Transcript

Hello and welcome back to Call Centre Helper. My name is Xander Freeman and I'm so excited to be joined by Barry Cooper, President of NiCE CX. Hello, Barry. Hey, Xander, great to see you again. Great to be here. Amazing to see you again. It's not been long, but yeah, I know we are pressed for time. There is some breaking news coming out of NiCE at the moment. It's another day. It's another bit of news from you guys. Let's talk a little bit about it. So Cognigy. Yes, absolutely. Well, I come to you from Cognigy's HQ in Dusseldorf, Germany. You know, obviously the the deal got announced today that we've entered A definitive agreement with Cognigy to acquire the company, obviously pending regulatory approvals. So that will take a few months or so from now. But I'm just here just to meet the team to kick it off and everything. But in the meantime, we still do operator as to separate companies until until closing. I mean, there's so much we could get into here the deal roughly values cognitively at $955,000,000. but I think that speaks to their reputation in the industry, their place of one of the leading voices in conversational AI platforms on the market I mean they've been named a leader in enterprise conversation AI consistently both with Gartner, IDC and others in this space there's so much to love about what they're doing yeah no, the techs incredible as well not just the tech but the people, but we spent quite a bit of time we've got. Conversational AI on the platform with natively created. We've, got partners, we've evaluated many, but we, came to the conclusion that really Cognigy are the best that's out there. So and you know, similar to what we did in the early days of CcasS when we evaluated the market, we acquired in our opinion the best CCasS provider and inContact and built the platform around that. We're kind of repeating that kind of methodology here and found the same best. Conversational and Agentic AI platform that's out there after a very very detailed evaluation we really yeah ran everything through it and so it's incredible technology incredible solution and incredible customer base and amazing people all of that kind of made it a bit of a no brainer for us I think you can see it from a lot of similarity in your messaging as well this year and going back even further as well it seems like a very natural fit yeah so during the process it was quite interesting and and. I was just here with Phil and, and we had a town hall and we both said the same thing that when we met early in the process, kind of we shared our strategy and our vision where things are going and they shared those and theirs. And Phil said he was a little bit embarrassed because it was like that's copied ours and put it back to us. So that was that was, it was an interesting initial start, but it also goes to the culture and the attitude of the people. There's a very, there's a really nice kind of. Coalescence of of kind of cultures here, which I'm I love. So it's gonna be obviously post closing. It's gonna be great to have this, this team on board. No, I think so. And I think you mentioned it there. The culture is so important with something like this, as much as the technology aligns the culture side of that coin. I think it's quite clear again from the messaging that you've been out under the new leadership of Scott Russell, but also as well the wider team and what comms you've been putting out on film. There's so much to there's so much there. Yeah, exactly right. So it's, uh, you know, and on that, on that point, you know, Cognigy well, obviously a big part of what we're gonna do with Cognigy is have it as a, native capability within CXone Mpower and have it leverage all of the data, all of the models that are sitting in there, which is powerful in itself. But we're also going to leverage them as a standalone platform as well. Very similar to what we do with WEM, the nicest WEM you can. Our customers, some of them use it as part of the platform, they're coming back. Some of them use it as a standalone connected to 3rd party ACDs and the same thing is going to apply here. I think you can clearly see where it fits into NiCE's wider product range as well. It's almost like a, it's not that you weren't already doing it, but it adds such a natural fit. It really fits really naturally. And there are already one of our partners, there are already a consumer of our virtual agent hub as well. So you know, we've all got work to do as partners ahead of, ahead of everything else. So, really interesting. So I suppose you've touched it a little bit there, but when can we expect it to start to see further integration between NiCE and Cognigy, you know? Yeah. So, so we're not gonna do anything until we have closing. We wanna get the regulatory stuff done first. But then immediately after closing, we have very, very detailed plans of what we want to get done. And effectively these plans are, as I kind of hinted to kind of. There'll be, you know, we want them on board. Cognigy as a native capability within CXone Mpower and that brings many things you know all of the assets that are on the platform, all that data that a customer may have all of the interactions that may be agent assisted can be now used at the click of a button to create these beautiful agentic Cognigy flows to to really automate customer service and really empower the employees in customer service to be even more powerful what they do so this is kind of one big. Elements of that, but there's also technologies that we have that's gonna help Cognigy you know, our real time ASR is extremely accurate, very low latency, very inexpensive and so to bring that kind of add something as well to that solution. So, so there will be a lot of work we do around that, but that won't begin until we've closed the deal completely. But our customers in the market can expect as they know with Cognigy and with NiCE. So every every three months or even faster, there's going to be a release that brings more and more and more, you know, and I'm just we're really going to start blurring the lines between attended and unattended with this capability, you know, with the best unattended near conversational AI that's agentic running alongside kind of capabilities that enable the best humans to work together. It's going to just blur as one. It's gonna it's so exciting. I think you can clearly see the benefits to customers within that as well, right? Yeah, For both the consumers and our customers, you know, as a consumer being able to do business with, you know, the, you know, AI that's been trained on, the best knowledge and the best actions, the best behaviors that the best employees in an organization at any time of the day at any scale is really powerful. But obviously we also believe in in having that ability to leverage humans as well. So allowing our organizations to deploy human capabilities. Empathy and and other other skills kind of alongside that. So that that's, that's the vision. But again, that's been clear from both your messaging and Cognigy messaging for months, if not years at this point. Yeah, yeah. And it absolutely right. And to your point earlier, when we compare strategies, you know, there's really two parts to our strategies and both of us have the same. So first of all is that single pane of glass for consumer interaction where it doesn't matter whether you're having a telephone conversation with an agent, a chat with an agent, an e-mail mobile app. Virtual agent and IVR, you name it. It's a single pane of glass. All of those come together in one place. So the consumers are not working in silos and have a conversation with a bot that the agent doesn't know about the next day. No silos there. We make the life easier for the employees because they're not all tapping between different systems to find out what's going on. And we make it easier for the organization because they have to integrate these capabilities together. We're going to integrate it for them natively within the platform. So that's the single pane of glass value prop, which is kind of the platform proposition. we have and Cognigy had the same, the same value prop and they were about to start this big journey of building out all of this, all of this stuff which we have already, you know, so no need for that. Now they can focus on that. But the other part, which was really encouraging for us as part of the due diligence we did is they have the same strategies we do around fulfillment. And that's underneath that pane of glass, you know, when you get beyond simple customer service intents, managing complex workflows through multiple systems and workflow, multiple systems and record. So with what we're doing with that Mpower agents and what they're doing with their agentic definitions, you know, we're gonna be able to creep into the middle and back office and start automating those kind of flows beyond the front office as well. So that combines strategy surprised us and we thought, wow, there's there's things that can come together here that's going to move us faster. No, I love what you just talked about. Again, when we talk about the back office, that's often a forgotten part of when we're talking about, you know, presenting your contact center is more than just the contact center. It is the. Inishgt hub of the organization linking all those elements together play such a crucial role in that. Yes, exactly right. So that's and that's really the future because we're pretty soon going to get there where that single pane of glass is relatively easy. And then the real value to everyone, to consumers, to organizations, you know, into their employees is to automate those complex flows. And this is a really interesting Xander. I realized that if you imagine a picture with the front office is kind of the first kind of vertical stack and then you've got Tier 2 or middle office and then tier 3 back office. You know, we we've all been working in the customer service space. So we know that front office is streamlined to an optimized to deal with. Customers, you know, and, and make sure the customer experience is as good as possible. You know, the human beings in there have been optimized, you know, down to the minute that they're doing the right thing and, and the flows are done in a way, the workflows in that front office done in a way to maximize the customer experience. But when you get to the middle and back office, that's not the case. They are business processes that are aligned with inventory flows or in in line with HR processes, which almost rather the main horizontal flows, they're vertical flows. So what we're doing here is. We're creating this hybrid workflow that reaches into the middle and back office and aligns those flows with the customer with the front office. And there's so much power and so much value for everyone in that, that it's brilliant. It's really great to see. Again, it's nice when there is an acquisition like this where you can clearly see as mutually beneficial from both sides as well. So that is great to see. I think round out from my side. I think two things I wanted to point out with this acquisition is you've got the fact that it expands your portfolio and and really positions the company to expand into sort of the wider. Customer contact entry rather than just control specifically. There's so much more that comes with something like this, which is something that Scott has been talking about for some time now. Yeah, we really no longer think of ourselves as a CcasS company. We are CX AI company. This is what we do and this I believe this acquisition reinforces that we're bringing together, you know, purpose built CX AI from the models that we have and Enlightened embedded in the platform and we're combining that with. The best conversational and agentic AI that's in in the market. This is this is purely an AI move and really moves away from just just a CcasS company. And I'll tell you what then I know our time is limited. So I'll move on to my final question. I think this builds on the massively positive momentum of recent significant partnerships you've had be it AWS, ServiceNow, Snow. Had major wins as well from a from a tender perspective this year, yes. What's next for NiCE? Well, we're going to execute that strategy I just outlined to you. Absolutely. without compromise. So that means making sure that that that CXone Mpower provides the the best and most complete single pane of glass. And we help organizations optimize for format deep into the middle and back office. And it will be a combination of of organic development plus potentially some other tech tuck ins that will make plus the investment that we're making here with Cognigy will bring all of that together to make that vision and reality. And if there's one thing about NiCE. And every step of our journey, we painted a vision and then we've executed on that vision and and this is what we'll do. So you'll see other moves from us, both organic and inorganic, plus investments in Cognigy, and we execute that strategy. I can't wait to hear more as it develops. Barry, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm so excited to see what comes next. Perfect. Thank you, Xander. Thank you.