NICE recorded a 375 percent increase in bookings for its CX AI product, Enlighten, in its latest earnings call.
In its Q4 FY 2023 earnings call, the CX business reported that total revenue for the quarter was $623.2 million, a quarterly increase of 10 percent. While NICE's cloud business continued to be generally responsible for the majority of NICE's sales — $429 million this quarter, a 20 percent increase — Barak Eilam, NICE CEO, highlighted its AI investments specifically as being critical to both its year-over-year revenue growth and long-term financial strategy.
"AI is now turbocharging our differentiation, further expanding our win rates," Eilam said.
Eilam suggests that the complexity of AI technologies for enterprises, in particular CX tech, has seen customers seek out specialists like NICE to leverage their expertise and advanced solutions for their own AI-driven use cases, with "each contributing to an incremental revenue opportunity".
"We are experiencing a spike in the number of customers and prospects approaching us after trying to leverage general purpose generative AI technologies unsuccessfully," Eilam said during the call.
They come to us with a clear realization that Enlighten, with thousands of CX-specific models that are constantly expanding and evolving from billions of interactions, is the only viable option. We are defining how AI is adopted for CX as demonstrated by an astounding 375 percent increase in Enlighten bookings in Q4."
As well as AI use cases, NICE also credited AI platformitisation as integral to its finances. The company noted that in Q4, bookings from new customers adopting CXone as a platform increased to 100 percent. Eilam underlined that in these deals, customers selected CXone with three or more apps, "displacing at least two incumbent point solutions".
Eilam didn't explicate which customers had leveraged NICE's AI services but cited anonymous examples, including an AI-driven platform win featuring a seven-digit ACV deal with a global provider of technology for commercial real estate. He also highlighted seven-digit CXone deals with a financial services provider, a large pharmacy provider and an international airline last quarter.
"CXone is the only platform in the CX market that was built on these principles from day one, and we have seen the fruits of that investment significantly materialize," Eilam enthused. "AI now adds a new tailwind for customers and prospects to standardize on CXone."
2023 — A Momentous Year For NICE
It's been a positive year for NICE, with total revenues growing by nine percent to $2,377.5 million as supported by its growing cloud business, which was reported at $1,581.8 million for the full FY 2023, an increase of 22 percent. Eilam said that its cloud growth is the highest in its industry and illustrates its "accelerating market share expansion".