Verint has acquired Cogito, a real-time agent coaching and guidance solutions provider.
A company spokesperson confirmed the roll-up to CX Today, which was finalized in October 2024.
Already, Verint has harnessed Cogito’s technology to release a new bot for scoring customer and agent experiences.
The “CX/EX Scoring Bot” tracks all contact center calls in real time to attach live scores. Supervisors can then leverage these to monitor their team’s performance, with alerts recommending intervention and praise.
Additionally, managers and resource planners may take that insight to make targeted operational decisions that impact the broader team.
Ultimately, several other contact center AI providers have similar agent guidance propositions. However, the sophistication of Cogito’s AI proved to be a differentiator for Verint.
Indeed, Cogito extracts and evaluates 200+ acoustic and lexical signals in “milliseconds” to more accurately interpret the customer-agent conversation and inform the bot’s scores.
Sharing a statement on the acquisition with CX Today, the Verint spokesperson added:
The real-time coaching and CX/EX scoring technology developed by Cogito is an excellent complement to Verint’s CX Automation solutions.
“This is evidenced by our announcement of Verint CX/EX Scoring Bot, running in the Verint Open Platform as the newest addition to our Verint Agent Copilot Bots, which deliver stronger, faster AI business outcomes for leading brands around the world.”
Other examples of the Copilot Bots include those that coach agents in real-time, transfer contacts with context, proactively offer relevant knowledge articles, and automate post-contact processing.
Yet, these are just a fraction of the 40+ total bots Verint has released over the past 18 months, each aiming to augment a specific contact center role, mechanize one function, and automate without disruption.
Verint leverages not just large language models (LLMs) but various forms of AI to best automate one task, as the new scoring bot underscores.
Some of these bots can also work together to mechanize multi-step processes.
For instance, Verint’s Quality Template Bot auto-builds quality assurance (QA) scorecards that feed a Performance Scoring bot that auto-fills them.
Other bots include those that serve workforce management (WFM), data management, and voice of the customer (VoC) teams. There are customer-facing conversational AI bots, too.
Such innovation highlights how Verint has proven steps ahead of the agentic AI trend, currently lauded by the likes of Microsoft, Salesforce, and SAP.
As this trend catches fire and rival vendors release similar capabilities, Verint must continue to differentiate. With Cogito’s AI – which has benefited from $150MN in investment – it hopes to do so.
Its Open platform may also help, as Joshua Feast, Co-Founder of Cogito and now General Manager of AI Coaching at Verint, suggested when celebrating the roll-up. He said:
The combination [of Verint and Cogito] allows customers to benefit from a complete best-in-class solution with an open architecture that lets them explore at their own pace.
That open architecture allows Verint to overlay the CX/EX Scoring Bot – and its other bots – over cloud, on-premise, and hybrid contact center environments.
Alternatively, brands can leverage that architecture, bring their own carrier, and work with Verint as their core CCaaS provider.
That approach allows end-users to design their contact center workflows before determining their telephony and routing. Meanwhile, most rival vendors start with the latter and reverse engineer those workflows.
Verint’s strategy has many backers, with ISG ranking Verint among its “exemplary” vendors in a recent advanced contact center evaluation – only behind NICE.
Now, it must translate strategy into further revenue growth. Thankfully, the signs are somewhat promising, with Verint surpassing analyst earning estimates in Q3.
In doing so, Verint raked in $224MN, representing five percent year-over-year (YoY) revenue growth.
