Nice Ltd ADR

Oppenheimer upgraded NICE to Outperform from Perform, citing improving financial metrics and easing concerns about AI disruption, and set a $150 price target on the stock, which rose 4% in early Wednesday trading. Analyst Timothy Horan said AI is now a tailwind, with record AI bookings in 2Q26, nearly every CXone enterprise deal including AI, and roughly 75% of NICE Cognigy bookings attached to CXone. AI and Self-Service ARR reached $362M, up 52% year over year, while AI represented 15% of cloud revenue. Horan noted the stock trades at more than a 50% discount to its historical median multiples, at 1.4x 2027 estimated revenue and 8x EPS, and said NICE is likely to sell its Actimize division for 2x its current consolidated multiple, with the potential sale valued at about $2B. He added that the recent Cognigy purchase has at least doubled to more than $2B, which values the legacy CX business at roughly 2x EBITDA.

A wave of deal activity spanned multiple sectors this week, led by Qualcomm's acquisition of robotics software firm PickNik to boost its presence in physical AI and robotics. Smurfit Westrock agreed to acquire Empresas CMPC's Chilean containerboard and corrugated business for $420M, including a paper machine in Santiago that produces roughly 250K tons per year. Madison Dearborn Partners agreed to acquire holding firm The Marygold Companies in an all-cash transaction valuing it at $2.00 per share, a 100% premium over its September 24, 2026 closing price. Brookfield is in exclusive talks to buy fraud detection business Actimize from Nice for $2 billion, while Goldman Sachs emerged as the lead bidder for Palmer Square Capital Management, a credit manager overseeing more than $37 billion. Elsewhere, Capri Holdings soared 10% on a report it has connected with potential acquirers, Evonik rose 7.2% in German trading after a report that BASF approached it about a takeover, RPM International agreed to acquire Italy-based Volteco S.p.A. for its Tremco Construction Products Group, and Superstar Platforms agreed to acquire fintech company TitlePal in an all-stock transaction.

Morgan Stanley said in a note Wednesday that the rise of consumer AI agents such as Meta's Muse could benefit communications and software vendors long seen as vulnerable to automation, rather than threaten them. Analyst Elizabeth Porter argued that agents like Muse and Instinct, personal assistants that complete tasks on users' behalf, could expand the volume of interactions businesses field, cushioning contact-center vendors whose seat-based models have been under pressure from AI. She wrote that consumer agents lower the effort required to engage a business while enterprise AI lowers the cost of responding, potentially expanding communications volumes and usage-based monetization. Porter believes Twilio offers the broadest exposure, benefiting from the messages and calls an agent initiates to complete a task, such as authentication texts, reservation confirmations and follow-ups, on top of its existing usage and software-attachment model. For contact-center names such as NICE, Five9 and RingCentral, she said higher volumes could slow the risk of seat reductions while automation priced by interaction expands, and among web-presence providers she sees Wix as better placed than GoDaddy, with Shopify the most direct beneficiary in e-commerce software. Porter cautioned this is a stronger medium-term bull case rather than a near-term catalyst, and said she is wary of extrapolating upside into third-quarter results.

Brookfield is closing in on a $2bn deal to buy Actimize, a financial crime and compliance specialist, from Nasdaq-listed NICE. Sky News has learnt that Brookfield's financial infrastructure arm, set up three years ago with the aid of the City grandee Sir Ron Kalifa, is in exclusive talks to acquire the business. Sources cautioned that a deal had yet to be finalised and could yet fall apart. If completed, the transaction would deepen Toronto-based Brookfield's push into financial infrastructure assets, following its acquisition of a stake in Barclays' merchant acquiring arm last year. Actimize was put up for sale by NICE earlier this year and was reported to have drawn interest from private equity firms including Advent International and New Mountain Capital; NICE bought the business in 2007 for $280m, and it now focuses on AI-driven fraud prevention and anti-money laundering products for financial institutions worldwide. Brookfield declined to comment on Wednesday morning.

RingCentral is seeing artificial intelligence become a major growth and upsell opportunity, with paid AI customers generating higher net retention and higher average revenue per user, Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Agarwal said at a Piper Sandler event. Agarwal said only 13% of the company's more than 600,000 customers have purchased at least one paid AI product, representing roughly $350 million of its more than $2.5 billion total base, leaving what he called a long runway for expansion. RingCentral is investing more than $250 million in research and development, with a large majority directed toward AI, and recently ran an OpenAI pilot involving more than 2,000 engineers. The company's core unified communications-as-a-service business accounts for about 80% of its business and continues to grow in line with the market, while its AI portfolio grows faster from a smaller base; the small- and medium-sized business segment and the global service provider segment are each growing at double-digit rates and are almost Rule of 40 businesses, supported by more than 16,000 channel partners and 16 global service providers. RingCentral expects to maintain gross margins of approximately 80% or more, improve operating margins by roughly 100 to 200 basis points annually, and deliver more than $7 in free cash flow per share this year, with durable growth next year as COVID-related renewal headwinds moderate. On the contact center side, Agarwal described RingCX as a strategic priority for simpler AI-native deployments, while the company expanded its relationship with NiCE into a bilateral arrangement in which RingCentral sells NiCE's CXone product and NiCE will begin selling RingCentral's RingEX offering to its customer base.

NICE reported that Bluecrest Health Intelligence has adopted its CXone platform to overhaul contact center operations using AI, marking a high-profile healthcare reference client for the company. The healthcare provider is using CXone to support a broad shift toward AI-driven customer interactions and contact center processes, with NICE highlighting operational efficiency, customer access, analytical insight, and resilience as key outcomes. This deployment sits squarely in NICE's core customer contact offering, and the company noted that rapid growth in demand for AI-driven customer experience solutions, manifested by 42% year-over-year growth in AI and self-service ARR and the upcoming integration of Cognigy's conversational AI capabilities, provides visibility into sustained increases in high-margin, recurring cloud revenue and expanded ARPU. However, complex international rollouts can be capital and resource intensive with slower revenue realization, and analysts have flagged execution and integration challenges, so investors may want to see similar wins repeated across regions before assuming broad-based traction.

NICE Ltd. reported second quarter 2026 total revenue of $782 million, up 8% year-over-year and above the high end of its guidance range, with non-GAAP EPS of $2.70 at the high end of expectations. Cloud revenue grew 12.6% to $609 million, driven by CX AI expansion and new logo acquisitions, while CX AI and Self-Service ARR reached $362 million, up 52% year-over-year and now representing 15% of total cloud revenue. The company raised its full-year 2026 non-GAAP EPS guidance to $11.06 to $11.26, reflecting expected operating margin at the higher end of its 25% to 26% range, and reiterated full-year revenue guidance of $3.170 billion to $3.190 billion. NICE also highlighted a record quarter for AI bookings, with cloud backlog up 19% year-over-year excluding a recently signed nine-digit total contract value agreement with HMRC, and AI backlog growing 72% year-over-year. The company repurchased $58 million of shares in the quarter, bringing year-to-date repurchases to $311 million.

Currys plc has deployed the NiCE CXone platform to unify customer interactions across its retail operations, driving double-digit improvements in customer satisfaction and quality. First contact resolution now runs at nearly 80 percent, the contact-to-order ratio fell to 0.18 per sales order, and the main Currys business recorded a six-point NPS improvement during the initial migration period. In one area, complaints fell by roughly half over 18 months and NPS rose by more than 20 points. The platform supports hundreds of advisors across the U.K., South Africa and India, managing nearly 6 million customer interactions annually. Currys expects the success to serve as a model for extending CXone across the wider business.

RingCentral announced a collaboration with OpenAI to build AI-native capabilities into its communications and contact center products, and expanded its bi-directional partnership with NiCE to integrate and resell unified communications and contact center solutions. The company aims to deepen AI across its platform while widening enterprise distribution through NiCE. RingCentral's stock has risen 16.9% over the past week, 34.8% over the past month, and 75.1% year to date, with a current share price of $48.31. The stock trades roughly 4% above the analyst target of $46.43, with estimates ranging from $38 to $60, and is flagged as undervalued, trading about 63.1% below one fair value estimate. The company has negative shareholders' equity and a high level of debt, presenting balance sheet risks alongside the potential benefits of these partnerships.

NiCE and RingCentral have expanded their strategic partnership with a new multi-year agreement that makes the relationship fully bi-directional. Under the deal, NiCE will resell RingCentral's unified communications as a service solution, RingEX, while the companies also extended their existing agreement to market and sell RingCentral Contact Center, powered by NiCE CXone, for an additional year. The expansion builds on more than a decade of collaboration since 2015, offering a deeply integrated UCaaS and CCaaS platform that connects contact center agents with back-office experts. Together with NiCE's CX AI, powered by NiCE Cognigy, organizations can orchestrate AI and human agents as one workforce across customer and employee workflows. The expanded partnership offerings are available now.

Nice and Check Point have become launch partners on Amazon Web Services' new European Sovereign Cloud. The collaboration allows organizations to deploy Nice's AI capabilities supporting data residency, operational autonomy, and digital sovereignty requirements within the European Union, targeting highly regulated industries such as the public sector, financial services, and healthcare. Check Point is offering its Cloud Firewall for EU customers through the sovereign cloud, enabling sensitive workloads to run with operational autonomy and data residency entirely within the EU. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud is an independently operated infrastructure located entirely within the EU, operating separately from existing AWS Regions, and backed by technical controls, sovereign assurances, and legal protections for European governments and enterprises.

A bullish thesis on NICE Ltd. argues the company is well-positioned to benefit from AI-driven automation in customer support, with AI annual recurring revenue growing 66% year-over-year and exceeding 10% of total revenue. The thesis highlights NICE's deep enterprise penetration, high switching costs, and expansion through acquisitions like Cognigy and partnerships with AWS and Salesforce. A key catalyst is the shift from seat-based pricing to usage-based AI monetization, which could unlock a share of enterprise support budgets as labor spend converts into software. While near-term margins may face pressure from reinvestment and pricing transitions, the long-term case rests on higher switching costs and stronger pricing power, with potential for multiple expansion if AI revenue growth outpaces seat erosion. NICE was trading at $84.68 as of June 18th, with a trailing P/E of 10.05 and a forward P/E of 7.65.

TTEC Digital has received Platinum Partner status in the NiCE 360 VISION Partner Program, the highest tier within the NiCE partner ecosystem. The designation recognizes TTEC Digital's strategic alignment, delivery excellence, and customer impact, with the company demonstrating market leadership and a strong alignment with NiCE's agentic AI vision. TTEC Digital has built one of the CX industry's largest NiCE Cognigy practices with more than 100 certified consultants, and has also been selected as a launch partner for the upcoming NiCE AI Specialization Program. The partnership enables clients across health care, financial services, retail, technology, and the public sector to achieve outcomes such as cloud migration savings, CX transformation returns, and AI self-service efficiency.