How NiCE Drives Sustainable AI and Data Centre Efficiency

Israeli-American software company NiCE has released its ESG report, outlining its performance throughout 2024.

A key highlight is an 11% year-on-year decrease in combined Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions intensity, achieved even as the business broadened its footprint across 26 countries.

The tech firm, which delivers AI-powered customer engagement and financial crime prevention platforms to more than 25,000 organisations worldwide, credits this reduction largely to office optimisation and infrastructure upgrades under its hybrid work model.

However, the company’s total absolute emissions rose by 1.8% to 6,581 tonnes of CO₂e.

Scott Russell, who took on the role of CEO in January 2025, acknowledges in the report that NiCE must balance its commitments at this stage of its development.

“We are proud to share our progress on our ESG journey across multiple areas of impact – customers, employees, communities and the environment,” he says.

Can NiCE expand its data centre portfolio sustainably?

Arguably the standout development of 2024 in NiCE’s sustainability push was the migration of its Israeli data center operations to cloud infrastructure.

The transition, which began in 2024 and is slated for completion in 2025, has not been entirely seamless.

Over the year, NiCE’s Scope 3 emissions from data centres reached 783 tonnes of CO₂e, up from 408 tonnes in 2023.

Even so, as its data centre footprint has grown, NiCE has started to place greater demands on suppliers regarding sustainability.

Its two primary data centre partners have each committed to sourcing 100% renewable energy for their operations – an expectation NiCE made clear in awarding contracts.

At the company’s Pune, India office, two of five electrical units were converted to renewable power, lifting the site’s renewable share to 30% and contributing to the facility’s IGBC Platinum Certification.

The AI energy paradox

NiCE is contending with a challenge increasingly common among modern software firms: reconciling investments in AI infrastructure with sustainability commitments.

In 2024, the company allocated a substantial 14% of its US$2.735bn revenue to R&D, with a strong emphasis on Gen AI and agentic AI capabilities across its CXone Mpower and Actimize platforms.

These technologies support monitoring more than five billion financial transactions daily and managing more than 30 million pieces of digital evidence.

Naturally, operations at this scale demand significant computational capacity – and the energy to power and maintain it.

NiCE has responded by deploying energy-efficient coding practices, adopting multi-tenant architecture, and introducing automated shutdowns of development resources during off-hours.

These steps have helped the software firm align with AWS’ Well-Architected Framework, which includes sustainability as a core pillar.

Governance structure and oversight

NiCE established its ESG Steering Committee in 2023 to keep the company on course. The committee met four times in 2024 and was led by CFO Beth Gaspich.

In 2025, the Board of Directors amended the Internal Audit Committee’s charter to include ESG oversight, renaming it the Internal Audit and ESG Committee.

The company also broadened its materiality assessment to add Community Involvement and Giving and Third-Party Risk Management as new material topics, reflecting shifting stakeholder expectations.

NiCE’s standing with ESG rating agencies improved, with MSCI upgrading the company from AA to AAA and EcoVadis increasing its score by eight points to 60, earning a bronze medal.

Targets set ambitious trajectory

Looking ahead, NiCE has set targeted environmental goals for 2025–2027, including a 10% increase in waste recycling rates at major sites, a 10% boost in electric vehicle adoption in Pune and Israel and a 10% rise in cloud spending relative to hardware.

The company aims to maintain 75% employee usage of its LinkedIn Learning platform and to fill at least 33% of roles internally by 2025, rising to 35% by 2027.

Water consumption monitoring now covers 55% of office floor area, up from 37% in 2023, with total consumption reaching 16,639 cubic meters.

Whether these initiatives can offset the energy demands of NiCE’s expanding AI operations remains the central question for its environmental strategy in the years ahead.

"Looking ahead, we will remain focused on making a measurable and lasting impact," Scott says. "Through ethical business practices, inclusive growth, climate-related initiatives and innovation that put people first."