Dreamforce 2025 | Dan Belanger, NiCE Americas, & Scott McDonald, NiCE inContact

Clips
More from Dreamforce 2025

Dan Belanger

President

NiCE Americas

Scott McDonald

VP, Product Management

NiCE inContact

play_circle_outline Dreamforce 2025 event introduction with hosts Dave Vellante and Gemma Allen.

play_circle_outline NiCE's focus on AI-first customer experience systems, emphasizing innovation.

play_circle_outline Long-term relationship between NiCE and Salesforce, integrating platforms for better service.

play_circle_outline Recent acquisition of Cognigy, focusing on conversational AI for enhanced customer experience.

Info
Transcript

Dan Belanger, NiCE Americas, & Scott McDonald, NiCE inContact

Dan Belanger

President NiCE Americas

Scott McDonald

VP, Product Management NiCE inContact

In this #Dreamforce interview, theCUBE’s Dave Vellante and Gemma Allen sit down with Dan Belanger, president of NiCE Americas, and Scott McDonald, vice president of product management at NiCE, to unpack how AI-first customer experience is moving from promise to production. The discussion covers NiCE’s 15-year relationship with Salesforce and how the company is integrating into the newly renamed Agentforce Voice to unify routing across cases, chat and email. McDonald explains why CRM as the “system of record” must work hand-in-hand with the contact center as t... Read more

explore Keep Exploring

What is the focus of the discussion during the event at Dreamforce 2025? add

What is NiCE and what are its contributions to customer experience technology? add

What is the nature and history of the relationship between the speaker's company and Salesforce? add

What are the key differences between Cognigy and other agentic AI solutions like Agentforce, particularly in the context of customer experience (CX) and their positioning in the market? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Dan Belanger, NiCE Americas, & Scott McDonald, NiCE inContact

search

Dave Vellante

>> Hey everybody. Welcome back to Dreamforce 2025. We're here at Moscone South and you're watching theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Gemma Allen. We're picking up from John Furrier who had to go east this week. He's back at the NYSE. Dan Belanger is here. He is the President of NiCE Americas and Scott McDonald, the Vice President of Product Management at NiCE. You hear a lot about ROI and questioning on ROI. There's two places where ROI is clear, coding is one, and customer experience and contact center is another one. That's what you guys are all about. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks so much for being here.

Dan Belanger

>> Thank you. Fantastic.

Scott McDonald

>> Thanks for having us.

Dave Vellante

>> So Dan, tell the audience about NiCE, what you guys do. What's your mission?

Dan Belanger

>> Be happy to. Be happy to. Sure. I joined about a year ago. So NiCE is the leader in AI first customer experience system. So if you think of our heritage starting three years ago with recording within, and it's advanced now within different organic and inorganic innovation, but we're currently in the forefront of customer experiences led by AI. So if you think of contact centers as a service across all channels, both digital voice and others and just $3 billion in size and significant and consistent R&D to keep up with technology, but really just a company I'm proud to be a part of. Really setting the standards. A first mover and an innovator in this industry.

Dave Vellante

>> Congratulations on the new role. And Scott, I wonder if you could talk about your relationship with Salesforce. It's a long-term relationship. Where do you fit in the ecosystem? Help us understand that.

Scott McDonald

>> So we've had a long-term relationship, like for 15 years with Salesforce. It's been a very lucrative relationship. We have 200,000 agents integrated between our platform and the Salesforce platform working together. And it's been a great relationship and we've been evolving with them over time as they've moved from one particular way they've done integration into the new Service Cloud Voice in which has now been renamed Agentforce Voice today while we've been here and we're integrated into that solution as well. And recently, I don't know if you saw the announcement in August, we made an announcement with the strategic relationship and increased strategic relationship with them. And basically what we're doing is we're actually integrating further into the new Agentforce voice solution. We're going to take what is the best of our CCaaS, our unified orchestration solution and bring that to their solution so that we'll be doing routing on behalf, which is one of our core competencies. Obviously what happens in a contact center is you're doing a lot of routing, right, a lot of orchestration. So we're going to take that and we're going to be doing routing of their cases, routing of their chat and their email in combination with our solution and our digital that Dan talked about, the multiple different digital channels that we have as well. And we bring all of our agentic AI in conjunction with the Salesforce agentic AI together as well. And we work in harmony with those solutions. A lot of people talk about contact centers and they talk about CRM, right? And they say, how do these two fit together? And the reality is they need to fit together like this because one is the system of record and one is the system of interactions, right? And both are important and critical to customers. So as a result, that's what we're doing, is we're bringing that really closely working together. And at the end of the day, it's giving our joint customers, our Salesforce and our NiCE customers, the best solution for them with our two solutions coming together.

Gemma Allen

>> Talk to us a little bit about the customer experience. I think when people hear customer support, you think of tickets, you think of the help desk experience, but we know that in this world and especially in the world of AI, it's about so much more than that. And I think at the core, in terms of giving a really great experience, it's about human interaction and empathy and authenticity in transactions.

Scott McDonald

>> Yeah. And there's-

Gemma Allen

>> Talk just about that from your perspective and how AI is shaping that.

Scott McDonald

>> Well, there's multiple different ways AI is shaping that, right? You've got your agentic AI first, which is really in many ways it can be outside of the CRM and the contact center solution. It's the front, and you've been at some of the keynotes this week you've seen some of those experience that are happening as a customer comes into a customer's portal and they're using agentic AI to do that. So we bring that together as a front. But then you know about contact centers and you know we have agents and you talk about how do we provide a better experience for the customer by enabling that agent. So how do we bring together the CRM, the data, the records that are in the system of record in conjunction with the agents and make them more efficient? How do we use agent assistance functionality with AI to give them next best actions? So we're telling them literally, hey, this is the situation. We're telling them sentiment online when things are coming in so they can understand, hey, this customer's got some issues and they're angry, and how am I going to deal with this? We're even taking that information using AI and providing that to our supervisors so our supervisors can be watching out. Do we have a problem here that we've got to deal with? Right. But even more so around agent assistance and next best action and combining that with knowledge-based information, bringing that in to help the agent to understand how to deal with that customer. And the other thing is it's important to note that we started off, everybody starts off with voice and voice is a key component, but it's not just voice, it's chat, it's SMS, it's email, it's WhatsApp, it's all those channels that have to come together that the customer can come to. And all the things I mentioned about AI and agentic AI and across all those things. It all has to come together.

Dan Belanger

>> And we really try to put the human at the center of it.

Scott McDonald

>> Yeah.

Dan Belanger

>> Because whether it's the human customer trying to get something done or the human agent, we talk about creating a nice world and not to be too cheeky about it, but we see that as something that's hyper personalized, but really leveraging AI to improve the human experience and how does that just enrich the lives of how people interact with brands. And then as Scott said, you think about the people working within a center, taking calls and things. How do we ensure that they're well-prepared and that AI is augmenting that human experience for them as well as the folks who are trying to get service? So it's kind of a virtuous cycle for us.

Dave Vellante

>> So I want to follow up on that and talk about sort of injecting AI into the customer experience. And when I think about the value, I started by talking about the ROI and this is one clear place where you get ROI. And it's the quality of the customer experience, it's the speed of a resolution. And it also allows contact centers to scale without labor.

Scott McDonald

>> That's right.

Dave Vellante

>> And so, which is always a challenge. We can throw more people at the problem, but it's expensive and it's hard to manage. So are those the right value drivers? And then what do your customers have to do to prepare, to take advantage and realize that value, whether it's from data standpoint or training or other infrastructure that they need to put in place?

Dan Belanger

>> Yeah, we talked about this a little. We've had great customer engagements here this week. It's been really phenomenal. But again, it does come down to data. Anything to do with AI, the heart of your data state and how well that is formatted to be able to give a seamless experience. So data's at the heart of everything that we're doing right now. And what happens is the world is, as has evolved for contact center, people have made really good decisions at the time, best-in-breed decisions, but what that's created is some fractions, right, silos within the data environments, which makes it really difficult, costly, and complex to deliver a seamless customer experience because you're having to go to different places to integrate the data. So one of the things we have as an AI data-ready platform. Based on the billions of interactions that we handle, you're kind of dealing with a platform approach, which means it's all contained. From the very first intent, AI is helping us understand that intent, get ahead of that intent in real time, but we see this as it's a common issue for customers, all want to move forward with AI. And you can either be generic, in other words, you're using generic data or you're using specific data for the specific purpose to deliver that exceptional experience. And that's where we shot.

Dave Vellante

>> Can I ask a follow-up on that before you jump in? Which is because-

Scott McDonald

>> Can I relate that back to how we work with Salesforce as well? Do you mind?

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah.

Scott McDonald

>> Well you go first-

Dave Vellante

>> Let me ask the question, see if this makes sense because you were talking about the system of interaction.

Scott McDonald

>> Yes.

Dave Vellante

>> And Dan was just talking about intent. So is the technology allow you to infer intent from that-

Scott McDonald

>> Absolutely.

Dave Vellante

>> Customer interaction?

Scott McDonald

>> Absolutely.

Dave Vellante

>> Is that kind of how it all works?

Scott McDonald

>> Yes, absolutely.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah. Okay, great.

Scott McDonald

>> Absolutely. And Dan was talking about data and data's important on both of those, system of record, system of interaction. And if you talk to Salesforce, they talk about the Salesforce Cloud, the Salesforce Data Cloud. Our platform, and Dan mentioned it, underlying brings all the data together. Now this is what people, he talked about fractured decisions because if you think about AI, how AI gets better is it has to have all the data from all the different interactions you do. You can't have it in these different silos. One of the things we announced in August was this initiative with Salesforce for zero copy with their data cloud to allow our data come together with their data. Again, those two systems. Again with I said earlier, how do we get this together for the best result? And that's where it all comes together. You talked about ROI, you talked about, you said all the right words by the way, in terms of how do I get a better experience? First call resolution we always talk about how do I make sure that customer's satisfied? That's one side of it. We use AI for that, right? That's really critical and we bring everything together and these systems have to work together. But the other side is, and this is more in the guts of things, but the contact center and you asked about how does AI help reduce costs? Well, not only is it going to make that agent better, which means your biggest cost in a contact center is agents, right? So if you can have them more efficient, talking fast, not faster, but resolving things faster, much better and better costs associated. And then if you can do more stuff on the front end with agentic AI and everything else that they don't ever come to the agent. We're actually seeing that, by the way. And that's what agentic AI is bringing. We're seeing that what used to be all those questions that came to an agent that were simpler, we can solve all those ahead of time.

Dave Vellante

>> Agentless.

Scott McDonald

>> Agentless. It's absolutely agentless.

Dave Vellante

>> It's .

Scott McDonald

>> It's agentless. And the one thing about AI? Doesn't get sick. It doesn't not show up for work. It's there all the time and it's infinitely scalable. So these are all the things that we bring together in those two systems coming together.

Gemma Allen

>> So on the customer side of it, we've had some really interesting Salesforce customers here with us over the last few days. We've heard about some fascinating use cases.

Scott McDonald

>> Yep.

Gemma Allen

>> One of the areas I was most interested in and actually pleasantly surprised by the innovation in was public sector and government. Right. We're all a customer of that space.

Scott McDonald

>> We are.

Gemma Allen

>> And I thought it was really interesting. We had M Universities on, we had folks in speaking about who run cities using Salesforce technology to improve the CX of the city. I'd love to learn a little bit about how you think about that because I think you guys also have some very interesting government contracts, right? And how you are really, I guess blending technology in a kind of multimodal way to give a better CX across the board.

Scott McDonald

>> I'll tell you something that's interesting. Government is sometimes behind, right, but in the last year we have had some of the largest government, and this is global, Australia, the UK.

Gemma Allen

>> I saw.

Scott McDonald

>> Some of the largest, you would know who they are, assuming you're from that area. Some of the largest government institutions are changing and we're helping them through that. And I don't know if you heard the keynote and you saw Mark talk about the five different companies that are using, right? And that was to help everybody else who is putting their toe in the water, but they're not quite there yet. So we're still in that early stages where people want to do it, but they're not completely understanding how to do it. But that's what all these government, you mentioned government. So one of the largest government divisions in Australia, another large one in the UK and we're bringing all this together. And by the way, again, it's often in conjunction with Salesforce because they have to have a system of record and they have to have a system of-

Gemma Allen

>> And when you say they really want to do it, and there's this real intensity right now around speed. You have to do this. It's your kind of almost a pressure pot, right? What is the key bottleneck? I'm sure data must be an issue. For you guys where-

Scott McDonald

>> It's everything we've talked about.

Dan Belanger

>> Yeah.

Scott McDonald

>> Bringing it all together.

Dan Belanger

>> Scale is a big part of it as well.

Scott McDonald

>> Scale is big as well.

Dan Belanger

>> Yeah.

Scott McDonald

>> Yes. Yeah. That's another thing. These customers are not for the faint of heart. Right. You have to have some of, and we happen to be in our space, one of the largest in the space and well respected. If you look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant and where we are, we're at the right-hand side of the top, which is also where Salesforce would be. Right. So they're looking for scale, security. There's all those, which are those key important elements that have to be done as well. And then how do I do this? PII comes into the situation because obviously governments are dealing with people's personal, that's also happening, by the way, in the healthcare sector for us as well. And how you bring all that together in a secure way. So we're just much like Salesforce, it's bringing these things together and helping those large government institutions accelerate through that. They have been behind.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah.

Scott McDonald

>> Right. And we all use those systems, so we know that, right? They take a long time to move, so yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, I mean I still go back to Salesforce classic sometimes because I have to, but so I'm looking at some news. You guys made an acquisition recently.

Scott McDonald

>> Yes.

Dave Vellante

>> Funny name company, I don't know if I can pronounce it, but it's around conversational. How does he say it?

Dan Belanger

>> Cognigy.

Scott McDonald

>> Cognigy.

Dave Vellante

>> Cognigy.

Scott McDonald

>> Cognigy.

Dave Vellante

>> Cognigy. It's an interesting name. But it's conversational AI, correct?

Scott McDonald

>> It's agentic AI.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay. Explain that a little bit more. What does that bring to you and Salesforce ecosystem?

Scott McDonald

>> Well, AI has gone through these phases, right, and now this whole conference we've been talking about agentic AI and what does that mean? And it's the ability. A lot of that is around the front end, as you've seen some the keynotes and everything else and how a customer interacts. And when we talk about no more agents, that is definitely heading towards no more agents. I mean, if you've heard Mark talk about how they've used their Agentforce, agentic AI in their service area, it answers thousands of their support areas now, right, from a Salesforce perspective. Cognigy is like Agentforce, agentic AI, except for it's very CX focused so, because that's our focus. Right. So it's really bringing the customer experience knowledge because it's different, right? There has to be specialization around that and bringing that to the forefront for our customers to deal with what they deal with in the CCaaS arena. Because not all our customers are as reliant on their Salesforce side. They're actually relying on us for a lot of that as well.

Dan Belanger

>> This was a very natural and synergistic fit for us. If you look at the last 10 years, NiCE has shown up in the upper right quadrant of Gartner, right, the magic quadrant. And if you look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant for conversational and agentic AI, Cognigy is in the upper right. So when you think about, as Scott said, there's multiple ways to look at kind of a broad view of AI because it's pulling from a broad set of data. Where Cognigy shines with the largest enterprises in the globe, the largest insurance company in the globe and others is in the CX space. And so they were directly in our space serving customers with an AI led. So we have a lot of different data and AI assets within the portfolio already. But this is an exponential move for us. Right. And we made it to do just that, to separate ourselves from the pack. And what we're going to do with Cognigy, which is already a leader as well as the data that we have will be truly unique. And then partnerships with Salesforce, again, extend that at scale. So it was just a wonderfully synergistic move, but it was all customer inspired as is our relationship with Salesforce. Customers want us to work together because we're all in those environments. So it's really a good story for us moving forward.

Gemma Allen

>> We talked a lot actually here over the last few days about the power of the ecosystem and how in this future world of kind of agentic AI is going to become even more prominent. Right.

Dan Belanger

>> Oh.

Gemma Allen

>> The companies think outside of silos and that there is a collegiality to the future of...