NICE NICE shares have declined 14% year to date, significantly underperforming the Zacks Computer & Technology sector’s return of 16.6%. The decline reflects investor concerns surrounding a slower enterprise spending environment, longer sales cycles and intensifying competition from Genesys, Five9, Salesforce CRM and Microsoft MSFT in the customer experience software market.
However, NICE remains focused on strengthening its enterprise (artificial intelligence) AI platform through continued cloud innovation and strategic customer wins. Sopra Steria, one of Europe’s leading technology consulting firms, has deployed NICE’s CXone and Copilot for Agents across its service centers in France, Poland and India. The deployment marks one of NICE’s first large-scale AI implementations in France and extends its presence across Europe’s growing enterprise AI market.
The cloud-based CXone platform is integrated with Sopra Steria’s IT service management tools, Active Directory and monitoring systems, providing intelligent routing, real-time reporting, interaction traceability and SLA management. The platform consolidates voice, email, chat and digital communications into a single agent interface, enabling Sopra Steria to answer 90% of customer calls within 20 seconds while improving customer experience and operational efficiency.
Sopra Steria’s Digital Platform Services division, which manages more than 1.2 million inbound customer interactions annually, is using Copilot for Agents to provide real-time contextual guidance, recommended responses and automated interaction summaries. The deployment supports more than 2,000 employees, including nearly 800 AI-enabled agents and is expected to reduce agent workload, accelerate issue resolution and improve service quality. The deployment further expands NICE’s international customer base and is expected to strengthen recurring cloud revenues over the long term.
Nice Price and Consensus
Nice price-consensus-chart | Nice Quote
AI Expansion Strengthens NICE’s Prospects
The Sopra Steria deployment aligns with NICE’s broader strategy of expanding agentic AI across enterprise customer service operations. In the first quarter of 2026, the company launched CXone Mpower Orchestrator, an AI-powered platform that coordinates AI agents, human employees and business workflows across front, middle and back-office operations. NICE also introduced CXone Mpower Agents, autonomous AI agents that improve productivity by handling customer interactions with minimal human intervention.
NICE’s strong cloud execution and growing AI adoption reinforce its long-term growth prospects. Cloud revenues increased 14.6% year over year in the first quarter of 2026 and represented approximately 75% of the total revenues. Encouraged by this momentum, the company raised its 2026 revenue outlook to $2.92-$2.94 billion. The expanding AI portfolio is expected to strengthen NICE’s competitive position, drive higher cloud adoption and support sustainable recurring revenue growth over the long term.
NICE expects second-quarter 2026 revenues to be $761-$771 million. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for second-quarter 2026 revenues is pegged at $767.17 million, indicating 5.57% year-over-year growth.
The Zacks Consensus Estimate for second-quarter 2026 earnings is pegged at $2.63 per share, which has been unchanged over the past 30 days. The figure implies a year-over-year decline of 12.62%.
NICE Faces Stiff Competition
NICE faces increasing competition from Microsoft and Salesforce as both companies deepen their presence in AI-powered CX, contact center and enterprise automation markets.
Microsoft competes with NICE through its Dynamics 365 Contact Center, Microsoft Teams, Azure AI and Copilot ecosystem. The company is embedding generative AI, intelligent routing, real-time agent assistance and customer service automation into widely used enterprise productivity applications. Microsoft offers customers an integrated platform that reduces the need for standalone contact center solutions. Its vast enterprise customer base and Azure cloud infrastructure also strengthen its competitive position.
Meanwhile, Salesforce is intensifying competition through Service Cloud, Agentforce, Einstein AI and Data Cloud. The company enables enterprises to deploy autonomous AI agents, automate customer service workflows and unify customer data across sales, marketing and service functions. Salesforce’s broad CRM ecosystem, extensive partner network and deep enterprise relationships make it an attractive end-to-end customer engagement platform, challenging NICE in AI-driven customer experience management.
Zacks Rank & Stock to Consider
Currently, NICE carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).
Dell Technologies DELL is a better-ranked stock that investors can consider in the broader Zacks Computer and Technology sector. Dell Technologies sports a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) currently. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.
Dell Technologies shares have surged 213.2% year to date. The long-term earnings growth rate for DELL is pegged at 26.35%.
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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).
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