NiCE Q4 2025 Earnings Call, 2026 Outlook

NiCE (NASDAQ: NICE) held its Q4 and full year 2025 earnings call this morning, February 19, reporting results that came in at the high end of guidance and announcing a new $600 million share repurchase program.

The Big Numbers

Let's start with the big numbers: for the full year 2025, NiCE's total revenue grew 8% to $2.945 billion, with cloud revenue (now $2.238 billion) driving the lion's share of that growth at 13% year over year.

NiCE closed Q4 with $786.5 million in total revenue, up 9% year over year. Cloud revenue – which now represents 77% of NiCE’s total revenue – rose 14% to hit $608.3 million in Q4.

AI ARR grew 66% year over year to $328 million. Non-GAAP EPS came in at $3.24 for Q4 and $12.30 for the year – beating analyst EPS estimates by 8%. NiCE ended the year with $417 million in cash, zero debt, and $489 million returned to shareholders via buybacks. During the call this morning, CFO Beth Gaspich announced the board then authorized a new $600 million repurchase program, bringing total remaining buyback capacity to roughly $1 billion.

CEO Scott Russell directly addressed analysts curious about how AI would impact NiCE’s revenue, highlighting that 100% of new seven-figure CXone deals in 2025 included AI.

2026 is all about speed, and we're moving quickly to seize the opportunity in front of us…my conviction today is stronger than when I joined, that AI is a clear tailwind for NICE. Let me be really clear here. NICE is an AI company. Enterprise CX AI requires deep domain expertise, unified data, orchestration, and governance at scale, and that is what we do. We have the technology, the data, the domain expertise, and the customer base to win, and we will seize this opportunity."

Scott Russell

NiCE, CEO

NiCE Cognigy’s All-In-One Platform

The numbers make it clear: customers are moving away from fragmented point solutions in favor of AI-native, all-in-one CX platforms like NiCE CXone. 

The Cognigy acquisition is the most important piece of this, proving that NiCE’s risky $995 million investment in Cognigy – a nearly 25x times premium – paid off. Cognigy filled in the most serious gap in NiCE's platform: enterprise-grade conversational and agentic AI. According to Russell, “pretty much nearly all" seven-figure ACV wins in Q4 included Cognigy, and both NiCE and Cognigy earned Gartner Peer Insights "Customer Choice" recognition. 

The newly launched Cognigy Simulator, an AI performance lab that lets enterprises test, evaluate, and scale AI agents before deployment, signals that the product integration is moving fast. Full native integration into CXone is expected later in 2026. When that happens, NiCE's claim of being the only fully AI-native enterprise CX platform that unifies voice, digital, and agentic AI at scale will be much harder to argue with.

International Revenue 

In 2025, NiCE’s international revenue grew 16% for the full year, accelerating to 29% in Q4. Russell, who pointed out that NiCE closed its largest international deal ever in 2025, plans to accelerate international expansion in 2026.

According to CFO Beth Gaspich, that growth is almost entirely cloud-driven. Most enterprises outside the US haven't fully migrated from on-premises to cloud yet, meaning NiCE is still in the early innings of a very large opportunity. International enterprises also tend to skip the incremental migration steps North American buyers took and move directly from on-prem to full AI-native cloud. For NiCE, that could mean larger initial deals and faster AI adoption.

A big part of why NICE is winning internationally is its sovereign cloud infrastructure – a non-negotiable for regulated industries in Europe and beyond. AOK Bayern, Germany's largest public health insurer, just went live on CXone, making it the first German public health insurer to move to the cloud.

Invest Now, Win Later

CFO Beth Gaspich outlined NICE’s intent to continue “leaning in” to AI-first CX by making further organic investments in R&D, sales, and infrastructure in 2026. 

2026 will be a year of deliberate, targeted investment to support our next phase of growth to capitalize on the immense CX AI opportunity. These investments are focused on three primary areas: cost of goods sold, R&D, and sales and marketing. As we've shared, near-term margin performance expectations reflect intentional investment choices. These investments are designed to optimize our AI market-leading position, drive durable growth, expand our competitive differentiation, and position the business for long-term operating leverage.

Beth Gaspich

CFO, NiCE

Most of these investments will take place in the first half of 2026, with operating margin expected to exit 2026 near the upper end of their 25%–26% target range. Further expansion is expected in 2027. NiCE expects faster cloud growth to rise to 15% in 2026, up two points from 13% in 2025. Given that NICE’s cloud backlog growth (signed contracts that haven't yet converted to revenue) hit 25% in Q4 of 2025, that expected acceleration seems feasible.

What This Could Mean For The Market

NiCE's Q4 and full year results are one of the better real-world data points we have on whether enterprise CX AI demand is genuine or inflated. The earnings call highlighted that enterprises are usually buying AI to make better use of their human agents, not replace them entirely. 

It also exposed another important truth: enterprises that over-automated and underdelivered are now looking for all-in-one, AI-native cloud platforms that can actually execute at scale. Point solution vendors will feel the burn from CX AI vendors like NiCE the most.