Barry Cooper on Education metrics
From The AI Conundrum: Navigating Technology While Preserving Critical Thinking With Barry Cooper · · Teach Middle East
“I think the traps they're how do I describe them um cognitive so it's about it's about thinking I think one of the the biggest issues we have as an industry in terms of teaching is um we've been metricized both by you know groups owning schools who are interested in the bottom line by governments who are interested in the statistics to prove that they're better than the people who came before them. So numbers, numbers, numbers, metrics, metrics to metrics. What it what matters to the people who are kind of pulling all these strings at the top is the the things that you can show for what you do. For the people in the classroom, what we're really interested in is does, you know, little Jenny or little Timmy understand more today than they did yesterday.”
On , Barry Cooper, President CX Division at NICE Ltd, spoke about Education metrics 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.