AI Use Is on the Rise, with Good Reason, NiCE Speakers Stress

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Artificial intelligence, particularly agentic AI, has advanced rapidly in the past year, yielding solid gains in Net Promote Score and Google rankings for companies that have deployed it in their customer-facing operations, Philipp Heltewig, chief AI officer of NiCe, said during a NEXUS pre-conference address as part of the NiCE World 2026 conference Monday .

NEXUS is the customer-led customer experience (CX) and artificial intelligence (AI) track, which kicked off a day before the full conference.

AI, Heltewig said, "is delivering true value, and that's what enabled us to really increase the number of customers. We added 205 brands using our technology to automate in the customer experience space, and this whole AI revolution really just keeps accelerating."

For NiCE's customers, AI agents processed more than 2 billion interactions, while the number of active deployments grew by 500 percent.

The growth is just beginning, Heltewig added, noting that analysts expect annual investments to top $720 billion this year, up from $425 million in 2025. Those gains are being driven by the potential of AI agents to deliver significant value, he said.

The technology has advanced from something used for classification to something capable of delivering human-like interactions, Heltewig says, noting that the speed of adoption and deployment is truly amazing when one considers that ChatGPT was launched only three and a half years ago.

"It's an amazing time," Heltewig said. "AI changes the paradigm of how we perform work in enterprises, because these AI agents are becoming the go-to digital interface."

Heltewig said he no longer uses traditional search engines like Google because AI presents more accurate and complete information. He recently used Anthropic's Claude AI to search whether he would be able to board a series of connected flights with multiple carry-on bags. Claude determined within minutes that one of the flights would only permit a single carry on, a feat that would have taken a human several hours to find.

"There are 8 billion people on the planet today. If we start using AI agents in any meaningful way, we could have a trillion of them,"Heltewig said. "The agents, some of which are on the customer-facing side and some of which are used to assist human agents, can be deployed in less than a day, though it takes a little longer in regulated industries due to compliance issues."

Some companies are already reporting great success with AI agents. For example, insurance giant Nationwide increased engagement by 8 percent and reduced costs by 87 percent with the help of its AI agent, named Sam.

"Trust in AI is rising, but that requires radical transparency," said Danny Allred, a product executive for conversational AI and contact center solutions at Nationwide. "We're investing $1.5 billion in technology over the next three years, with 20 percent of that dedicated to AI solutions."

AI helps meet the needs for interactions that humans can't, according to Allred. "There are about 1,200 auto insurance prospects that never get a call back from a human each month."

Sam, Nationwide's young, female-sounding AI agent, is used for outbound calls, providing all the required disclosures, and automatically transfers to a licensed human agent once a prospect expresses an interest in a purchase.

Though use of AI agents is expanding in many areas, Allred said at Nationwide executives have promised that claims inquiries involving injury or death will always be handled by a human, not by an AI agent.

Fabletics is another company that has had great success with AI, increasing both customer satisfaction and human agent efficiency, according to Jack Roberts, the company's senior global director of GMS technology and applications.

In the coming weeks, Fabletics will introduce two new roles for agentic agents, which it expects to handle about 70 percent of all contacts, Roberts said, adding that the goal is to optimize human skills by leveraging technology to support them better.

Roberts stressed the importance of using AI to develop intelligent tools with more data and touchpoints to enhance customer experience, making contact centers more proactive and customer-centric while moving away from traditional cost-focused metrics.