Barry Cooper on AI in education
From The AI Conundrum: Navigating Technology While Preserving Critical Thinking With Barry Cooper · · Teach Middle East
“I think the big ticket item at the moment is AI. I think that's the big ticket item. That's what I'm focusing on. It's day one with the team. I'm going to be talking about it next week. Day one with the students the week after that. I'm going to be talking about it with them about how we use it, how we understand it, how we see it both in the short, medium, and the long term. And how to do two things I think. One maximize the benefit for them and two avoid them falling into the traps that I think it is laying for us and it's laying for educators.”
On , Barry Cooper, President CX Division at NICE Ltd, spoke about AI in education during The AI Conundrum: Navigating Technology While Preserving Critical Thinking With Barry Cooper on Teach Middle East.
About Barry Cooper
In August 2025, Cooper announced that NICE had entered a definitive agreement to acquire Cognigy for $955 million, pending regulatory approvals. He stated that the acquisition reinforces NICE's identity as a "CX AI company" rather than a CCaaS provider Mend. Cooper described the deal as bringing together NICE's platform with Cognigy's conversational AI to "blur the lines between attended and unattended" customer experience. Earlier in 2025, at NICE Interactions, Cooper discussed the company's strategy of embedding AI across its CXone platform, including agentic capabilities that he said require guardrails to prevent unauthorized actions. He also highlighted new partnerships with AWS, ServiceNow, and Snowflake, and said NICE would continue to pursue both organic development and "tech tuck-ins" to execute its vision. Cooper has consistently emphasized that NICE's Enlighten AI is differentiated by being trained on CX-specific data rather than generic internet data, which he argued makes it more aligned with an organization's goals and best agents. He noted that NICE has built "a thousand different models" from billions of anonymized interactions that come out of the box. In 2024, Cooper discussed NICE's acquisition of LiveVox, describing it as the market leader in proactive outbound communication, and said the company's M&A engine remains active. He also outlined a shift in NICE's pricing model from user-based to interaction-based, defining a session as any interaction between an organization and a consumer within 24 hours regardless of whether it involves AI or a human.