In 2008, Beth Gaspich stood on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, ringing the bell as RiskMetrics went public. What made the moment extraordinary was its timing—amid one of the most volatile markets in decades. The IPO decision, she tells us, came “down to the wire.” After months of preparing the S-1, long roadshows, and weekend work with auditors, leadership had to choose: delay indefinitely or seize a fleeting opening. They chose action, and the listing became a defining milestone in her career.
Read MoreThat experience shaped her conviction that preparation and clear communication are indispensable when markets are uncertain. It also foreshadowed the way she would later lead NiCE through its own transformation. When she became CFO in 2016, NiCE was largely an on-premise software company with roughly $1 billion in revenue. Today, she tells us, the firm is approaching $3 billion, with $2.2 billion in cloud revenue. “We don’t put boxes around people,” she notes, describing a culture where finance leaders are expected to help drive strategy, not just report results.
Her approach to AI investment echoes that belief. She explains that NiCE’s AI and self-service ARR reached $238 million, growing 42% year-over-year. Rather than measure ROI only through headcount reduction, she emphasizes redeploying people to more strategic work. Internally, AI “champions” in each function track outcomes with KPIs.
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CFOTL: My familiarity with NiCE is that it makes software that helps big companies answer phone calls, keep track of what was said, and ensure banks and businesses follow the rules. But tell us about NiCE today. This company is several decades old—what is it about now?
Gaspich: Well, first, I would say we’ve come a long way. We still do some of the things you mentioned, but we do significantly more. We are an enterprise software firm delivering AI on a cloud platform that was built natively in the cloud. For more than 30 years, we’ve continued to transform as a company. We’re traded on two stock exchanges—NASDAQ here in the U.S. and TASE in Israel. Today we’re about $3 billion in revenue, serving over 25,000 customers in more than 150 countries.
Read MoreIn the early days, we focused heavily on the contact center—providing call recording and routing. But over time, we greatly expanded. A major acquisition, right around the time I stepped into the CFO role, resulted in our CXone platform on the customer experience side. That started with improving agent efficiency but has evolved. Today, our growth is driven largely by AI in our cloud platform. It’s fully integrated—AI augments agents when consumers reach them, while also providing human-less (AI-based) interactions that extend far beyond the contact center. We’ve really expanded into a full, end-to-end customer experience offering.
CFOTL: Looking at the economic environment today, what external factors are playing the largest role in shaping your financial strategy?
Gaspich: Not surprisingly, AI is a major factor. Since the introduction of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, every enterprise software provider is being evaluated through the lens of AI. For NiCE, the question is: where are humans most involved, and where can AI replace or augment them?
What makes me proud is that we’ve been ahead of the curve. As a 30-plus-year company, our software has always been grounded in analytics and early AI, like machine-based learning. Even before 2022, we were winning awards for our “Enlighten” platform, which applied AI use cases to improve outcomes between organizations and their customers.
When conversational AI emerged, we moved quickly into next-gen capabilities. Most recently, we closed the acquisition of Cognigy, a leader in conversational AI. Adding it to our platform strengthens our growth engine. Fundamentally, we believe AI is best delivered when it’s integrated with a cloud-native platform and has access to relevant data. That’s exactly what we offer at NiCE.
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