NiCE Ltd; announced plans to acquire rival Cognigy GmbH for $955 million. NiCE sells a platform called Mpower that helps enterprise run their contact centers more efficiently. It can measure the performance of customer support teams, answer common requests using artificial intelligence and perform related tasks. Cognigy competes in the same market. The company’s cloud platform, Cognigy.AI, enables enterprises to build custom AI agents for automating customer service tasks. Development is done in a low-code interface that uses large language models to speed up certain tasks. The acquiree says AI agents built using its platform can not only answer customers’ questions but also perform actions on their behalf. According to Cognigy, AI agents powered by its platform can ingest multimodal input. An online retailer could create a technical support agent that lets users upload a photo of a product with a manufacturing defect. The AI agent could analyze the photo, determine what’s wrong with the product and issue a refund. Under the hood, Cognigy uses LLMs from major AI providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. If the LLM that powers an agent encounters an issue while processing a customer service request, Cognigy can retry the query. If that doesn’t work, it can switch to a different model. NiCE plans to integrate the company’s technology with its CXone Mpower contact center automation tool. The latter offering lends itself to many of the same tasks as Cognigy.AI, including custom AI agent development. It also provides human help desk representatives with guidance on how to resolve tickets.