A Q&A with Verint CEO Dave Rhodes

Dave Rhodes, was named CEO of Verint near the end of February. He brought to the role decades of experience growing and scaling software businesses. He joined Calabrio as CEO in 2024, leading the workforce performance company through its combination with Verint under the auspices of Thoma Bravo. Before Calabrio, he held senior executive roles at Sauce Labs, Unity Software, Paradigm/Emerson, and Autodesk

During the Verint Engage conference in Las Vegas earlier this week, Phil Britt had a chance to sit down with Rhodes to discuss changes at the company, the outlook for the CRM industry as a whole, and the difference between artificial intelligence producing a positive ROI and it being an expensive investment with little or no return.

CRM: It's been nine months since Thoma Bravo acquired Verint and about six months since the deal closed. How has Verint changed in that time?

Rhodes: For many years, Verint was a publicly traded company, so the ability to interact with the employee base and their customers was limited. Publicly-traded companies are often discouraged from thinking about long-term investments to support short-term earnings per share. As a privately held company, our operating model is dramatically different. The level of communication across the business has opened up our ability to make investments, making our roadmap better to deliver value for customers. We've been able to shift our investments around. We've tripled down in the area of AI.

CRM: Verint and Calabrio previously competed in some areas, so how are they working together now? Now that they are both under the same ownership, what is Verint delivering to customers and what is Calabrio delivering to customers?

Rhodes: Both companies provide workforce management solutions. Calabrio brought to the table a very advanced AI-driven conversational intelligence capability. What Verint brought was a huge war chest of CX automation, with 50 different agents and bots working in an integrated fashion. Both companies brought open systems. We're working hard to ensure that collaborative customers are deploying great automation, great conversational intelligence capability, and agentic capability.

We told customers from the beginning that there was no big platform shift that we were going to undergo; there was no sunsetting of any products that would force them off of their existing solution. For example, our Time Flex bot is an agentic capability that works on top of the Verint WFM solution. Now it also works on top of the Colabrio Workforce Management solution.

CRM: As Verint has evolved to focus more on CX, how are you working with legacy customers using legacy solutions for workforce scheduling, etc.?

Rhodes: We are not asking customers to move to new products. We're adding additional capabilities on to legacy products. They don't have to deploy those additional capabilities.

CRM: Different CEOs have different styles and different involvement levels with their companies. How would you describe your management style, and how are you leading Verint?

Rhodes: I'm very detail-oriented and hand-on in the business. I take what I do personally. There are 4,000 jobs inside the company, and tens of thousands of customers and individuals in enterprises whose livelihoods depend on Verint.

CRM:< With the recent discussions by legislators and even Pope Francis about the impact of the technology, AI has gained plenty of attention, particularly its effect on the workforce. Microsoft and other tech companies have laid off thousands of workers. How do you see it?

Rhodes: Our customers are primarily financial services institutions, huge healthcare companies, large big-box retail, luxury, travel and entertainment. The contact center is mission-critical. We've seen no reduction in headcount in the segment of the market that we cover. I's becoming a hybrid environment because of AI. The technology is making workers more productive. AI is making our agents and our customer experiences better.

CRM: There have been reports about many companies not realizing the benefits of their AI investments, yet other companies have said they have achieved significant positive ROI from AI. What separates the companies that are profiting from it and those that are just sinking money into it without a positive return.

Rhodes: There have been billions of dollars spent on failed ERP implementations, Y2K, initial transition to the cloud…Some companies want to experiment. There are companies that are getting value quickly and differentiating themselves in the market through agentic AI. They use the right tool for the right job. They identify a modest, practical outcome in a critical part of their businesses. They quickly assess the market and determine the best fit in a technology and in a business partner. We look at what a company is trying to accomplish. Are you trying to increase sales? Reduce churn? We have a hard business outcome and ROI model that we take our customers through. Those are the companies that are winning with AI.

CRM: What is your outlook for Verint for the rest of this year and for 2027? Outside of a blip during COVID, there hasn't been a recession for some time. Any concerns about a possible economic downturn?

Rhodes: I've been in up cycles and down cycles my entire career. Customers make business decisions out of fear or greed. Even in down times, there are opportunities; there are actually better opportunities to take market share. We'll be fine in good times and in bad times. We were fortunate enough to do some of the right things with our operating model when we put [Verint and Calabrio] together so that we could take some of the money that we were spending on growth initiatives and take advantage of the AI tailwind that we are experiencing. Companies our size are growing in the low single digits in our industry. We will hold market share, if not take a little share. And we will probably do it in a more predictable and profitable level than we could as a public company.

CRM: How will Verint look different for Engage 2027?

Rhodes: We're 10-xing the conversation around AI business outcomes because it's so important. We're packaging some technology that we expect to have huge business impacts for our customers. We will continue to have a strong customer orientation.