Sydney, Australia, 27 October 2026 – NiCE (Nasdaq: NICE) today announced it has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). NiCE was placed furthest of any provider for its Completeness of Vision.
The promise of AI has given the contact center a new mandate. As AI agents begin resolving issues end to end, and consumers deploy personal AI agents of their own to interact with brands, enterprises must run AI and human agents together, with the governance and data to do it safely and with success measured in outcomes rather than activity. Enterprises seek a partner that can deliver AI at the scale of CX, with AI agents, human agents, workflows and real-time context working as one system. NiCE helped lead the move to CCaaS and is now leading that next evolution to CX AI.
“We got here by running customer service for the world’s most demanding enterprises for decades, and by building the AI to match it,” said Scott Russell, CEO of NiCE. “The contact center was where customer service lived. It is no longer where it ends. What matters now is one platform, where every interaction is handled by the right agent, human or AI, and every enterprise can run customer service as a single, accountable operation.”
The shift is already visible in NiCE’s business. Its AI annual recurring revenue reached $362 million in the second quarter of 2026, up 52% year over year and driven by enterprise deployments rather than pilots, and now represents 15% of cloud revenue. The quarter was also an all-time record for AI bookings, with strong momentum driven by NiCE Cognigy.
Behind those numbers, NiCE Cognigy agentic AI is in production at global enterprises, including:
- Openreach, where AI agents cut missed appointments and inbound contact volumes by one-third
- Toyota, where 95% of customers offered the AI service chose to book directly with an AI agent
- Lufthansa Group, where AI agents handle more than 16 million customer conversations a year
- Tripadvisor, which took AI voice agents from concept to live calls in 2.5 months
Gartner Disclaimer:
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service, Drew Kraus, Jason Bridge, Pri Rathnayake and Megan Fernandez, October 19, 2026.
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