a CX solution by bolting several products together won’t work in the AI era, since the data from each product will live in silos.

I’ve said many times that, with AI, good data leads to good insights, but silos of data leads to fragmented insights and that can result in inconsistent actions. A decade ago, NiCE was a WFM provider but showed great vision when it acquired CCaaS vendor inContact and brought the two products together. Since then, it has built many of the other capabilities required to service customers and this single, unified stack gives it a unique platform advantage. Evidence of this is that when NiCE wins a competitive deal, it often replaces a dozen or more other vendors.

Cognigy and NiCE create a 1+1=5 value proposition

A unified data set and the platform gives NiCE an advantage. Now the question is, what will NiCE do with this data? Enter agentic AI provider Cognigy GmbH, which boasts many well-known brands as customers. Lufthansa, Bosch, Bayer, Toyota and many others have used Cognigy to transform the way they interact with customers. NiCE has the data and now can apply Cognigy’s agentic AI capabilities.

Prior to being acquired by NiCE, Cognigy was already a partner but also works with many of NiCE’s competitors. One question that was raised at acquisition time was whether NiCE would keep Cognigy open. At the time, NiCE said it would and Russell reiterated that at Analyst Summit as it’s what’s best for the customer.

However, by owning the asset, NiCE can better control the roadmap and keep the development of Cognigy in lockstep with the parent company. If executed on correctly, Cognigy plus any CCaaS vendor should be 1+1=3, but when NiCE is involved that should be more like 1+1=5.

Voice is far from dead

With all the digital channels available to customers today, many have called for the death of voice but, in the words of Mark Twain, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” “Everyone is prophesizing the doom of voice, but voice interactions continue to grow,” Russell said, and he backed that up with a chart that showed voice grew 27% last year. That’s certainly well behind the growth 42% digital channels grew and 65% boost AI saw, but it’s healthy nonetheless.

I believe as AI agents get better at understanding natural language, the use of AI voice will create a voice renaissance as people will prefer to talk to brands versus email or chat. It’s the default interface we all have and the easiest to use, if done correctly. Agentic agents can understand what we say and find information much more quickly than people.

There will come a day in the not-too-distant future where, when you call a brand, you’ll prefer the AI agent over the human for simple, repetitive tasks. Human voice is far from dead, and the use of AI voice will eventually dwarf other forms of communications.

AI shifts CX decision-making

Historically, NiCE and its peers have sold through the contact center business unit, but AI will change that. During Russell’s presentation he mentioned how “AI will melt the org chart by orchestrating workflows across the front, middle and back office.”

This will have a profound impact on contact center decisions as it will move to more to the C-suite. At the event, I caught up with Cognigy’s vice president of AI transformation, Thys Waanders, and he told me that many wins initially went through the chief information officer and more and more now chief digital officers. This is something I had discussed previously with Joe Rittenhouse, CEO of Converged Technology Professionals, a leading services firm, and he echoed that sentiment when he told me, “We see AI being driven at a C-Suite level more than at the contact center business unit.”

The reason for this is that, at the business unit level, change can be scary because it threatens jobs, changes roles and redefines workflows. I’m not saying there aren’t a handful of forward-thinking contact center leaders that push change and disruption, but in general, disruption rarely happens at the business unit.

Server admins didn’t bring in virtualization, telecom managers weren’t on board with voice over IP and don’t expect all contact center managers to jump for joy with AI. Cognigy’s ability to bridge the gap between NiCE and the C-Suite is one of the underappreciated aspects of this acquisition, but change is coming, and Cognigy’s experience here will pay big dividends for NiCE.

Final thoughts

Agentic AI is going to have a significant impact on the way brands deal with customers. NiCE has built a strong platform and is widely recognized as the CCaaS leader as evidenced by its top position in both Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and Forrester’s Wave.

Now the industry is changing, which typically threatens incumbents because they are market leaders rarely want to upset the apple cart in which they’re a leader. Cognigy gives NiCE the AI suite, and it needs to use this to evolve its marketing, sales motion and partner programs to address new buyers that will have a different mandate than their traditional customer.

Russell has things pointed in the right direction, but 2026 will be a year of proving the vision he laid out can turn into execution.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for News.

Photo: Zeus Kerravala