AI is moving fast, but no CX leader should be expected to navigate this transformation alone.
NiCE World London 2026 brought together customer experience leaders, technology experts and frontline practitioners from across Europe to share what they’re learning as AI moves from experimentation into large-scale, real-world deployment.
Across the event, one message came through clearly: succeeding with AI isn’t simply about adopting another tool. It requires organisations to rethink how their technology, data, operations and people work together.
From building hybrid human-AI workforces, to tackling complex customer journeys and measuring outcomes that genuinely matter – the sessions offered a valuable look at what’s working, where organisations are still struggling, and how CX teams can move forward with greater confidence.
It was a huge event with plenty to unpack, so we’ve gathered the most important insights, examples and practical takeaways for CX managers below.
The Future of CX & Orchestrated Intelligence
Scott Russell, CEO of NiCE, argued that consumer AI has already changed what customers consider good service – AI now needs to work across the whole customer journey. He also boldly declared that “The future of CX will belong to those who can orchestrate intelligence.”
“Customers already live in an AI-first world in their personal lives,” Russell explained. “If your service feels slower, less personal or less intelligent than the AI they used on their phone that morning, they notice.”
We all now use intelligent tools in our everyday lives to find information, make decisions and complete tasks quickly. And so as a result, as customers, we’re becoming less tolerant of customer service that feels slow, generic or disconnected.
This doesn’t mean businesses simply need to add more chatbots. Isolated AI tools will only take organisations so far, but problems emerge when they can’t share information or maintain context across the wider operation – with customer data, digital channels, human agents, automated agents and operational systems working together rather than functioning as separate tools.
The main test for CX managers is when a customer’s situation becomes more complicated, however. Can the AI remember what has already happened? Can it move between systems without losing context? Can it follow company policies, respect regulatory requirements and create a clear record of the decisions it has made?
For Russell, these questions are what separate an impressive AI demonstration from a system that can be trusted at enterprise scale.
The Advantages (And Challenges) Of Scaling
Philipp Heltewig, Chief AI Officer at NiCE and General Manager of NiCE Cognigy, focused on the practical challenge of deploying this technology across complex, international organisations.
A global customer experience operation may need to support multiple languages, regulatory frameworks and rules on when an interaction should be escalated. That makes it risky to rely on a single type of AI for every situation.
In Heltewig’s words, AI should take on “the repeatable, policy-heavy tasks”, allowing employees to focus on the moments where human care and decision-making matter most. His advice for organisations beginning their AI journey was also to avoid choosing a pilot simply because it’s easy. “Don’t start with something trivial,” he advised. “Start with the areas that genuinely matter.”
He also emphasised that momentum depends on people. It requires engaging “your C-suite really early” and finding “that executive sponsor that can come along with you.”
This is crucial because “it’s not going to go to plan,” and having someone “bought in on the journey already” is what makes “everything becomes easier.”
Ultimately, Heltewig argued that the biggest barrier might not be the technology itself, but whether organisations are prepared to change how customer service is delivered.
“The big question is, are you willing to embrace change?” he asked. “Because if you can, the possibilities are endless.”
The Release of NiCE Labs
London also served as the venue for the official launch of NiCE’s newly announced dedicated AI innovation engine: NiCE Labs.
That new engine is built on three pillars:
- The first is research and benchmarking, which exists because “every day a new model drops,” but the real question is, is it the right model for what you’re doing in CX?
- The second is prototyping and innovation, which involves taking research and “building prototypes directly into our Augmented product portfolio.”
- The third is applied AI, backed by “a global, large team of forward deployed engineers” who “work shoulder to shoulder with you on your hardest agentic problems.” This is driven by the belief that “the best innovation happens shoulder to shoulder with our customers.”
Russell tied it all back to the learning theme that ran through the day. He noted that NiCE Labs “allows us to take customer stories and turn them into repeatable innovation at scale.”
It is the same idea he captured earlier in a single statistic – “100% of interactions improving the next one” – with the platform, in his words, getting “smarter and smarter every single day.”
Fabletics’ Story
The most vivid proof point of the day came from Fabletics, the world’s largest digitally native activewear brand.
Serving millions of members across North America and Europe means their customer service team handles a massive influx of daily inquiries – everything from cancellations and refunds to complex shipping issues. During major product launches and promotions, traffic spikes used to be punishing.
Their support reps were completely overloaded, and their legacy automation simply couldn’t keep up with the unique nuances of their subscription model. They needed technology that could genuinely improve the customer experience while driving efficiency.
On stage, Jack Roberts explained why Fabletics made the counterintuitive choice to begin with the hardest problems rather than the easy wins.
“We wanted to put it into complex situations because we felt that that’s really how you find the validity within the tool,” he said, reasoning that “your complex queries are where your friction points are,” and “if you can target your friction points, that’s how you can have the biggest uplift from a customer experience standpoint.”
Operating across “different languages, different regulatory considerations, and different escalation triggers,” his team built a hybrid model combining agentic capabilities, large language models, and NLU, insisting “it’s all about that orchestration” and warning “there’s no need for overkill with this.”
Roberts was refreshingly honest about what nearly derailed the effort: “we realised that we were just measuring the wrong things.”
Watching call volume and average handle time through the old lens, the team expected satisfaction scores to fall — but they didn’t. Faced with the question of “which of these numbers do we choose,” Roberts said simply, “we chose to believe our customers.”
That reframing toward customer effort and experience is what ultimately paid off, with AI taking “the repeatable policy, heavy tasks” while reps focused “where human judgment, care, expertise matter most,” delivering “faster resolutions, higher satisfaction.”
Newcastle Building Society’s Story
At the heart of the NiCE World discussions was a crucial reality check: despite the immense hype surrounding AI, you cannot run headlong into automation without a rock-solid foundation.
For Newcastle Building Society (NBS) and their partner SVL, Xander spoke to Richard Abdy, Director of SVL and Paul Anderson in Strategic Solutions and found that their path to AI maturation has been deliberate, highly regulated, and deeply focused on the human element.
Rather than chasing technology for technology’s sake, NBS has focused on key strategic pillars to unlock true customer experience advantages:
- Knowledge Management as the Ultimate Power Source: AI is only as good as the data feeding it. For NBS, the absolute prerequisite for generative AI success is robust knowledge management, single-source-of-truth process documentation, and clean underlying data.
- The “Complex-First” Strategy: While many organisations test the waters with easy wins, learning from industry peers shows that tackling the most complex organisational processes first can pave a smoother road for everything that follows. NBS is applying this by first deploying generative AI to support and empower their frontline advisors, removing friction from their day-to-day workflows.
- Navigating Heavy Regulation & Governance: Operating in a strict financial services environment means breaking new barriers in compliance. Implementing an advanced cloud contact centre (CCaaS) suite required NBS to pioneer internal AI policies and robust ethical governance models from scratch—answering tough security and risk questions that didn’t even exist five years ago.
- Mitigating Fear and Empowering Advisors: Introducing AI often brings operational trepidation regarding job displacement. NBS has actively managed this by taking their board and frontline staff on the journey together through continuous feedback loops and open forums.
- The Frontline Perspective: By viewing the technology through the lens of the advisor on the phones, the goal shifts from replacing heads to creating a highly efficient workforce. True optimisation allows natural attrition to take its course without causing redundancy scenarios, all while evolving roles for the better.
Ultimately, the partnership highlights that fast-tracking complex CX projects requires a mix of expert talent, a phased implementation strategy, and the flexibility to account for the unknown – no matter how perfect the initial plan.
Data Sovereignty
This recap wouldn’t be complete without touching the topic of data sovereignty. Xander was the first to bring this up to Darren Rushworth, President of NiCE International, commenting that the conversation around it has improved in leaps and bounds since the last time they spoke, and in the world in general in the last 12 months.
His response was gold:
“When we first discussed this in Europe, data sovereignty was still a relatively new concept. Since then, people’s understanding of it has improved dramatically.
It’s no longer just about where the data centre is located. Organisations are also asking who can access the data, who supports the systems and whether the entire operation is sovereign-compliant, including the use of local personnel.
Geopolitical developments, for better or worse, have accelerated that shift. They’ve placed much greater emphasis on data ownership and on protecting citizens, particularly their personal and constituent data.
As a result, people care far more about data sovereignty today than they did in the past.” – Darren Rushworth
Conclusion
If NiCE World London 2026 made one thing abundantly clear, it’s that the era of treating AI as a shiny, standalone experiment is officially over.
True customer experience advantage no longer comes from simply plugging in a new chatbot or automating a single queue.
Instead, as Scott Russell perfectly captured, the future belongs to those who can master orchestrated intelligence – knitting together human talent, agentic AI, local data compliance, and operational systems into one seamless, living ecosystem.
Getting there isn’t without its growing pains. Whether it’s Fabletics proving that we need to tackle our hardest friction points first, or the collective realisation that we must stop measuring 2026 technology with legacy call-centre metrics, the path forward requires a willingness to change.
Thankfully, with initiatives like NiCE Labs providing the collaborative blueprint for applied AI, and a much sharper industry focus on data sovereignty, CX leaders don’t have to navigate this shifting landscape in isolation.
The technology is ready, the real-world use cases are proven, and the metrics are shifting toward what customers actually care about: effortless, intelligent experiences. The only question left for CX organisations is the one Philipp Heltewig left echoing across the venue:
Are you willing to embrace the change?
Rounding out our coverage for the day at NiCE World 2026, Xander Freeman was joined by Sarah Thompson, a fellow attendee from Marshmallow to talk about the ideas and themes standing out across the event (and specifically, Russell’s standout quote about orchestrating intelligence):
“Someone at NiCE is going to love me for saying this: but the imagery of just that alone.
So, ‘Orchestrate.’ I mean immediately my brain goes to an orchestra, with a conductor, and you’ve got to think about how like in an orchestra you don’t just have string section you don’t have bass or a drum…the whole thing need to work together in order to make that beautiful symphony sound – and that’s one thing I really liked about that – the idea that in a business that’s exactly what you need to do.
You don’t need all these different individual things, you need everything to work in harmony, work together to orchestrate a symphony, and your business.”
Author: Stephanie Lennox
Reviewed by: Jo Robinson
Published On: 20th Jul 2026
Read more about - Expert Insights, Customer Experience (CX), Darren Rushworth, Event Coverage, NiCE, NiCE CXone, Service Strategy, Stephanie Lennox, Technology Enablement Strategy, Technology Roadmap
