1. Scott Russell on orchestrating intelligence for a NiCE World
NiCE CEO Scott Russell delivered a visionary and dynamic keynote on how AI has pushed CX to the center of how companies grow, differentiate, and compete.And what gives them the advantage comes from connecting what far too many enterprises still run in isolation."Orchestrating intelligence, that's the key. Not just artificial intelligence, as important as it is — human intelligence, customer intelligence, operational intelligence, market intelligence, all connected, all acting together, all improving upon each and every interaction. That's what a NiCE World looks like," Russell said.His challenge to the room was practical: find where intelligence sits disconnected across your stack, because that gap is where competitors go first.
2. Jeff Comstock crystallizes the stakes for CX AI
NiCE President of CX Product & Technology Jeff Comstock put the stakes of this moment in perspective.“Customer experience is where everything is on the line. Every interaction is a chance to deliver an amazing experience, earn loyalty, and even grow revenue. But when that moment is not well executed, the cost is real. You can lose the customer,” Comstock said. “Agentic AI is fundamentally changing customer experience.”He backed the urgency with the 2026 Stanford AI Index: generative AI reached 53% population adoption in roughly three years, faster than the PC or the internet at launch.For CX leaders, that means navigating an unprecedented adoption curve that outpaces shifts they have planned around before.
3. Phil Heltewig shows AI that takes action
NiCE Chief AI Officer Phil Heltewig made agentic analytics tangible with a demo that hit home for the roomful of travelers.An airline on a unified CX AI platform flags a storm-disrupted connection overnight and prepares a fix before the customer calls. It reasons across the full itinerary, hotel, session timing, and seat preferences, then closes the loop end to end by rebooking the flight, confirming the hotel, updating the transfer, and sending confirmation without a handoff."This is a demo that's very close to reality. Because here the challenge now is not just filling the available seats, it's really understanding each traveler's needs across the complete trip and acting before they ask," Heltewig said, noting that every itinerary and every reason for travel differs. His take on AI that acts came straight from Star Wars: "This is the way."
4. Fabletics builds accountable autonomous agents with NiCE Cognigy
"It's kind of fun to do the impossible." Jack Roberts, senior global director of GMS technology and applications at Fabletics, spotted that line on a sign during a morning walk near the Disney venue, and it summed up the strategy of taking on the hardest use cases first."Complex queries are where your real friction points lie," he said. "If you can earn that trust in those moments, you can deploy that trust in AI anywhere." With NiCE Cognigy, his team built autonomous agents that know their customers, take meaningful actions, and can be held accountable. Two and a half years in, the roadmap is "more packed than it was at the start, full of projects we couldn't think of at the start, trying to solve problems we didn't even know we had." On the setbacks along the way: "failure in AI is not a proof of incompetence, it's a sign of ambition."
5. Citi automates 90% of complaints and saves $7M
With 74 million customers and over a billion records of data, Citi's complaint process had ground on for years — 10,000 opinions, inconsistent assessments, inconsistent data. So Mia Carraro, head of customer excellence at Citi, said she made a bet: "I wrote a check I couldn't cash." The partnership model carried it. “NiCE doesn't just build and leave, they build and maintain in perpetuity," she said, describing a team Citi "treated as an extension of our team." Automation now handles 90% of complaints, with a 150% lift in identification and more than $7 million saved."I wrote one check. Now the returns are funding the next one, and we are just getting started," Carraro said.
6. Agentic AI runs in production at ASU, Tripadvisor, Nationwide, and Deloitte
NiCE customers took the main stage to share their powerful stories of AI in production and what it looks like once the pilot ends.Arizona State University reaches students before problems surface, with 85% acting on proactive outreach and under 1% needing a call. Nationwide's agent earns trust by being transparent about when a customer is talking to AI. Tripadvisor's voice agent reads intent and sentiment at 90% accuracy, ahead of human agents at 71%. And Deloitte framed governance as a way to move faster, pointing to the gap between internal metrics and what customers say.7. Customers and partners show AI in action
Some of the biggest names in their respective industries were at NiCE World. Leaders from Aetna, BT, GEICO, Lowe's, Nationwide, and more than 25 other organizations joined 3,000 CX and technology leaders, alongside strategic partners Accenture, AWS, Concentrix, Deloitte, Pindrop, PwC, ServiceNow, and Snowflake. They shared how they automate self-service, orchestrate journeys, and lift workforce performance. Hyatt's story stood out, with faster adoption, stronger consistency, and multilingual support across regions that turned even skeptical agents into advocates for a better guest experience.8. The Agentic Engagement Plane orchestrates at enterprise scale
Each keynote, each session brought it home how one AI-native orchestration layer puts AI and human agents on a single operating layer, so handoffs, escalations, and interventions carry shared context and control. Context is the point. Experience memory preserves the the relationship between brand and consumer, so an AI agent, employee, or system can pick up what happened before, what matters now, and what should happen next. That continuity on the Agentic Engagement Plane is what makes trust possible at scale.9. NiCE Guardian AI builds in governance
Oversight has to run at the speed and scale AI agents operate at. Unveiled at NiCE World, Guardian AI provides runtime guardrails and controls, monitoring AI and human actions in real time, applying compliance rules, detecting risk, and improving performance continuously across the operation. Keeping agents grounded, compliant, and aligned to the brand is what lets enterprises trust them with real work.10. Agentic analytics decides in the moment
One connected platform watches human and AI conversations continuously, which is what makes the influx of agentic activity manageable."Traditional analytics tell you what happened. Agentic analytics identifies what needs to change and helps turn that opportunity into action. Out of the box, it analyzes interactions, workflows, and outcomes to find where automation can create the biggest impact," Jeff Comstock said. The pieces form one connected system: "AI agents resolving, employees deciding, workflows adapting, analytics discovering, governance protecting, and memory carrying the context forward. And because it's all connected, intelligence compounds. Every engagement makes the next one smarter. Every resolution strengthens the customer relationship," he added.11. The Workforce Empowerment Suite brings together human and AI agents
We introduced the Workforce Empowerment Suite, a single operating model to manage, govern, and empower human employees and AI agents at scale. It gives enterprises one framework to deliver CX operational excellence across people and AI, optimize customer and employee experience, protect profitability, and manage compliance as the workforce grows. Analysts called it a defining moment for workforce operations in the agentic era."Every enterprise running customer service is about to confront the same question: how do you govern, coach, and scale a workforce that is half human and half AI? NiCE has answered it first, and they've answered it at the scale major enterprises operate at," said Sheila McGee-Smith, founder and principal analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics.
12. NiCE Labs makes its debut
NiCE Labs debuted as our dedicated AI innovation lab for advanced research, benchmarking, and rapid prototyping at the leading edge of agentic CX. A familiar gap separates what AI can do in a research environment from what it delivers reliably inside a complex enterprise, and that gap is where many organizations stall. NiCE Labs is built to close it through research, validation, benchmarking, and co-development with real customers, turning AI potential into AI performance.13 . Build, test, and certify your own AI agent
One of the week's most talked-about experiences let attendees build, test, and certify their own AI agent. They could even walk away with a practical certification and skills that could be applied the same week.It made Heltewig's keynote concrete. "While we're sitting here in the audience right now, I bet we have very few autonomous agents doing something. In two or three years' time, everyone will have AI agents doing something — rebooking a flight, booking a restaurant appointment, checking on that doctor's appointment, coding, doing PA-style work in the background," Heltewig said. "And we will have AI agents talking to AI agents and human agents on behalf of real people, and that is going to be the new reality, and it changes everything in how we think about customer service." That future calls for a new model where AI agents, copilots, and human agents share a unified knowledge layer and unified workflows on one platform.
14. Celebrating the 2026 CX Excellence Award winners
Leaders who lead are our favorites. With the 2026 CX Excellence Awards, we honored the organizations leading the AI era of customer experience, brands that have moved past experimentation to embed AI into how CX operates, scales, and improves.- Consumer Cellular won for Excellence in Engagement Orchestration
- TD Bank for Excellence in Workforce Empowerment
- Fabletics for Excellence in Agentic Experience Automation
- Arizona State University for Excellence in AI Innovation
15. One-on-one time with Forrester, IDC, Frost & Sullivan, and more
Attendees booked private 30-minute sessions with leading analysts from Forrester, IDC, Frost & Sullivan, Metrigy, Everest Group, and others. Those conversations went straight to the questions executives rarely get to ask in the open: where AI is delivering ROI today, how teams are orchestrating end-to-end experiences, and where the workforce heads next.
16. Where CX leadership meets at the Executive Exchange
Away from the keynote crowds, the Executive Exchange traded the main stage for a smaller room and a closer conversation among the leaders writing the next chapter of customer experience, with NiCE hosting and Forrester and Accenture pulling up chairs. The talk tracked the market as it stands today and followed the line out to where CX and AI are heading. It stayed candid and off-script, the kind of peer-to-peer exchange where pilots, production realities, and hard questions get direct responses.
17. Agentic AI goes live in the Vertical Village
Walking the floor, you could move from a retail counter to a hospital pharmacy to a bank's fraud line to an airline gate, each one staged as a live demo built around a problem you have lived through — the flight that slips off the board, the prescription that runs dry, the charge you don't recognize. The Vertical Village pulled people in with its examples of how agentic AI is creating a NiCE World.18. An all-new demo-driven show floor
NiCE World’s show floor packed a full day into one room. Live demos ran alongside customer stories, analyst briefings, meeting corners, and a steady stream of food and conversation, so you could trace an idea from a booth to a theater without losing the thread. People could do more than just visualize Intelligence orchestrated across the whole customer experience through agentic experience automation, engagement orchestration, and workforce empowerment, carried by data, CX AI models, an open ecosystem, and enterprise-grade trust, governance, and observability.
19. Hands-on AI before the main stage with Nexus and the EDU Pre-Day
Nexus opened the week with customer-led conversations, peer-to-peer AI insights, and practical discussion of enterprise transformation, and quickly became one of the most talked-about experiences of the event. Its companion EDU pre-day ran alongside the main event, focused on CX and AI training through hands-on product labs, software training, and targeted certification prep. It gave professionals direct access to technical experts, a sharper focus on real-use cases, and a faster path to platform value.
20. Nick Jonas live at NiCE World
After a full day of keynotes and demos, we turned up the volume. Nick Jonas took the stage for a live performance that gave attendees a reason to stay late, and a high-energy concert that made a week away from the office feel like more than a conference.
21. Jason Sudeikis takes the stage - in shorts
Jason Sudeikis brought a different energy to the main stage, mixing humor with the kind of conversation that lands after a long day of strategy. His off-duty wardrobe of shorts got a laugh from the crowd.
22. NiCE World 2026 by the numbers
NiCE World drew 3,000 attendees, 2,000 customers, across 150 sessions. A packed house, and the energy and insight showcased it.23. NiCE AI Agents go native in the CXone stack
NiCE AI Agents anchored the platform story as the execution layer for autonomous customer resolution. Running natively inside the platform, with Cognigy built into the CXone stack, they understand intent, take action across enterprise systems, complete workflows end to end, and resolve customer needs across voice and digital channels without unnecessary handoffs. Because they live inside the platform, there’s continuity with context, governance, and memory directly.24. Investor Day at NiCE World 2026
NiCE hosted its 2026 investor and analyst day via live webcast, giving the financial community the same view of agentic AI’s transformation from pilot to production.25. Kristen Bell and the NiCE Effect
Wrong cowboy hats for a bachelorette party. Right save. Attendees got a first look at Kristen Bell running headfirst into a party-supply mix-up — and watching CX AI not just fix the order, but volunteer a wedding gift idea for the same friend before she'd even asked. That's the NiCE Effect: service that spots the problem, solves it, and reads the next move. Connect insight across every interaction, and “sorry for the trouble” becomes "we already handled it." Watch the Kristen Bell video.
26. Mark your calendar for NiCE World London and NiCE World 2027
Three takeaways from Orlando travel home with every leader who attended: disconnected intelligence is where competitors move first, ungoverned agents are a board-level risk, and a hybrid AI workforce needs a governance model organizations may not have yet.Missed NiCE World 2026? The innovation won't stop there — the momentum continues at NiCE World London on July 1-2 where Kristen Bell will take the main stage.Disconnected intelligence, ungoverned agents, a workforce model with no plan for AI — every one of those is a reason to be in the room next time. As NiCE World made clear — This is the way.Register now for NiCE World London and NiCE World 2027
