NiCE Ltd., a publicly traded provider of contact center software, today announced plans to acquire rival Cognigy GmbH for $955 million.

Shares of NiCE rose more than 4% on the news. The jump may have been driven by investor optimism about the impact of the deal on the company’s revenue growth. NiCE’s sales climbed 6% last quarter on a year-over-year basis, while Cognigy expects its annualized revenue to surge 80% next year.

NiCE sells a platform called Mpower that helps enterprise run their contact centers more efficiently. It can measure the performance of customer support teams, answer common requests using artificial intelligence and perform related tasks. NiCE says its software is used by more than four-fifths of the Fortune 100.

Cognigy competes in the same market. The company’s cloud platform, Cognigy.AI, enables enterprises to build custom AI agents for automating customer service tasks. Development is done in a low-code interface that uses large language models to speed up certain tasks.

The acquiree says AI agents built using its platform can not only answer customers’ questions but also perform actions on their behalf. A hotel chain, for example, could build an agent that automatically processes bookings. The underlying AI model personalizes its behavior based on a customer’s past contact center interactions.

According to Cognigy, AI agents powered by its platform can ingest multimodal input. An online retailer could create a technical support agent that lets users upload a photo of a product with a manufacturing defect. The AI agent could analyze the photo, determine what’s wrong with the product and issue a refund.

Under the hood, Cognigy uses LLMs from major AI providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. If the LLM that powers an agent encounters an issue while processing a customer service request, Cognigy can retry the query. If that doesn’t work, it can switch to a different model.

The other focus of the company’s platform is making human customer service representatives more productive. When a help desk professional is assigned a support ticket, Cognigy brings up relevant information about the issue. The platform can then generate pointers on how to fix the issue.

Cognigy raised more than $150 million in funding prior to today’s acquisition announcement. Its installed base includes over 1,000 organizations including Toyota Motor Corp., Bosch GmbH and other major brands.

NiCE plans to integrate the company’s technology with its CXone Mpower contact center automation tool. The latter offering lends itself to many of the same tasks as Cognigy.AI, including custom AI agent development. It also provides human help desk representatives with guidance on how to resolve tickets. 

NiCE expects to complete the acquisition in the fourth quarter.

Image: NiCE