NiCE launches AI innovation lab to advance agentic customer experience
NEW JERSEY, UNITED STATES — NiCE has launched NiCE Labs, a dedicated AI innovation lab designed to conduct advanced research, rigorous benchmarking, and rapid prototyping at the leading edge of agentic customer experience.
According to a press release, launched at NiCE World in Orlando, NiCE Labs will operate as NiCE’s incubation engine, working with customers and partners to apply AI research directly to real-world enterprise CX challenges. No financial terms were disclosed.
NiCE, headquartered in Hoboken, New Jersey, is a Nasdaq-listed enterprise CX platform provider and established leader in cloud contact center and agentic AI solutions.
NiCE Labs benchmarks AI against real-world CX outcomes
NiCE Labs is structured around three pillars: AI research and benchmarking, rapid prototyping into the Agentic Portfolio, and AI advocacy through published research.
The benchmarking pillar independently evaluates AI models against real-world CX scenarios — ensuring principled, evidence-based decisions about what enters the NiCE platform. In a crowded agentic AI market, independently benchmarking AI models against real enterprise CX scenarios is a more defensible product differentiation than capability demos.
“The pace of AI advancement is extraordinary, but raw AI capability and enterprise CX leadership are fundamentally different. NiCE Labs is how we close that gap,” said Phil Heltewig, Chief AI Officer at NiCE.
Lab output feeds NiCE’s agentic CX product roadmap
NiCE Labs will release prototypes into the Agentic Portfolio on an accelerated cadence — compressing the time from promising AI concept to production-ready enterprise capability.
The AI advocacy pillar will engage academic institutions, model providers, and the broader AI ecosystem, connecting emerging AI developments with what is practical and credible for enterprise CX deployment.
The gap NiCE Labs targets — between research-environment AI performance and production enterprise reliability — is precisely where most enterprise agentic AI deployments currently stall.
“We help our customers decide on how to best leverage cutting edge AI technologies to achieve their CX goals,” said Phil Heltewig, Chief AI Officer at NiCE.
Enterprise AI adoption has reached an inflection point where the critical challenge is no longer access to AI models but the ability to deploy them reliably at scale within governed enterprise environments.
NiCE competes in the enterprise CX platform market against Genesys, Salesforce, and Five9, where the race to productize agentic AI capabilities has become the primary competitive battleground.
For NiCE, establishing a visible, named AI innovation lab rather than treating R&D as a background function signals a deliberate move to make research credibility itself a market-facing competitive asset.
