In the last seven days, the CX space has seen a major agentic AI announcement from NiCE, a significant CCaaS milestone from Genesys, more controversy at Salesforce, and a surprising revelation from Gartner.
Here are the extracts from these popular news stories.
NiCE Goes All In on Agentic AI with CXone Mpower Agents, Boosted AWS Partnership
NiCE is the latest big-name tech provider to launch AI agents, announcing “CXone Mpower Agents”.
The vendor claims that businesses can build and deploy their first Mpower Agents “in seconds”.
However, what really separates this offering – as announced at NiCE Interactions 2025 – from what came before is how the agents can collaborate with those in other systems.
By doing so, they can scrape context from other enterprise solutions and trigger actions from within them to automate more complex queries.
As such, NiCE increases the scope of self-service, mechanizing long-tail resolution flows that require mid-office approvals and back-office fulfilment.
In making this point, Barry Cooper, President of the CX Division at NiCE, stated: “There’s a big difference between AI that talks and AI that gets things done.
Mpower Agents work across the entire CXone Mpower platform to deliver real outcomes, not just responses,” he summarized. “That’s what separates intelligent automation from intelligent distraction.
To further support this intelligent automation, NiCE promises its solution will help dig up “high-impact” intents. In other words, the contact center’s most prominent demand drivers (Read on…).
Genesys Becomes the First Tech Provider to Announce $2BN+ in Annual CCaaS Revenue
Genesys has announced that it has reached almost $2.1BN in annual recurring revenue (ARR) for its Genesys Cloud platform.
The news makes Genesys the first vendor to announce that it has officially broken the $2BN mark for annual CCaaS revenue, with the company reporting 35 percent YoY growth.
Indeed, the tech firm had been neck and neck with NiCE, with both vendors hovering around $1.9BN, but has now seemingly pulled ahead.
However, after a series of big deals announced in the last quarter, including a $100MN deal with Europe’s largest contact center, NiCE may soon close the gap.
The next closest competitor in CCaaS is Five9, which broke the $1 billion barrier in 2024.
AWS is also likely to have reasonably high CCaaS revenue, but the company does not disclose its contact center earnings.
Genesys believes that its strong numbers are partly down to an uptick in the implementation of Genesys Cloud AI, a suite of AI capabilities integrated into the vendor’s CCaaS platform.
Indeed, the company stated it was in a strong position to “lead the advancement of agentic AI in CX orchestration.” (Read on…).
Salesforce Hikes Its Prices, Aims to Mitigate High AI Integration Costs
Salesforce has increased its prices by an average of six percent due to “increasing integrations with AI.”
The increased rates apply to both the Enterprise and Unlimited SKUs of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Field Service, and “select Industry Clouds.”
The changes will come into force on 1 August 2025.
However, for now, Salesforce Starter, Pro, and Foundations editions avoid the increase.
But what did the industry have to say?
While some in the sector understand that price rises were inevitable after a period of extensive R&D development, others are still concerned about the knock-on implications.
Take James Kelley, Manager of Client Services at Pedowitz Group, who argued that “an increase in pricing is going to push some to migrate.”
“I doubt 70 percent of their client base is ready to implement AI, whether due to security concerns, data completeness or accuracy, processed documentation to drive AI, or several other aspects that need to enable AI within the business,” he added (Read on…).
50% of CEOs Have or Plan to Develop a Strategy for Machine Customers, Says Gartner
A Gartner Survey has revealed that half of CEOs either have or intend to implement a strategy for machine customers in the next two years.
Gartner VP Analyst Don Scheibenreif discussed the findings on an episode of ThinkCast.
Scheibenreif detailed how the survey’s findings showed that CEOs are increasingly acknowledging that machines will play an active role in making purchasing decisions, describing it as a “pleasant surprise.”
But what exactly are machine customers?
Scheibenreif defines the tech as “a non-human economic actor that obtains goods or services in exchange for payment.
So, essentially, we are delegating the things that we do as human customers to a machine.
In a customer service and experience scenario, an example might be a digital assistant that calls a customer service channel on behalf of a human.
Although the technology has existed for a while, recent AI advancements have made it far more effective for customer service and experience (Read on…).
