NICE Ltd. (NICE) Q2 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Welcome to the NICE conference call discussing second quarter 2026 results, and thank you all for holding. [Operator Instructions] Following management's formal presentation, instructions will be given for the question-and-answer session. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded August 5, 2026. I would now like turn this call over to Mr. Ryan Gilligan, Vice President, Investor Relations at NICE. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. With me on today's call are Scott Russell, Chief Executive Officer and Beth Gaspich, Chief Financial Officer. Before we start, I would like to point out that some of the statements made on this call will constitute forward-looking statements in accordance with the safe harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, please be advised that the company's actual results could differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Additional information regarding the factors that could cause actual results or performance of the company to differ materially is contained in the section entitled Risk Factors in Item 3 of the company's 2025 annual report on Form 20-F as filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 26, 2026. During today's call, we will present a more detailed discussion of second quarter 2026 results and the company's guidance for the third quarter and full year 2026. A copy of today's press release, investor presentation can be found on NICE's Investor Relations website. Following our comments, there will be an opportunity for questions. Let me remind you that unless otherwise noted on this call, we will be commenting on our adjusted results of operations, which differ in certain respects from generally accepted accounting principles as reflected mainly in accounting for share-based compensation, amortization of acquired intangible assets, acquisition and divestiture-related expenses, gains on intercompany foreign currency transactions, amortization of deferred financing costs, amortization of discount on debt, the tax effect of the non-GAAP adjustments and the tax rate impact resulting from the non-U.S. intercompany transaction. The differences between the non-GAAP adjusted results and the equivalent GAAP figures are detailed in today's press release. The information and some of our comments discussed on this call may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions. I will now turn the call over to Scott.

Thank you, Ryan, and good morning, everyone. I'm encouraged by our execution in the second quarter as we continue to strengthen our leadership position in the CX AI market. We're still in the early stages of our growth opportunity and our second quarter results reinforce that underlying demand trends in our business continue to build strong momentum. In Q2, we delivered total revenue of $782 million above the high end of our guidance range and non-GAAP EPS of $2.70 at the high end of the range. Cloud revenue grew 12.6% year-over-year as customers increasingly consolidate around a single enterprise CX AI platform that powers seamless experiences across every channel. That trend reflects a broader reality. Customer engagement is a category in its own right. It connects with broader enterprise workflows, but it remains a distinct system of engagement where every interaction happens in real time, and every customer experience matters. It requires a different level of specialization than enterprise workflow automation or AI only interaction models, and that's exactly where NICE has built its leadership. As customer interactions continue to grow with AI interactions growing even faster, customer engagement is becoming a more strategic capability for the enterprise. That shift is driving enterprises to scale customer engagement and AI across their organizations, expanding their investment in NICE. This is reflected in continued CXone seat growth, a record Q2 for new cloud ACV bookings, including another record quarter for AI bookings, a strong cloud backlog growth of 19% and AI backlog growth of 72%. One additional point. These backlog metrics do not include our recently signed HMRC deal. Had HMRC being included, cloud backlog growth would have been similar to last quarter, while AI backlog growth would have accelerated above Q1. In Q2, nearly every CXone enterprise deal included AI. Customers are choosing NICE Cognigy because of its proven success operating at enterprise scale. AI deal volumes and average deal sizes continue to grow substantially. And we're seeing our installed base increasingly choose NICE Cognigy. Win rates are very high with existing CXone customers as these enterprises view NICE as a trusted partner and see the benefit of a single CX AI platform. And the beauty of NICE Cognigy is it also continues to compete well on a stand-alone basis. ARR increased 52% year-over-year, and AI now represents 15% of cloud revenue. Within that, our Agentic AI solutions grew even further. As enterprises scale AI across their organizations, adoption naturally ramps over time. While the technology can be implemented quickly customers are preparing their data, governance and operating models before scaling AI across mission-critical workflows. Our deployed engineers and NICE Labs engagement models proactively help our customers accelerate that journey. Importantly, virtually all of our AI revenue already comes from production deployments rather than pilots, where customers are achieving meaningful results at scale. International is another area of strength. In Q2, international revenue increased 22% year-over-year, and our recently announced HMRC win is another example of the large-scale enterprise transformations we're increasingly winning. Cloud migrations, our expanding partner ecosystem and growing demand for sovereign cloud deployments, particularly in Europe, are creating multiple durable drivers of international growth. Broadly speaking, our Q2 results reinforce what we recently discussed with customers and partners at NICE World Orlando and NICE World London. Attendance at both events increased more than 20% year-over-year, evidence of the growing interest in our fully AI-native CX platform. It is clear enterprises are no longer valuing AI based on what it can demonstrate. They're evaluating it based on what it can deliver in production, accuracy, governance, scalability, measurable business outcomes are now the criteria that matter. As a result, customers are moving away from fragmented point solutions towards a single platform that orchestrates every customer experience across voice, digital, human and AI. That plays directly to NICE's leadership with a unified operating platform. And we're continuing to strengthen that platform advantage through innovation. At NICE World, we announced that Cognigy is now fully native to CXone, ahead of schedule, making it the platform's foundational conversation on the Agentic AI engine, one application, one shared data layer, one deployment experience. Customers can activate AI faster, eliminate integration complexity and build AI agents directly on CXone data. The native integration of Cognigy is also accelerating innovation across CXone in ways that simply aren't possible when AI and customer engagement sit on separate platforms. At NICE world, we showcased the agentic analytics, which continually analyzes data across the platform to identify new automation opportunities and improve existing automations. We also introduced the agentic engagement plan, purpose built for an emerging hybrid workforce, enabling human and AI agents to operate together seamlessly This capability is unique to NICE and our single natively integrated platform. Combined with learning loops and Guardian AI, these innovations continually improve AI performance while giving enterprises the governance control and operational confidence required to scale AI across every customer interaction. To sustain that pace of innovation, we also launched NICE Labs. Our dedicated AI lab focused on furthering agentic customer experience through advanced research, rigorous benchmark and rapid prototyping. Working closely with customers and partners, NICE Labs is designed to help close the gap between what's possible with AI and what enterprises can reliably deploy in production. Importantly, we built that innovation without sacrificing flexibility for our customers. Our platform is model agnostic, allowing enterprises to take advantage of proprietary open weight and future models as they evolve, without locking themselves into a single LLM. That gives customers the freedom to adopt the best models for each use case while protecting long-term flexibility and cost efficiency. Ultimately, our strategy is delivering measurable results for our customers. TripAdvisor an existing CXone customer deployed NICE Cognigy AI agents moving from concept to its first live automated voice calls in just 2.5 months. Today, it's AI agent delivers a 90 customer sentiment score, well above the 71% achieved by human agents. GXBank, Malaysia's first operational digital bank with over 1 million customers built its customer experience operation on CXone, where the platform now delivers 95% customer satisfaction and 95% first contact resolution, while AI autonomously resolve 70% of customer chat interactions. These outcomes are not isolated success stories. They reflect a broader pattern that we're seeing across our customer base. Enterprise is achieving measurable business outcomes with AI in production. We're translating these outcomes into continued competitive momentum. Our CCaaS win rates remained strong in Q2 and improved year-over-year as more enterprises selected NICE to modernize customer engagement with AI. In Q2, we secured an 8-digit ACV win with HMRC, making it the largest CXone deal and largest Cognigy deal ever. Delivered in partnership with Capgemini, HMRC selected NICE's unified CX AI platform to help modernize and enhance citizen engagement at scale. We also secured another 8-digit ACV win with one of the largest health care organizations in the U.S., which selected NICE CXone and Cognigy to advance customer engagement on a unified AI platform. Working together with Accenture, the customer chose NICE to accelerate AI adoption scale while enhancing member experiences and driving greater operational efficiency. Stand-alone Cognigy also continues to compete favorably. Recent wins, including displacing AI-native point solution at a large multinational utility, where our platform delivered stronger automation performance while giving the customer greater flexibility and faster time to market for new use cases. We also replaced an incumbent AI native solution at a large insurance company after winning a competitive evaluation against an AI native solution and a large enterprise software platform. Together, these wins across both our unified platform and stand-alone AI offerings underscore the strength of our strategy, the competitive differentiation of NICE Cognigy and the growing leverage of our global partner ecosystem in driving large-scale enterprise transformation. Speaking of our partners, our partner ecosystem continues to be an increasingly important driver of our success. ACV booked through our GSI partners in Q2 was multiples higher than the prior year. With AWS, customers are leveraging AWS marketplace and committed cloud spend programs as a part of their procurement processes with NICE, making it easier to adopt our platform while expanding our commercial reach across both new customer deployments and renewals. And we've also expanded our long-standing partnership with RingCentral. Building on nearly a decade of collaboration, NICE will now offer RingCentral's UCaaS solution while RingCentral continues to offer NICE's CXone platform. This gives organizations that prefer an integrated UCaaS and CCaaS deployment the flexibility to use a unified solution without compromising on the capabilities of either platform. And we've also strengthened our position in health care through our recent EPIC integration by embedding patient engagement into the clinical workflow, we've made it easier for health care providers to adopt a NICE platform positioning us for additional growth in this strategic vertical. Collectively, these partnerships make it easier for customers to buy, deploy and expand their investments in NICE, while expanding our reach into new industries and buying centers. Before I turn it over to Beth, I'd like to leave you with one final point. The future of customer engagement is on a single platform, delivering production at scale. That's where NICE is uniquely differentiated, and it's why we continue to win enterprise transformation deals, large ones. That differentiation compounds as customers expand their usage of the platform because our capabilities are natively integrated. Customers can activate AI solutions quickly without the complexity of deploying separate platforms. We are incredibly excited by the accelerating momentum we're seeing in product innovation and customer demand. These trends continue with our expanding partner ecosystem, reinforce our confidence in the significant opportunity ahead. With that, I'll turn the call over to Beth.

Thank you, Scott. We continue to execute on the strategic priorities we outlined earlier this year second quarter revenue coming in above the high end of our guidance range and non-GAAP EPS delivered at the high end of our expectations. Let me now turn to our second quarter results. Total revenue for the second quarter was $782 million, up 8% year-over-year. The outperformance relative to our guidance was primarily driven by stronger-than-expected product revenue, while cloud revenue performed in line with our expectations. Foreign exchange provided a modest benefit of 40 basis points to revenue growth in the quarter, lower than the approximately 1 point tailwind experienced in the first quarter. Starting with revenue by business line. Cloud revenue totaled $609 million, representing 78% of total revenue and growing 12.6% year-over-year, including approximately 250 basis points of contribution from Cognigy. Cloud growth was driven by the successful expansion of CX AI offerings into our existing installed base new CXone logos and strong international performance, partly offset by the strategic renewals we completed. Within cloud, CX AI and Self-Service ARR reached $362 million, growing 52% year-over-year and now representing 15% of our cloud revenue. As we continue to move further upmarket and win larger enterprise AI opportunities, many customers remain in the early stages of deployment, creating a lag between the strong bookings momentum we see and timing of customer adoption. Customer demand remains strong, and we continue to see significant momentum across our AI business. Looking ahead, we're encouraged by the continued strength of our land-and-expand strategy. We delivered a record quarter for AI bookings with approximately 75% of NICE Cognigy bookings attached to CXone. This reinforces our strategy to deliver the market-leading end-to-end CX AI platform. These leading indicators combined with the continued ramp and existing deployments reinforce the confidence in our long-term AI expansion opportunity. As Scott mentioned, cloud backlog increased 19% year-over-year. Our cloud backlog at the end of Q2 does not include our recently signed 9-digit TCV HMRC deal due to customary public sector contractual agreement requirements. As anticipated, Cloud Net revenue retention remained healthy at 106%. Turning to our premise-based revenue streams. Services revenue was $125 million, representing 16% of total revenue and declining 11% year-over-year. This reflects the migration of customers from on-premise deployments to cloud, which naturally reduces the services activity associated with legacy implementations. Product revenue was $49 million, representing 6% of total revenue and increased 7% year-over-year, primarily driven by greater-than-expected term renewals in our non-CX businesses. Turning to our geographic performance. The Americas region, which represented 82% of total revenue, grew 5% year-over-year, supported by healthy cloud growth and continued adoption of our CXone platform, partly offset by anticipated decline in services revenue. International remained an important contributor to growth during the quarter. EMEA revenue representing 13% of total grew 30% year-over-year or 28% on a constant currency basis. APAC revenue, representing 5% of total revenue grew 8% year-over-year or 5% on a constant currency basis, reflecting the lapping of a large public sector cloud deployment that began in the second quarter of last year. International cloud revenue increased 34% year-over-year on a constant currency basis, reflecting continued adoption of our cloud and AI solutions across underpenetrated international markets. Supported by an expanding partner ecosystem and the ramp of recently secured strategic wins, we remain confident that international expansion will continue to be a durable long-term growth driver for NICE. Turning to our business segments. Customer engagement revenue totaled $645 million, representing 82% of total revenue and increased 8% year-over-year. Growth was driven by continued double-digit cloud revenue expansion from both our large installed base as well as new logos, which more than offset the expected decline in maintenance revenue. Financial Crime and Compliance revenue totaled $137 million, representing 18% of total revenue and increased 6% year-over-year, driven by continued demand for our financial crime prevention solutions. Turning to profitability. Gross margin for the quarter was 68.4%, in line with our expectations. Cloud gross margin improved 40 basis points year-over-year to 69%, reflecting improvements in the efficiency and scale of our cloud operations while continuing to support growing AI adoption across the platform. Operating income was $198 million, resulting in an operating margin of 25.3%. Consistent with the investment framework we outlined earlier this year, we continue to invest in AI innovation, go-to-market initiatives and our partner ecosystem. The second quarter also included elevated marketing investments associated with our annual customer conferences, resulting in some quarterly variability within our target operating margin range as we continue to support our long-term growth strategy. Earnings per share for the second quarter were $2.70, coming in at the high end of our guidance range due to outperformance in total revenue and in line operating margin. Turning to cash flow. Operating cash flow for the quarter was $123 million and free cash flow totaled $93 million. Cash generation during the quarter reflected the timing of working capital movement, including prepaying certain expenses and capital expenditures, which can create variability from quarter-to-quarter. We remain confident in our full year free cash flow outlook and continue to expect to finish the year at the higher end of the 18% to 19% free cash flow margin range. We ended the quarter with $355 million in cash and short-term investments. Turning to capital allocation. We repurchased $58 million of our shares during the second quarter. Shares outstanding at the end of June were approximately 58.1 million shares, a decline of 6% year-over-year. Year-to-date, we have executed $311 million of share repurchases, representing 5% of our market capitalization, with our repurchases increasing approximately 10% from the first half of 2025, reflecting our continued commitment to returning capital to shareholders. Turning to guidance. For the full year 2026, we are reiterating our total revenue guidance and raising our EPS guidance to reflect an expected operating margin at the higher end of the 25% to 26% range we previously shared. Full year 2026 total revenue is expected to be in the range of $3.170 billion to $3.190 billion, which represents an increase of 8% at the midpoint. We continue to expect 2026 cloud revenue growth to be in the range of 13% to 15% with Q3 cloud growth expected to be similar to Q2. As we look to the second half, demand across our cloud and AI portfolio remains very strong. At the same time, many customers are still in the early stages of AI adoption and the pace at which they move into production can influence the timing of monetization. We also continue to see stronger-than-expected on-premise demand within our non-CX business from several large financial institutions. While we remain confident in the long-term cloud migration opportunity there, the timing of these migrations can affect the mix between product and cloud revenue. These factors may influence the timing of cloud revenue growth and where we land within our guidance range, but they do not change our confidence in the business. Our strong H1 bookings and continued backlog growth reinforce the healthy demand environment we see for our cloud and AI portfolio. Full year fully diluted earnings per share are now expected to be in the range of $11.06 to $11.26. For the third quarter of 2026, we expect total revenue to be in the range of $780 million to $790 million, representing a 7% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. We expect third quarter fully diluted earnings per share to be in the range of $2.73 to $2.83. In summary, we are pleased with our execution in Q2. As we look ahead, we are encouraged by the strength of our cloud and AI bookings, backlog and pipeline, which continue to support our long-term growth outlook. Combined with disciplined execution, strong cash generation and a healthy balance sheet. We remain confident in our ability to capitalize on the significant opportunities ahead. With that, I'll turn the call back to the operator for questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Siti Panigrahi with Mizuho.

You guys talked about that concept of offering this legacy product discount to a large customer in extent of multiyear commitment. And how is that impact -- are you seeing the same trend continues after that in Q2 and second half, a similar kind of trend from other market customers that's going to coming up for renewal in the second half? And how confident are you on your second half cloud growth as you guided? Do you expect that to reaccelerate?

Yes, thanks. Let me take these questions. So first of all, on the renewals. The renewals we've completed have gone exactly as we expected. And just as a reminder, this was not a large scale. This was more about smart commercial decisions that we designed and work with our strategic customers to accelerate AI adoption and secure long-term commitments. And so none of those changes reflects any deterioration or concern about the underlying demand. In fact, the underlying CCaaS market is really strong. The AI market is really strong. Customer interaction volumes grow. And the voice channel is really critical. So these were very targeted strategic decisions, not a broad change in commercial approach, and we've completed those as we expected with no further concern for the remainder of the year. As it relates to our cloud revenue growth, of course, we've continued to guide within the range. And as Beth mentioned, we feel really -- we feel great about the backlog. We've got record backlog. We've got record bookings. Our AI backlog continues to expand. And if you include HMRC, our backlog is actually accelerating in AI compared to where it was in Q1, it's a great problem to have. Now we've got work to do with our customers to take that backlog and put it into deployments and ultimately convert it to revenue. And the reality is, and you can see it with our wins that we talk to, we're dealing with some of the largest enterprise deployments that are on the planet. And they take some work to be able to deploy them at scale. So customers are taking measured approach as they prepare their data, the governance, the operating models before they scale AI across all the use cases of which they've signed up to. So -- it's not a challenge from a NICE perspective. We've got all the capabilities. We've launched NICE labs. We've got great examples in customers like TripAdvisor and others that are able to deploy quickly. But the reality is we're dealing with complex not simple use cases and those ones require a measured deployment approach, which does have some impact on the revenue in the short term, but in the long term, it's very secure.

Your next question comes from the line of Rishi Jaluria with RBC.

Wonderful. Maybe just start with, look, I get the AI story, obviously, good to see some of these large deals and backlog building. Maybe I want to understand, as we're talking to a lot of our customers, the AI decision is not an all or nothing, right? It's not, hey, we need to buy everything from one vendor. In a lot of cases, you have these high-profile AI native companies out there that might be on call deflection, voice AI agents, et cetera. And to a certain extent, you're competing with them, but to a certain extent, it feels like there's maybe partnership opportunities where you can maybe see certain parts of the market, but still have the connectivity, you still have the hooks still kind of integrate. Maybe can you talk us through your philosophy as it pertains to either working with or integrating with some of those AI native so that it becomes less of a factor of maybe crowding out or delaying some of these decisions. Maybe just help me understand that, and then I've got a quick follow-up.

Sure. It's a great question. So you're right that it is a highly competitive market. And in some respects, when you take just the pure AI story alone, everyone sounds pretty similar. I find it remarkable -- and part of it is because creating voice agents and creating agents. Look, on Cognigy, all I can say is it literally takes seconds. It's -- this is not a difficult activity. So we really focus on our competitive positioning on what makes us unique, what makes NICE unique? Well, it's the only platform that can run a hybrid workforce at scale. It's the only platform that has a best-in-class AI capability if you want to do that independent. But when you want to orchestrate it with the millions of voice interactions, the digital channels, the human workforce, you can do it in an interoperable way without any lag, without any integration, without any latency. We also focus on mission-critical scale. I think a lot of these companies are realizing these AI native companies are realizing that when you get to mission-critical scale, it can't drop. It can't fail. Quality matters. And we've been doing this for decades in our voice and digital and -- in the CXone platform. So taking those same capabilities and doing it in the AI space really does differentiate us. And I think that's why you can understandably see large companies, complex transformational engagements around the world really are where those companies are looking for that capability. Now to your second part of your question, which is a great one. We very much -- our philosophy is very much being a company that is able to interoperate within a competitive ecosystem. Our CCaaS platform, of course, integrates beautifully with other AI native solutions. We operate with open LLM, different LLMs, open source, open weight models. We offer our own speech transcription, text-to-speech service that all we offer, others that can be integrated into our platform. And if you think of it from our point of view, NICE Cognigy works beautifully with every other CCaaS platform. It works beautifully with other enterprise workflow solutions. So we very much look at an interoperable way and then really zero in on the value drivers that we can bring. And then last but not least, the thing that we have the most that everybody needs that is native to our platform is our data. You can't run an AI platform without all the knowledge of all of the intent, the interactions, all the things that happens on voice is a requirement for any of those AI natives to be able to have an insightful way of being able to do containment deflection and others. So our advantage is we can provide that natively with AI agents, human agents interoperable platform all within the one data platform that is easy for our customers to use and deploy. So we take an open approach. We back ourselves with our competitive differentiation, but we also look at ways that we can collaborate with both AI native players and even other CX players because we know that we've got value to provide even if it's not the full suite, there are parts of our portfolio that are evaluating to our customers, and we don't limit ourselves with that opportunity.

All right. Very helpful. And then maybe just on kind of the long-term cloud outlook. If we rewind 9 months ago at your Analyst Day, back in November, you talked about kind of this glide path to accelerating organic cloud growth. Obviously, with Cognigy being a big driver of that. Given where numbers have settled out and with some of the changes in buying behavior, are those targets still on the table? Is the time line still the same? Maybe just help us understand kind of your confidence in that reacceleration story back to what you told us 9 months ago.

Yes, sure. Great. I'll let Beth add to anything that I -- from an opening point of view. So when we got together in November last year, I talked a lot about the growth opportunity of both the CX market and the emerging AI opportunity. And I mentioned that we would need to invest in both the native capabilities and all the things that I described about Cognigy being integrated into the CX platform, being able to provide that transformation. We knew that our differentiation was the combined platform, not just having pieces that could compete head-to-head on an isolated case. So that's been a large focus. And candidly, my main emphasis is being on winning the AI market, winning the CCaaS market, growing our backlog and bookings completing the investments, which were ahead of schedule on that then gives us confidence, and we go into the out years of the midterm guidance with confidence around our cloud revenue and our operating margin. So as of the first half of this year, I feel good about that midterm. What we've got to keep on doing is expand our international, expand with strategic ecosystem, continue to book strongly on both AI and in the CX market and clearly, our opportunity now based on all of the bookings is converted into revenue. So look, we look at that outlook in a positive way, and we will continue to execute against strategy. I'm feeling good about that. Betsy, if anything you want to add?

Yes. I think you've done a great job of covering it, Scott. I think one of the things that's important is we've really done well on executing on the strategic priorities that you highlighted really driving the international growth, putting in play the ecosystem, more business with partners and opening that distribution network. So I think we're well positioned. We feel well on track in those medium-term targets we've already executed. And when we see the -- both the backlog that we've had in the first half of this year, combined with some of the largest deals ever that we've seen, both internationally as well as for Cognigy, that gives us really the confidence that we're still on track for that medium-term outlook.

Your next question comes from the line of Samad Samana with Jefferies.

This is Julian, on for Samad. To start, I mean it's great to see the strong results on the product side and the greater-than-expected term renewals in the non-CX business. As we think through the back half as we model product for the rest of the year, how are you thinking about what your expectation as it relates to the on-prem strength?

Yes. Thank you for the question. As you highlighted, I think we had -- as expected, cloud growth in Q2 and really phenomenal growth in the product in the non-CX businesses in the second quarter. It really speaks to the durability of our ongoing business. When you look at the back half, our strategy remains the same that our expectation is that we continue to drive and our customers, our legacy customers in those non-CX businesses over to the cloud. And that is what we factored into our expectation for the back half. We do have opportunity, and we may potentially see that some of those same financial institutions may opt to actually continue to stay with us durably on a term basis. But as of now our expectation is that we'll continue to see that shift, and that's certainly what we promote to our customers as well as internally to our internal go-to-market teams as well.

Your next question comes from the line of James Fish with Piper Sandler.

Ryan, on for James Fish. So you guys talked about the renewed partnership with RingCentral. How does it impact your UCaaS offering you released and why the decision to renew here?

Well, I think it's -- thanks, James. Look, I think the reality is we've got a wonderful relationship and partnership with Ring, we've had for over a decade. And it's mutually beneficial not for just each other, but also for our customers. And what we realized is back to the earlier question about our strategic partnership is strategic partnerships don't mean exclusivity. So we have many customers that would like a capability that we can provide from NICE, but it's also a recognition that many customers want a world-class UCaaS platform and coexist and buy that in coexistence with their CCaaS or the CX AI platform, and we want to be active in promoting that just as Ring actively promotes and drives the CX capabilities that we have, not only of our CCaaS, but also of Cognigy as well. So it's a win-win for both organizations, and it's an opportunity for our customers to have better choice, deployment flexibility, and it is accretive to what we can offer to our customers. Hence, we linked into that, and we look forward to continuing to build it out.

A quick follow-up, too. So ARR still growing over 50%. But if we back out Cognigy here, it seems that AI grew sub-30 compared to 40% last quarter. What's going on with that organic AI offering slowing down?

Yes. I think, listen, first of all, you can't really look at organic versus inorganic with respect to Cognigy. At the time we made the acquisition of Cognigy, it meant that we discontinued selling the other comparable solutions we had previously. So you must look at it in consolidation. It doesn't really pertain to look at it in a segmented way at this point.

Your next question comes from the line of Tyler Radke with Citi.

Just going back to some of the comments about sort of the lag of bookings to revenue? And I guess related to the prior question, if I just compare your net new AI ARR, just taking the sequential AI ARR addition, it looks like Q2 was below Q2 of last year. You're calling out record bookings. So I'm curious, is there an offset whether it's churn or consolidation of other existing cloud revenue? Or is there a duration impact? Or is there some timing impact just because it does seem like you called out record strength in bookings. But as we look at that sequential ARR, it's not exactly showing up in terms of net new.

Yes. Thank you for the question, Tyler. And it's spot on to what Scott and I both have been talking about earlier today that related to the conversion of timing. We see the strength in our backlog and you may see variability from quarters in terms of how that shakes out. Again, we expect to see that expansion coming more so you'll see in the forward-looking ARR in the back half.

Your next question comes from the line of Arjun Bhatia with William Blair & Company.

Willow Miller, on for Arjun Bhatia. I appreciate your comments about the targeted renewals and how they were thoughtful and extended to certain marquee customers. But if the strategy plays out how you expect it to, would you consider extending the strategic renewals to customers beyond this first group?

Yes, it's a good question. So as you can appreciate, we look at this really closely. And if you think about the strengths of NICE, many of them are around our product, our history, our capability, but one of our biggest strengths is our customer base and our installed base. So we have a very clear view about our renewals, our outlook not only for 2026, 2027 and even into 2028. We've got a very clear view of what customers, what they're using, where they're at and having proactive conversations about their deployment journeys. So I think what you can interpret is based on the signals and the buying behavior of our customers that we clearly saw in Q1, we're way further in front of being able to engage our customers around how to best deploy AI and leverage that within the CXone environment. The beauty is now that Cognigy has integrated into CXone completely, they can literally click a button and they can start activating some of those AI capabilities that Cognigy provides, which wasn't available to us, obviously, at the beginning of the year. So I'm not expecting any adverse app impacts in terms of our overall growth or revenue outlook as we look at those renewals. In fact, quite the opposite, as we look at the opportunity with those customers well in advance of renewal events that we can then seamlessly be able to bring in those AI capabilities, do it in an enhanced way and then obviously make it accretive for our growth overall as a company.

Your next question comes from the line of Patrick Walravens Robbins with Citizens.

Great. And congratulations you guys on the biggest deal in your history. So Scott, who -- when you're doing these 8-figure deals, can you just talk to us a little bit about who you're competing against and sort of how that dynamic works? I mean, is it Genesys? Is it Sierra/Decagon does the new agent force contact center product for Salesforce show up? Who do you end up at the end of the day, having to beat out to win these deals?

Yes. It's a good question, Patrick. The answer is probably all of the above. I mean the reality is it is a competitive environment. And let's face it. We are -- we fully acknowledge that all customers have choice of approach. We believe firmly that the system of engagement and the customer engagement platform in a united manner will be the preeminent way large enterprise and medium for that matter, we'll be able to deliver their customer experience. It takes a bit of time because what they're evaluating is not only who is the best vendor or who's the best partner, but how to achieve their business outcomes companies don't want to be integrating different technologies. So what they're doing is they're looking at AI native solutions, but then they have to figure out how to integrate it and how to maintain that integration -- if they then look at a unified platform like us, then they look at our direct peers and historical CCaaS space and says, who's got the end-to-end capability that provides voice, digital, human, AI agent, all in it completes with and has an innovation road map. So we're clearly in front there. We see that with our win rates, and that's where customers like HMRC who clearly chose to go into our platform going from a legacy on-prem platform that was not NICE. So it is very competitive in those different scenarios. And the way we feel good about it, Patrick, is this -- if a customer chooses to break it apart and then they're going to choose their CCaaS as distinct from their AI platform as distinct from their workforce management, we stand up really well. But when they look at the combined offer of a unified platform and the benefits of it, we stand apart. That's the way that we go to market and compete on those. But I would highlight NICE Cognigy, I mentioned it earlier, but I just want to reiterate it. On a stand-alone basis, head-to-head against these AI players, it stacks up really well and we compete favorably. So we have confidence that we have different buying behaviors and we're able to compete on those. But clearly, the unified platform is our sweet spot and one that really does drive the large enterprise.

Great. And then if I could do a follow-up for you. Just on the whole bookings versus rev rec, I mean is it -- are you comfortable saying that you're reiterating the $3.5 billion in 2028 because that would kind of answer all the questions.

That's correct, Pat, we are. We are standing with the expectation of the -- to continue to meet all of the guidance on the top line that we've already communicated as well as the other targets that we communicated last November as well, yes.

Your next question comes from the line of Elizabeth Porter with Morgan Stanley.

I had a question just on the cloud AI ARR number, which ticked down a little bit versus Q1. And I appreciate you guys have cited some compression in certain CX components, but clearly highlighting this longer-term opportunity is especially as customers scale with AI. So could you just kind of frame the near-term proportion of cloud ARR that is exposed to some of this compression and maybe some of those milestones that would indicate that NRR has reached a trough before we can get that opportunity to start to re-improve.

Thank you for the question. The cloud NRR and the NRR generally was as anticipated for the quarter, it was really just a modest change from what we saw in the first quarter at 106% NRR. It's really directly tied to what you started your question with, which was the strategic renewal opportunities that we addressed last quarter, and that was expected and really anticipated in what we would have shown here.

Your next question comes from the line of Catherine Trebnick with Rosenblatt Securities.

You mentioned the ACV from the GSI partners with multiple times higher year-over-year. And you featured Capgemini, which I think is a new GSI partner -- and then at NICE International, you had two GSI sponsors, which you hadn't had in the past. So the question is, what are they offering with NICE that can't be replicated from competing platforms. And then is that a durable differentiation? And anything else you can unpack about how these partnerships are really helping you out with a larger opportunity.

Yes, it's a great question. So maybe just a bit of context in history. If you remember, I guess, last year, I spoke a lot about the importance of strategic partnerships and you probably would have noticed they placed an enormous amount of attention on technology partnerships. So whether it be with AWS, with ServiceNow, with Salesforce, with RingCentral and many other technology partners. And I indicated that we were also now really leaning into our GSI partnerships. It takes a bit of time for that to bear fruit. Why? Because we have to invest in a lot of effort. We've got a record number of certified and trained NICE Cognigy and NICE consultants now within our GSI partner ecosystem. We built a go-to-market platform, which we can now really target and pursue and build out. They see a durable growth opportunity for them because they see the same demand signals as we do. We put in place a new Chief Partner Officer under our COO, Arun, to really drive this engagement. So a lot of work and effort has been building upon this, which has led to the results that you saw in Q2, which was great record wins whether it be at the HMRC with Capgemini, the health care opportunity with Accenture and many others. So what do we expect from here? The beauty of the GSI ecosystem is once they've got scale of capability and they've got repeatable assets that they build around our technology stack, they will then scale it both from a go-to-market and from an execution. I see multiple advantages, and I'm excited about it, as you can probably hear in my voice. The first is they expand our reach into the market without being dependent on our own go-to-market sellers. So we get a better reach into -- because they have relationships beyond the CX space in all of these enterprise customers. Secondly, they have deep industry expertise that really complement our strong technology stack. So we get win-win. And that's why health care, public sector, insurance, banking, we're able to provide a more nuanced and detailed capability that combines those together. And then last but not least is they help us innovate because what they're able to do is the speed of innovation that we now see with our full deployed engineers combined with our GSI partners is we're able to enter it with rapid prototyping that we can do, we bring that back into product. So they really do give us expansion and scale. We've only scratched the surface. I think you'll continue to see the impact of that ultimately, it's a key driver for us on that long-term growth and the outlook that we provided, which is exciting. Hopefully, that gives some context.

That concludes our question-and-answer session. I will now turn the call back over to Scott Russel for closing remarks.

Thank you, operator. Look, I think as closing, I just want to recap on where we see the quarter and where we see the outlook. At the beginning of the year as was referenced on this call, we talked about investing in international markets. It's a winner. We invested in strategic partnerships -- it's a winner. We invested in an AI capability that is best-in-class. It's a winner. We talked about integrating into a single native platform on CXone. It's a winner. It's ahead of schedule. And we talked about then driving durable growth and then starting to reaccelerate margins as we are able to then capitalize on this opportunity. We're on track. And we feel really good about what we delivered, but more importantly, where we're going. Yes, it's a competitive interesting market, but we're well positioned, and we have a unique strategy compared to others. So I appreciate the time today and look forward to further engagement. Thanks, everybody.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.