CEO Letter

Dear Shareholders:

2025 was a defining year for NiCE. It was a year of execution, conviction, and transformation. We delivered at the high end of our financial guidance, strengthened our leadership in CX AI, and positioned the company to accelerate growth in 2026 and beyond.

I joined NiCE because of its clear market leadership, deep domain expertise, and the rapidly expanding opportunity ahead. Over the past year, we sharpened our focus on execution and speed, leaned into an AI‑first, platform‑led strategy, and prioritized international expansion and strategic partnerships. Our 2025 results demonstrate the impact of that focus.

NiCE’s 2025 Financial Performance

In 2025, we delivered strong, profitable growth while accelerating our leadership in cloud and AI.

Total revenue for 2025 reached $2.9 billion, representing 8% year‑over‑year growth. This growth was driven by the strength of our cloud business, which grew 13% year‑over‑year. Cloud revenue increased 12% excluding Cognigy, the enterprise leader in conversational and agentic AI that we acquired in September 2025. This performance highlights the resilience of our core NiCE CXone platform and the immediate strategic value added by NiCE Cognigy.

CX AI was the most important growth driver in 2025. AI and self‑service ARR at year-end 2025 increased 66% year over year to $328 million, representing 13% of cloud ARR. Adoption accelerated for our AI-powered co-piloting and agentic AI agent solutions as customers moved from pilots to scaled deployments. AI was included in every seven‑figure ACV CXone deal during the year, highlighting the central role AI now plays in large enterprise buying decisions.

Large enterprises and international markets were standout contributors. In 2025, we closed a record number of CXone deals exceeding $1 million ARR, including the largest international CXone deal in NiCE’s history.

We also delivered a record year for new cloud bookings in 2025, driving cloud backlog growth of 25% year over year and reinforcing our conviction in accelerating growth in 2026 and beyond.

In our Financial Crime and Compliance segment, we had another strong year with total revenue growth of 7% year over year. This business continues to cement its market leadership in combating financial fraud and in managing regulatory risk and compliance for the world’s leading financial institutions.

We exited 2025 in a position of exceptional financial strength, with an operating margin of 31% and a free cash flow margin of 21%, fully repaying $460 million of outstanding debt, leaving NiCE debt‑free. We also accelerated our buyback program, returning $489 million of capital to shareholders. Our strong balance sheet and cash generation provide the foundation to invest with focus in 2026, extend our market leadership, and capitalize on the significant opportunity ahead.

Extending Leadership in CX AI

A pivotal milestone in 2025 was the acquisition of Cognigy, which strengthened our CX AI capabilities and accelerated our leadership in customer experience automation. With this acquisition, NiCE uniquely combines market-leading CCaaS and conversational AI in a single, fully AI-native CX platform – unifying human‑assisted engagement, autonomous self‑service, and agentic orchestration on a single data foundation.

Our leadership in customer experience continues to be independently validated by both analysts and customers. In 2025, NiCE was recognized by Gartner as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) for the 11th consecutive year. In addition, NiCE Cognigy was named the sole Customers’ Choice in the 2025 Gartner® Peer Insights™ Voice of the Customer for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms, based entirely on verified customer reviews.

Customer recognition also extends to our core CXone platform, which was named a Gartner’s Customers’ Choice in CCaaS, making NiCE the only vendor distinguished by customer reviews across both conversational AI and CCaaS.

Taken together, these distinctions reinforce NiCE’s position as a leader in AI-native customer experience, validated by both independent analysts and the customers we serve.

International Momentum and a Growing Ecosystem

2025 was also a breakthrough year internationally. We delivered 16% international revenue growth year over year, including our largest international deal to date. Cloud adoption internationally remains underpenetrated, creating a powerful multi‑year opportunity as enterprises modernize their CX infrastructure.

At the same time, we meaningfully expanded our partner ecosystem in 2025, signing new strategic alliances with leading global system integrators and technology partners including ServiceNow, AWS, Snowflake, Salesforce, Deloitte Digital, PwC, and RingCentral as well as several other international SI partners. These partnerships are becoming a force multiplier for NiCE by extending our global reach, accelerating large enterprise deployments, and enabling customers to scale AI-powered automation more quickly across their organizations. We expect the contribution from these partnerships to continue to grow in the years ahead.

Built to Lead the Next Phase of CX Transformation

While we are proud of what we accomplished in 2025, we are more focused on what comes next.

Our strategy is clear: to extend our industry leadership through our CX AI‑first platform that automates complex, high‑volume, and mission‑critical enterprise workflows. As organizations accelerate the shift from labor-intensive processes to intelligent automation, NiCE is uniquely positioned to lead.

We are entering 2026 with strong momentum. The CX AI market is at an inflection point, as enterprises move beyond isolated use cases toward end‑to‑end automation across entire customer journeys. Leadership in this next phase will be defined by platforms that combine purpose‑built AI, unified data, orchestration, and enterprise‑grade governance. This is exactly where NiCE is differentiated.

To capture this opportunity, we are making targeted, time‑bound investments to:

1. Fully integrate Cognigy into CXone as a seamless, AI‑native platform
2. Advance agentic AI to automate complete customer journeys from intent to resolution
3. Extend automation beyond the contact center into adjacent front‑, mid‑, and back‑office workflows
4. Expand global delivery, go‑to‑market capacity, and our partner ecosystem
5. Continue innovating with trusted, secure AI at enterprise scale

These investments are designed to accelerate growth, expand our addressable market, and strengthen competitive differentiation, while preserving the financial discipline that has long defined NiCE.

Two principles guide us forward: speed and focus. We are moving decisively to extend our market leadership into the era of agentic AI, leveraging our unified AI-native platform and deep domain expertise to redefine customer experience.

Confident in Our Path Forward

I am more confident today than when I joined NiCE that AI is a durable and powerful tailwind for NiCE. We operate in an attractive and expanding market, and we are uniquely positioned within it. With the right strategy, exceptional talent, a robust customer base and strong financial foundation, including disciplined capital allocation, we are well equipped to lead the next phase of CX transformation.

On behalf of our leadership team and NiCErs around the world, thank you for your continued trust and support. We are building for the long term, investing with purpose, and executing with urgency. I look forward to sharing our continued progress with you in the year ahead.

Scott Russell

CEO, NiCE

View 2025 Annual Report