NiCE has completed its $955MN acquisition of enterprise conversational and agentic AI provider Cognigy.
The deal, announced in July, promised to bring Cognigy’s AI solutions to NiCE’s deep contact center install base, which includes 25,000 businesses worldwide.
Now, NiCE has received all the required regulatory approvals to make that promise a reality.
It’ll start by incorporating Cognigy’s AI solutions into its unified CXone Mpower platform, while continuing to offer Cognigy as a standalone product.
In turn, Cognigy’s offering will be enhanced by NiCE’s purpose-built AI models that are informed by its long experience in the contact center space.
With the acquisition, NiCE also aims to help organizations quickly scale their adoption of agentic AI and develop more expansive contact resolution flows, which spread across the front, middle, and back office. That aligns with its long-term vision and partnerships established earlier this year with the likes of AWS, Salesforce, and Snowflake.
Cognigy is already helping some of the world’s biggest brands establish and automate these long-tail resolution flows, working with Adidas, Lufthansa, Toyota, and many others.
By pulling in that knowledge and tech, Scott Russell, CEO of NiCE, hopes to help “redefine the future” of customer experience. He added:
We are accelerating AI adoption and value realization for global enterprises by delivering one of the industry’s most powerful and comprehensive customer experience platforms leveraging CX models and agentic and human agents powered by decades of CX purpose-built data and insights.
Back to Cognigy. It’s a company that has grown quickly, with its revenues reportedly doubling in 2024 from the previous year.
Since then, these revenues have likely climbed much higher, as Cognigy proved one of the first enterprise technology vendors to introduce AI agents, making them available in January 2025.
Notably, in implementing these AI agents across various contact centers, Cognigy has leaned on partnerships with NiCE’s long-term rivals, including Genesys and Avaya. That may have raised some tricky questions. Yet, as NiCE will keep Cognigy operating independently, these relationships are safe, and Philipp Heltewig, Co-Founder & former CEO of Cognigy, hopes to grow even further.
With NiCE, we’re expanding our reach and joining forces with the leader in cloud CX to redefine what’s possible, all while continuing to serve our customers as a trusted partner for innovation, speed, and enterprise-grade AI.
The enterprise-grade AI includes the ability for brands to create AI agents in a no-flow, prompt-based style that allows businesses to balance “fully agentic” processes with a process-driven approach. That enables a hybrid approach to AI agents that, interestingly, aligns closely with the vision behind NiCE’s CXone Mpower Orchestrator.
In this sense, it’s a thoughtful acquisition, and Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, voiced his approval.
“Acquiring Cognigy demonstrates why NiCE remains the class of the contact center industry,” he said.
For the past decade, NiCE has understood that CX is more than CCaaS and has added fraud management, orchestration capabilities, and more.
“Cognigy adds conversational AI agentic agents to the NiCE portfolio, enabling its customers to seamlessly add that capability to an already market-leading set of capabilities,” he concluded
