At this year’s NiCE Interactions user conference, one message came through clearly: AI in customer experience is shifting from simple information lookups to agents that can take meaningful actions within well-defined business rules. Scott Russell, NiCE’s brand new CEO, summed it up in a question: “What if every interaction felt human, even the ones that are delivered by AI?” That idea framed the debut of CXOne Mpower Agents, which are designed to move beyond today’s chatbots by automating tasks from start to finish.

This concept of “agentic AI” showed up not only in product announcements but also in customer examples. On the mainstage, Carnival UK described how it is gradually weaving AI into processes like identity verification and post-call summaries, with a focus on freeing human staff for more complex work. FedPoint, in a breakout session on its use of interaction analytics, shared how more advanced IVR routing and fraud detection are improving efficiency while protecting its high customer satisfaction scores. The takeaway is that brands are experimenting with automation that handles transactions, not just queries.

A second theme tied these stories together: trust and knowledge as the backbone of more consistent service. Several speakers emphasized that better orchestration—linking data, workflows, and AI—can reduce friction for customers and staff alike. “Knowledge empowers trust,” as one of Russell’s slides noted. For NiCE, this means investing not only in agentic AI but also in copilots that guide human agents, supervisors, and managers in real time with context and recommendations.

Both ideas—action-oriented AI and trust-driven orchestration—reflect where NiCE sees the market heading. Companies may spend more on technology, but the expectation is that cost savings elsewhere will keep budgets stable overall. If this approach works as intended, customers should see smoother journeys, frontline staff should gain more support, and brands should deliver service that feels more personal, even when AI does most of the work.

Partnership And Data Strategy 

A subtle but significant shift at this year’s Interactions was NiCE’s approach to partnerships. Long known for delivering a tightly integrated, end-to-end platform, NiCE is now signaling a more open stance—willing to plug into broader enterprise ecosystems. The most visible example? A deepening relationship with ServiceNow, hinting at a future where AI agents span front office, back office, and customer service operations. That’s not just a technical integration; it’s a strategic acknowledgment that agentic AI—AI that acts, not just answers—relies on access to the full context of a customer’s journey, not just what lives in a CRM or a contact center transcript.

Of course, that kind of orchestration requires quality data, and lots of it. As companies like Salesforce move to acquire data integration players like Informatica, the signal is clear: owning the pipes and plumbing matters in an agentic world. What counts as “quality” data—three months old, three years old, real-time?—remains an open debate, especially in multi-vendor environments where ownership and governance get messy fast. But NiCE seems well-positioned to help brands navigate that complexity. Its real-time analytics, behavioral models, and increasing focus on cross-platform data orchestration suggest a future where CX intelligence isn’t walled off in a single suite but shared across systems to power AI agents that actually deliver.

Introducing MPower Agents: Making AI Do the Work

NiCE’s biggest product spotlight at Interactions was CXone Mpower Agents, which mark a notable leap from today’s reactive chatbots and static process automations. These are designed to act—approving refunds, processing claims, orchestrating workflows—based on outcome-driven prompts defined in the new Mpower AI Studio. What sets them apart is their ability to draw on behavioral signals, domain-specific models, and NiCE’s wider CX ecosystem to automate from start to finish, not just start conversations.

The bigger idea here is that AI shouldn’t just answer questions—it should get things done. Mpower Agents reflect NiCE’s vision of AI that listens, reasons, and takes action within clear business rules. This isn’t about replacing the human agent but augmenting them with intelligent systems that move tasks forward, whether it’s summarizing an interaction or completing a transaction behind the scenes.

That shift—toward agentic, action-oriented AI—is what makes the Mpower approach more than just another genAI wrapper. It’s an attempt to rewire how outcomes are delivered across CX. And if NiCE can successfully combine this capability with orchestration across tools like ServiceNow and real-time data flows? That’s when AI stops being just a helper and starts acting as a true business partner.

written with Derek Top and Peter Headrick

Categories: Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: AI, NICE, genAI, agentic, AI agents, servicenow, trust, CX automation, agentic AI