NiCE has launched the next generation of NiCE Cognigy, its platform for building and managing enterprise customer-service AI agents. Announced on 12 November 2026, the release adds AI-assisted development, reusable skills, decision tracing and native voice-to-voice interaction, and changes how customers access and pay for the AI models behind their agents.

The platform is aimed at large organisations that want to coordinate AI agents across a whole customer journey, rather than automate a single task. NiCE says the new version is designed around how AI agents reason and act, so teams can move from an idea to a working agent in production more quickly, with the governance that large organisations require. For existing customers, the next generation is included in NiCE's continued product development, and production deployments already in place keep running unchanged.

Agentic Experience Studio and reusable skills

The centrepiece is Agentic Experience Studio, a redesigned, AI-assisted environment where teams go from an idea to a working AI agent. It comes with default speech-to-text, text-to-speech and large language models, plus ready-made resources, so new projects can start productively from day one. Premium models from Deepgram, ElevenLabs and Anthropic are also available natively.

Agents are built from skills, tools and personas that teams create once and reuse across every agent, improving them over time. The agents can coordinate specialised sub-agents for complex work and connect with external agents, including customers' own personal AI agents, through open standards. An AI companion, called AI Assist, guides setup, testing and improvement across the agent lifecycle.

Tracing every decision an agent makes

NiCE has added tracing, which gives teams full visibility into every step an AI agent takes, from the data and tools it uses to the decisions it makes. Voice-to-voice support uses native speech-to-speech models that process audio end to end, which NiCE says makes conversations faster and more lifelike. The release combines autonomous agents with the structured flows, safeguards and governance enterprises rely on, so each organisation decides where agents act on their own and where defined processes apply.

Model choice and billing also become simpler. Default AI models are included in the conversation price, with nothing to configure and no separate model contract, according to NiCE. Teams can add premium third-party models in a few clicks with usage-based billing, or keep working with their own model contracts.

What NiCE and analysts said

Philipp Heltewig, NiCE's Chief AI Officer, said: "AI Assist guides setup, testing and improvement. Skills built once work across every agent. Tracing shows every decision. We designed the next generation of NiCE Cognigy around that, so enterprises can scale AI Agents with the visibility and control production demands."

Ian Jacobs, vice president and lead analyst at Opus Research, said reusable skills and AI assistance through the lifecycle can speed the path to production, while visibility into how agents make decisions gives organisations the oversight they need to operate at scale. Unite.AI reported that the release is aimed at customer-experience operations that want to coordinate agents across a complete customer journey rather than automate one task at a time.