Barry Cooper on University admissions
From The AI Conundrum: Navigating Technology While Preserving Critical Thinking With Barry Cooper · · Teach Middle East
“I think the problem is the universities require them to have these grades to come and take courses that will then ask them to do what? Learn more information to spit it back out. So where does it end? And I and I kind of think we're being the the the the tail is wagging the dog as they always say. What what can be done? And I don't know, we can't answer that. But I've just I just thought of it when you talked about people who would just get the thing to spit out the answer. I think I think I mean it's I think there's a there's a there's something that you can play with as as school leaders and this is something I'd tell the team as well is what we need to start with is great teaching. We have to be absolutely brilliant teachers. grades will take care of themselves.”
On , Barry Cooper, President CX Division at NICE Ltd, spoke about University admissions 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.