July 8, 2026 • 9 min read
Verint Engage 2026: Agent Factory, Workforce Intelligence, and the Calabrio Merger
CX Analyst & Thought Leader
July 8, 2026
Verint CEO Dave Rhodes opened Verint Engage 2026 in Las Vegas by acknowledging an uncomfortable CX reality:
“We’re in a world full of AI noise, vendor hype, and lots of promises. But there’s a massive gap between what companies are investing in AI and what they’re actually seeing in the results. Verint and Calabrio are the two best workforce engagement companies on the planet, and coming together creates a CX automation powerhouse that delivers unmatched AI outcomes."
Engage marked the first big opportunity for Rhodes, who was named CEO in February, to introduce the world to what Verint looks like after PE firm Thoma Bravo acquired Verint and merged it with Calabrio.
If you don’t have time to read the full post, here’s everything you need to know about this year’s Verint Engage:
- The Cross-Pollination Effect: Verint is not forcing Calabrio customers to migrate platforms or sunsetting products (yet.) The merger has expanded Verint’s customer base significantly, especially within the SME space, creating a mutually beneficial “cross-pollination” of innovation for existing Calabrio and Verint customers.
- Verint Agent Factory Launch: Verint Agent Factory is an AI agent orchestration environment for building, configuring, and maintaining today’s AI-human hybrid workforce. Enterprises can create their own custom AI agents alongside Verint’s pre-built bots, facilitating human-to-AI handoffs within a single workflow.
- Three Enhanced Intelligence Layers: Verint launched Workforce Intelligence, Desktop Intelligence, and Quality Intelligence: all built on Verint’s Agent Factory. These tools leverage agentic AI to manage, measure, and improve the human-AI hybrid workforce.
- Workforce Intelligence: An operation intelligence layer that works alongside existing WFM tools. Includes agent-facing Agent Assist and Operations Assist for managing daily contact center operations.
- Desktop Intelligence: Turns all agent desktop activity (every click, app, step, etc.) into AI-ready structured data, allowing enterprises to understand how work actually gets done. These insights feed process discovery, coaching, and quality automation across the Verint platform.
- Quality Intelligence: Extends existing quality automation by combining interaction data with system activity, flagging discrepancies.
Keep reading for a more detailed breakdown of Verint Engage.
Verint Wants To Close The AI Outcomes Gap
As Rhodes made clear in his opening keynote, Verint’s goal is to close the gap between AI hype and AI reality, for both Calabrio and Verint customers. The only way for AI agents to proactively orchestrate and execute workflows, Rhodes argues, is by making Agentic AI the core of today’s contact center management.
Jamie Meritt, Chief Product Officer at Verint, argued that what’s really holding enterprises back from achieving meaningful AI outcomes at scale isn't the technology. It’s the reality that most contact centers simply don't know how to operationalize AI at scale, combined with endless AI analysis paralysis and pilot purgatory.
CMO Anna Convery identified the main barriers to AI CX success as the 9-minute-per-call busy work tax, over-automation, and disengaged agents.
Verint's answer is a CX automation platform purpose-built for the human-AI hybrid workforce, powered by an agentic foundation that’s built on over 20 years of combined Calabrio and Verint customer experience data.
Verint Agent Factory: The Orchestration Layer
Agent Factory is the foundation for Verint Intelligence: the connective tissue that lets all your AI agents/tools talk to each other while following the same rules and working the same system.
This agent orchestration, ideally, puts an end to fragmented AI tools, isolated AI experiments, and most importantly, disconnected workflows between human and AI agents. Instead, its composable environment makes coordinated human-AI production possible.
Agent Factory also provides centralized prompt management, making it easy to update prompts for all your AI agents in one place while maintaining compliance. Verint’s open platform means AI model flexibility: a “Bring Your Own AI” approach preventing model and vendor lock-in.
When I asked Daniel Ziv, Verint's Global VP of AI and Analytics, what the biggest customer experience problem Agent Factory solves, he pointed to the orchestration angle and Verint's heritage:
Verint was really at the forefront of launching what people call now AI agents, but three or four years ago we called bots. What Agent Factory allows you to do is orchestrate all of those bots we have that are agent-facing or supervisor-facing, et cetera. I think what's quite unique is we're taking our WEM heritage and all the automation we've built there and within the same canvas, allowing you to orchestrate AI across your AI agents and your human agents. Sometimes even within the same flow.
The last point, in particular: human and AI agents orchestrated in the same flow, on the same canvas, is Verint’s most compelling.
Workforce Intelligence
Built on Agent Factory, Verint Workforce Intelligence (WFI) is available across Verint's full portfolio of workforce management products.
But Workforce Intelligence isn’t meant to replace WFM, Instead, it sits on top of existing WFM solutions, leveraging AI to automate workflows, optimize scheduling, and provide predictive insights. It’s a strict departure from traditional rules-based (and manual) WFM.
Two Workforce Intelligence features are leading this launch, with more in development: Agent Assist and Operations Assist.
Agent Assist
Agent Assist is an agent-facing conversational AI workforce assistant that agents can chat with to request PTO, swap schedules, and accept overtime requests in real time.
The natural-language interface can answer questions that standard portals can’t answer.
For example, instead of asking, “Can I take Friday off?” the agent could ask, “What’s the best day for me to take off next week” and get a compliant, context-aware answer in seconds.
Deep automated explanations accompany every approval, denial, or change, so even when a request can't be granted, agents understand why and what to do next.
Agent Assist syncs with existing WFM data, rules, and scheduling policies, so every action is instantly evaluated against admin rules.
Operations Assist
Operations Assist is, as the name implies, all about optimizing and automating contact center operations.
Instead of spending hours looking for anomalies, admins and supervisors can detect issues, predict their potential impact, and get recommended actions in real time. The goal is to identify warning signs of service level drops, then take preventative action.
When something goes wrong, AI summaries explain exactly what happened and why, then provide next-best-action suggestions to prevent it from happening again.
Desktop Intelligence
While contact centers have always recorded calls, they’ve had limited visibility into agent desktop screen visibility – and certainly haven’t been able to extract real insights from its unstructured data.
Verint’s triggerless Desktop Intelligence makes this possible, no configuration required. The Desktop Activity Bot captures everything automatically from the moment an agent logs on: what apps they used, automatic process classification, the process steps agents followed, and how much time they spent on each step.
Process Discovery Bot identifies workflow processes, agent activity, and essential maps out contact center work is actually being done. It finds variations across agents and teams, then recommends the most efficient path - complete with estimated time savings and visual process maps.
Used correctly, Desktop Intelligence can improve coaching efficiency, optimize quality management, and help businesses identify and improve broken processes.
The risk, at least to me, is that Desktop Intelligence has the potential to be a nonstarter if (when?) agents pushback against having their every move recorded and analyzed.
Whether Desktop Intelligence drives agent engagement or destroys it will depend almost entirely on how businesses deploy and govern it. Ideally, they’ll use it to fix broken processes, not surveil employees - but we’ll see.
Quality Intelligence
Quality Intelligence builds on Verint’s existing Quality Automation capabilities, connecting agent actions to outcomes.
It identifies the gap between what was promised to the customer versus what was actually delivered to them. When it detects an issue, QI immediately flags it (hopefully, before the customer notices it.)
Quality Intelligence is much deeper than the standard “did the agent follow the script and follow our processes” QA process.
That moves quality assurance beyond checking whether the right words were used and into verifying that promises became outcomes. Instead, it verifies that agent promises became customer outcomes.
The Calabrio-Verint Cross-Pollination
The Calabrio-Verint merger was included - sometimes tacitly, sometimes outright - at nearly every conversation at Engage. Verint says it’s taking a customer-friendly approach: no rip-and-replace, no product sunsetting, no forced cloud migration for anyone.
Throughout the event, Verint reinforced the idea that they’ll “meet customers where they are” instead of forcing Calabrio clients to switch over to Verint.
As Daniel Ziv, Global VP AI and Analytics, told me:
The aim is to make sure that every application, regardless of where it started, can coexist on a single platform. That's the product strategy, which means that regardless of where the customer is, what they already have, what they don't, they can start adopting things at their own speed.
We're not saying you must move to the cloud, you must buy into CX and migrate your whole infrastructure before you can start leveraging or benefiting from AI. We always say, we love you the way you are.
The fact that Verint (enterprise) and Calabrio (mid-market) have different customer bases makes the non-cannabilization more realistic. Still, some are wary of the classic post-PE buyout playbook: namely, abruptly ending the “coexist” environment, consolidating, and preparing the platform for sale. We’ll have to wait a couple years to see what really happens.
What’s Next For Verint
If Engage was about proving the Verint-Calabrio merger was a success, Verint’s future rests on its ability to deliver the outcomes it promised.
The differentiators Verint is leaning on are real: an open platform, human-AI agent orchestration at scale, the “meet you where you are approach” that preserves existing tech investments - not to mention, the decades of domain expertise.
Given Verint’s own research proved just how wide the gap between AI expectations and AI reality is, the fact that it’s making closing that gap the center of its strategy carries real risk.
PS: I recorded an Executive Spotlight Interview with Verint CEO David Rhodes while at Verint Engage. Keep a look out for it in the coming days.