NiCE accelerates agentic CX innovation with a dedicated AI lab focused on research, benchmarking, and enterprise-ready AI solutions.
NiCE has launched NiCE Labs, a dedicated AI innovation lab designed to advance agentic customer experience through research, benchmarking, and rapid prototyping. Announced at NiCE World 2026, the initiative will serve as the company’s incubation and innovation engine, helping enterprises adopt AI technologies that deliver measurable customer experience outcomes.
According to NiCE, the lab will bring together AI researchers, product teams, customers, and technology partners to explore how AI agents can operate more effectively in enterprise customer experience environments. The company said the goal is to bridge the gap between emerging AI capabilities and practical business applications.
“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. It brings together deep CX domain expertise, rigorous research and benchmarking discipline, and a rapid prototyping culture, all focused on one goal: ensuring that NiCE and the enterprises we serve are always operating at the leading edge of what agentic customer experience can be,” said Phil Heltewig, Chief AI Officer, NiCE.
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Advancing Enterprise AI for Customer Experience
NiCE Labs will focus on three core areas: AI research and benchmarking, product incubation, and industry advocacy. The company said the lab will evaluate AI models, orchestration approaches, and agent behaviours against real-world customer experience scenarios before introducing new capabilities into its platform.
The prototyping and incubation function will develop and test new AI capabilities within NiCE’s Agentic Portfolio, helping accelerate the path from experimental concepts to production-ready customer experience solutions.
NiCE also plans to publish research findings, reference architectures, and benchmarking insights to help organisations better understand how emerging AI technologies can be applied within customer service and contact centre environments.
Bridging the Gap Between AI Potential and Business Outcomes
The company believes many organisations continue to face challenges when moving AI initiatives from pilot projects into live customer-facing operations. NiCE Labs has been created to help validate technologies, measure performance, and ensure AI solutions meet enterprise requirements for governance, reliability, and business impact.
According to NiCE, the lab will work directly with customers and ecosystem partners to test new approaches and accelerate the adoption of AI capabilities that improve customer experiences, operational efficiency, and service outcomes.
The launch reflects growing investment across the customer experience industry in agentic AI technologies, as organisations seek practical frameworks for deploying autonomous systems that can deliver measurable business value while maintaining enterprise-grade governance and control.
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