Verint

It's 9:14 a.m. and a million people are about to call customer service at once.

Somewhere right now a contact center is lighting up. Hold music. Agents toggling between twelve screens. A supervisor refreshing a dashboard that updates too slowly to matter. This is the daily theater of modern customer service, and it has a problem: expectations keep rising while the budget to staff them does not.

Verint sells the unglamorous fix. Headquartered in Melville, New York, it builds an open platform of AI-powered bots that sit on top of the systems a company already runs - reading interactions, automating the repetitive steps, and handing agents a copilot instead of a coffee. More than 80 of the Fortune 100 use it. Roughly 10,000 organizations in 175+ countries do too. The product is invisible to the caller, which is exactly the point.

There is a gap between what customers want and what companies can afford. Verint named it.

Call it the "customer capacity gap": demand for great service grows faster than the headcount budget. The traditional answers were to hire more people (expensive), outsource (risky), or tell customers to wait (suicidal). Verint's answer was less dramatic and more useful - automate the specific, boring steps inside each workflow, and let humans handle the parts that actually need a human.

The insight sounds obvious now. In a market full of vendors promising a heroic "rip and replace," promising the opposite - keep your systems, just add intelligence - was almost contrarian. Naturally, that turned out to be the part customers cared about.

Born inside another company, Verint spent two decades deciding what it wanted to be.

Verint's origin is corporate, not garage. It was incorporated in 1994 as a unit of Comverse Technology, took the name Verint in 2002, and went public on NASDAQ that May under the ticker VRNT. For years it carried two businesses under one roof: customer engagement and cyber intelligence. Useful, but unfocused.

The defining bet came in 2021, when Verint spun off its cyber-intelligence arm as Cognyte and became a pure-play customer engagement company. Under longtime CEO and chairman Dan Bodner, the freshly focused Verint placed its chips on one idea: AI bots as the unit of automation. Each bot does one job - a slice of a workflow - and the platform stitches them together. By 2025, AI-related annual recurring revenue had grown to roughly half of total ARR.

One open platform. Fifty-plus bots. Each doing exactly one annoying thing.

The Verint Open Platform runs on two engines - the Verint Data Hub, which pools behavioral and interaction data, and Verint Da Vinci AI, which acts on it. On top sit the bots: each designed to fully or partially automate a single step of a manual CX workflow, from quality monitoring to coaching to live agent assistance. You can add one without betting the whole contact center on it.

Close the gap between what customers expect and what companies can afford.

Strip away the acronyms and Verint's mission is plain: let organizations deliver better service without hiring an army to do it. The bots are a means; the outcome - what Verint relentlessly calls "AI business outcomes" - is the product it actually sells. Lower handle times. Higher self-service rates. More capacity from the same team.

In August 2025, that mission got a new owner. Software investor Thoma Bravo agreed to acquire Verint for about $2 billion - $20.50 a share, an 18% premium - and to combine it with Calabrio, pairing Verint's enterprise strength with Calabrio's mid-market reach. CEO Dan Bodner called the deal "a strong validation of our CX Automation strategy." Validation, of course, is what every founder says about a buyout. This one came with a check.

Back to 9:14 a.m. The phones are still ringing. Fewer of them reach a human.

The contact center that lit up at the top of this page hasn't gone quiet - demand never does. What changed is who answers. A self-service assistant resolves the simple ask in one of forty languages. A copilot drafts the response before the agent finishes reading. A quality bot scores the call no supervisor had time to review. The hold music plays for fewer people.

That is the bet Verint made and is now scaling under private ownership: that the future of customer service isn't more people on phones, it's software doing the work around them. Skeptics can argue about how much of "AI" is real. The harder thing to argue with is the contract - and Verint has 10,000 of them.