Nexus vs Cognigy: Automating the Conversation vs Completing the Work Behind It
Cognigy automates contact center conversations. Nexus agents complete the 90% behind them: validation, routing, decisions, and execution. Compare platforms.
Last updated: February 2026
Quick honest summary
Cognigy is a strong contact center AI platform, and that reputation is well-earned. It's been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI three times, it serves brands like Mercedes-Benz, Lufthansa, and Nestle, and its 2025 acquisition by NICE for $955M validated its position in the CX space. For voice and chat automation inside the contact center, Cognigy is purpose-built and effective.
But here's what most conversational AI comparisons miss: conversation is only about 10% of most business processes. The other 90% is the complex work BEHIND the conversation: collecting data from multiple systems, validating it, making decisions within guardrails, handling exceptions, routing edge cases, and taking action. Cognigy is designed around the conversation. Nexus is designed around the work.
Nexus deploys autonomous agents that complete entire business workflows end-to-end: customer onboarding, sales intelligence, compliance monitoring, HR operations, proposal generation. Across any department and any system. Where Cognigy handles the dialogue, Nexus agents handle the dialogue AND the data collection, the validation against backend systems, the decision-making, the execution, and the escalation logic. The conversation is a surface. The work is the substance. And Nexus is not just a platform. It's a platform plus a service layer: Forward Deployed Engineers embedded with your team, change management guidance, and ongoing optimization. Because deploying AI at scale is 10% technology and 90% organizational change.
The right choice depends on which problem you're solving. If your primary challenge is contact center efficiency and you need better voice and chat automation for customer service, Cognigy (now part of NICE CXone) is purpose-built for that. If you need AI that completes the 90% of work that happens after or around the conversation, across your entire organization, that's a different category. That's what Nexus is built for.
Side-by-side comparison
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When Cognigy is the better choice
Cognigy is the right choice in specific scenarios, and it's worth being straightforward about that:
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The conversation IS most of the work in your use case. Not every process has a 90/10 split between behind-the-scenes work and conversation. For some contact center scenarios (FAQ resolution, simple routing, appointment confirmations), the conversation itself is the bulk of the work. If that describes your challenge, Cognigy is purpose-built for it.
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Your primary challenge is contact center efficiency. If the problem you're solving is call volume, average handle time, first-contact resolution rates, and agent utilization, and the scope stays within the contact center, Cognigy is focused here. It's what they do, and they do it well.
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Voice AI is a core requirement. Cognigy has strong telephony integration and voice capabilities, particularly through its integration with NICE CXone. If you need voice bots that handle IVR replacement, call routing, and real-time voice conversations at scale, that's a genuine strength.
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You need a Gartner-recognized contact center AI vendor. If your procurement process requires analyst validation and your use case is specifically conversational AI for customer service, Cognigy's Magic Quadrant Leader positioning (three consecutive reports) gives your buying committee confidence. That matters in enterprise procurement.
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You want one vendor for your CX stack. With the NICE acquisition, Cognigy is now part of a unified CX platform (CXone Mpower). If you're already a NICE customer, or if consolidating your contact center stack under one vendor is a priority, the integration makes sense.
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Your scope is strictly customer-facing conversations. If you don't need AI that crosses departmental boundaries, if the goal is better automated conversations in the contact center and that's the entire scope, Cognigy is a focused solution that won't try to be more than you need.
When Nexus is the better choice
Enterprises that partner with Nexus tend to share a specific pattern: they automated the conversation, then realized the conversation was only about 10% of the process. The other 90%, the work behind the conversation, was still manual, fragmented, or breaking down at the edges. Their contact center tool couldn't reach it because it was never designed to.
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You need AI that handles the 90% behind the conversation, not just the 10% in front. Contact center automation is one use case. But what about customer onboarding, sales research, compliance monitoring, HR operations, proposal generation? This scope limitation is shared by all conversational AI platforms, from Moveworks to Ada. These are workflows where the conversation is just the entry point. The real work is data collection from multiple systems, validation, decision-making, exception handling, and execution. Cognigy is designed around the conversation. Nexus agents are designed around the work: across sales, operations, HR, compliance, and finance.
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You need agents that complete work, not just hold conversations. Cognigy automates the conversation layer, and it does that well. But think about what happens after the customer says "I want to switch my plan." Someone (or something) has to check eligibility, verify the account, calculate proration, flag compliance issues, route approvals, execute the change, and confirm it. That's the 90%. Nexus agents handle the entire process: collecting, validating, deciding, executing, and escalating. That's the difference between automating a channel and completing a workflow.
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You want a service partner, not just software. Most enterprise AI vendors sell you a platform and leave you to figure out the hard part. Nexus embeds Forward Deployed Engineers with your team: real engineers who help identify the highest-impact use cases, design agents for your specific workflows, handle integration complexity across those backend systems, and run pilots without requiring your internal resources. This is why Nexus has a 100% POC-to-contract conversion rate. Deploying AI at scale is 10% technology and 90% organizational change. FDEs are how Nexus solves the 90%.
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Business teams need to own the AI, not wait for IT. Cognigy is typically owned by IT or the contact center team, and reviewers note that advanced workflows can require engineering help. This engineering dependency mirrors what enterprises experience with developer frameworks and open-source builders. Nexus agents are built and owned by the business teams who understand the workflows: sales, operations, HR, compliance. At Lambda, the Head of Sales Intelligence built a system monitoring 12,000+ enterprise accounts, with no engineering background. At Orange, the business team deployed production agents in 4 weeks.
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Your workflows span multiple systems, not just your contact center stack. If the work involves CRMs, ERPs, ticketing systems, WhatsApp, Slack, custom APIs, Nexus connects to 4,000+ enterprise systems. One agent can pull data from your CRM, validate against your ERP, communicate via WhatsApp, and update your ticketing system. The agent works across your entire infrastructure, not just within a contact center environment.
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You want per-agent pricing tied to outcomes, not conversation volume. Cognigy's consumption-based pricing means costs scale with conversation volume, with separate charges for voice, chat, and LLM workloads. For enterprises evaluating the build vs buy decision, the total cost of ownership matters more than per-unit pricing. Nexus charges per-agent: an agent that handles customer onboarding for thousands of customers costs the same whether volume spikes or dips. The pricing is tied to value delivered, not interactions processed.
What enterprises experienced
Orange Group: automating the 90% behind onboarding, not just the conversation
Orange, a multi-billion euro telecom with 120,000+ employees, built autonomous customer onboarding agents using Nexus. A contact center AI platform like Cognigy could have automated the voice and chat interactions with customers, but the onboarding workflow required far more than conversation handling. Not chatbots that answer onboarding questions. Agents that complete the entire onboarding workflow. The conversation with the customer is maybe 10% of onboarding. The other 90% is collecting customer information from multiple systems, validating data in real-time, checking compatibility, running eligibility logic, routing unusual cases, and escalating complex issues with full context. That's what these agents do.
Deployed in 4 weeks. 50% conversion improvement. $4M+ incremental yearly revenue. 100% team adoption, because the agents live inside the channels the team already uses. No new system to learn, no new interface to adopt.
The distinction matters: a conversational AI platform would have automated the conversation layer, the 10%. Nexus automated the entire process: the conversation, the validation, the decision-making, the execution, and the escalation logic. When the agent can confidently approve, it approves. When uncertain, it escalates to the salesperson with full context. Every step visible. Every decision logged. 100% compliance.
The business team built it. Not engineering.
A multi-billion euro telecom operator: 40% of support capacity freed
A major European telecom (13,000+ employees, EUR 500M+ revenue) deployed a multi-purpose agent suite with Nexus: support agents, compliance agents, registration agents, data harmonization, and escalation handlers. Not just conversation automation; a coordinated system of agents working across different functions.
The result: 40% of their support capacity was freed. Full regulatory compliance maintained across millions of interactions. 12-week deployment timeline. The agents handle exceptions intelligently instead of hitting dead ends, and they maintain complete audit trails for every decision.
This is the pattern companies we work with keep describing: their conversational AI handles the customer-facing conversation, the 10%. Nexus handles the 90% behind and around it: the systems, the validation, the compliance, the routing, and the completion.
Lambda: $4B+ AI company chose to buy, not build
Lambda is a $4B+ AI infrastructure company with 500M+ ARR and world-class AI engineers. If any company could build sales automation agents internally, it's Lambda. AI is literally their business.
Their CTO said the opportunity cost of engineering time was too high. Every hour their engineers spent on internal tools was an hour not spent on their core AI infrastructure product. They deployed with Nexus in days what would have taken months internally.
The Head of Sales Intelligence, Joaquin Paz (no engineering background), built an agent that monitors 12,000+ enterprise accounts annually with deep intelligence. The result: $4B+ in cumulative pipeline discovered, 24,000+ hours of research capacity added annually, and a projected value exceeding $7M by 2026. Lambda is now expanding from a single agent to an agent fleet across sales and marketing.
If Lambda, with AI as their core competency, chose Nexus, most enterprises should ask: what's the opportunity cost of trying to build this ourselves?
Key differences explained
Designed around the conversation vs. designed around the work
This is the fundamental distinction, and it matters more than any feature comparison.
Conversational AI platforms like Cognigy are architecturally designed around the conversation: NLU, dialogue flows, telephony, channel management. The conversation is the center of gravity, and everything else connects to it. With the NICE acquisition, Cognigy's scope extends across the CXone platform, covering front and back-office operations within the CX workflow. But the starting point is still the conversation, and the architecture reflects that.
Nexus is designed around the work. The agent's job is to complete a process: collect data from multiple systems, validate it, make a decision, handle exceptions, route edge cases, take action. Sometimes that involves a conversation. Sometimes it doesn't. The conversation is one possible surface, not the architectural center. Cognigy manages the dialogue. Nexus agents complete the entire workflow that dialogue triggers (or that triggers without any dialogue at all).
The question isn't which is better. It's whether you need AI designed around conversations or AI designed around the work behind them. If the scope is optimizing contact center dialogue, Cognigy is focused there. If the scope is completing the multi-system, multi-step processes that most conversations initiate, Nexus is built for that.
The 10/90 gap: why automating the conversation leaves 90% untouched
Contact center AI automates what happens during a conversation. But the conversation is only about 10% of most business processes.
Take customer onboarding: the conversation is where you collect information. But completing the onboarding means validating that information against backend systems, checking compatibility, making a routing decision, triggering downstream actions, and handling exceptions. All in real-time, across multiple systems. That's the 90%. A conversation bot handles the 10% (the dialogue). A Nexus agent handles all of it.
This is what companies we work with describe as the automation gap. They invested in conversational AI, automated the dialogue layer, and expected the process to be automated. But the process still breaks down at the edges: when it leaves the conversation and enters the workflow. The data still needs validation. The decision still needs logic. The exception still needs routing. The action still needs execution. Conversational AI was never designed for that work. Nexus closes that gap because it's designed around the work from the start.
Software vs. solution: the FDE difference
This is a difference many comparison pages overlook, and it might be the most important one.
Cognigy (and most enterprise AI vendors) sells software. You get the platform, onboarding assistance, training through Cognigy Academy, and a support portal. Implementation is on you or your systems integrator. That works when the product's scope is well-defined (automate conversations). It breaks down when the scope is completing complex, multi-system workflows, because that requires deep understanding of YOUR specific systems, processes, and edge cases.
Nexus is a solution: platform plus Forward Deployed Engineers. FDEs embed with your team from day one. They help identify the highest-impact use cases (not guessing based on templates). They design agents for your specific workflows and systems (not generic off-the-shelf). They handle the integration complexity across your CRM, ERP, ticketing systems, and custom APIs. They run pilots without requiring internal resources. And they provide change management guidance, because the hardest part of deploying AI that completes real work isn't the technology. It's getting people to trust the agent with decisions that used to be theirs.
This is why Nexus has a 100% POC-to-contract conversion rate. Not because every pilot is easy, but because FDEs are invested in making every pilot deliver measurable value. They stay through production. They optimize ongoing. They're the reason "platform plus service" isn't a marketing phrase at Nexus. It's the delivery model.
Voice-first vs. work-first: different starting points
Cognigy starts from the conversation surface: voice and chat. Its architecture is built around natural language understanding, dialogue management, and telephony integration. Channels are the foundation. This makes sense when the conversation is the primary value.
Nexus starts from the work: systems, data, decisions, actions. Its architecture is built around 4,000+ enterprise integrations, autonomous decision-making, and end-to-end process completion. Channels are deployment surfaces (Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, email, phone, web), but the value comes from what the agent does across backend systems, not just what it says in a conversation.
For enterprises whose processes involve collecting data from a CRM, validating against an ERP, routing through a ticketing system, and communicating via multiple channels, the starting point matters. Conversational AI starts at the channel and tries to reach the systems. Nexus starts at the systems and reaches whatever channel makes sense.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use both Cognigy and Nexus?
Yes. Some enterprises use Cognigy (or NICE CXone) for the conversation layer in the contact center and Nexus for the work behind and beyond those conversations. They solve different parts of the problem: Cognigy handles the 10% (the dialogue), Nexus handles the 90% (the workflow completion across systems). If you have a mature contact center operation and want to extend AI into the actual work, the two can coexist without conflict.
We already invested in Cognigy for our contact center. Does Nexus replace it?
Nexus doesn't replace contact center AI. It extends beyond it. Your Cognigy investment continues handling voice and chat automation in the contact center. Nexus adds autonomous workflow capabilities across sales, operations, compliance, HR, and any other department. The question is whether your AI ambitions stop at the contact center or extend across the enterprise.
How does Nexus handle customer support differently than Cognigy?
Cognigy automates the conversation: the dialogue between customer and virtual agent. That's the 10%. Nexus automates the 90% behind it: validating data against backend systems, checking compatibility, making routing decisions, executing actions across multiple systems, escalating with full context when the agent reaches its guardrails. A multi-billion euro telecom operator deployed both support agents and compliance agents with Nexus, freeing 40% of support capacity while maintaining full regulatory compliance. The agents don't just talk to customers. They collect, validate, decide, execute, and escalate. That's the difference between conversation automation and work completion.
What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why do they matter?
Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) are real Nexus engineers embedded in your organization. Completing work across enterprise systems requires deep understanding of your specific data flows, decision logic, exception cases, and integration landscape. FDEs bring that understanding. They help identify the highest-impact use cases, design agents for your specific workflows, handle integration complexity across your backend systems, and run pilots without requiring your internal resources. This is not a chatbot you configure yourself. It's a partnership where Nexus engineers are invested in making your agents complete real work from day one. FDEs are what makes Nexus a solution, not just software.
How long does deployment take?
Most Nexus enterprise engagements go live within 2-6 weeks, with a Forward Deployed Engineer handling integration and configuration alongside your team. Orange deployed production agents in 4 weeks. Lambda deployed in days. Every engagement starts with a 3-month proof of concept tied to measurable outcomes.
Is Cognigy or Nexus better for European enterprises?
Both have strong European presence and GDPR compliance. Cognigy is headquartered in Germany (now under NICE, headquartered in Israel) with strong European data residency positioning. Nexus is SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, and GDPR compliant, headquartered in Brussels with an office in San Francisco, and has enterprise deployments across multiple European markets, including Orange across multiple European countries and a multi-billion euro European telecom operator. The deciding factor isn't geography. It's whether your challenge is the conversation layer or the work behind it.
How does pricing compare?
Cognigy uses consumption-based pricing that scales with conversation volume, with separate charges for voice, chat, and LLM workloads. Enterprise contracts typically start above $100K per year. Nexus pricing is per-agent and depends on what you're automating: you pay for value delivered, not interactions processed. Orange generates $4M+ yearly revenue from agents that cost a fraction of what scaling headcount or per-interaction pricing would cost. Every engagement starts with a 3-month POC tied to measurable outcomes, so you see the math before committing.
What does the NICE acquisition mean for Cognigy customers?
NICE acquired Cognigy in September 2025 for $955M. Cognigy is now part of the NICE CXone Mpower platform. For existing Cognigy customers, this means deeper integration with the CXone ecosystem, which is a positive if your focus is contact center automation. It also means Cognigy's roadmap is now shaped by NICE's priorities, which are centered on customer experience. If your AI needs extend beyond CX into sales, HR, compliance, and operations, this consolidation makes the scope question even more relevant.
Worth exploring?
If you've automated the conversation but the work behind it is still manual, fragmented, or breaking at the edges, that's the 90% that conversational AI was never designed to reach. Nexus agents complete it. With Forward Deployed Engineers embedded in your team from day one.
Orange automated the full onboarding workflow (not just the onboarding conversation): 50% conversion improvement, $4M+ yearly revenue. A major European telecom freed 40% of support capacity by automating the work behind support, not just the dialogue. Lambda, a $4B+ AI company, chose Nexus over building internally because the opportunity cost of their engineers' time was too high.
Every engagement starts with a 3-month proof of concept tied to specific outcomes. You can exit anytime.
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Every engagement starts with a 3-month proof of concept tied to specific, measurable business outcomes. Forward Deployed Engineers embed with your team from day one.