Partner Value Solution Engineer

Zoom appoints Andrew Hindmarch as APAC head of channel. Zoom Communications has appointed Andrew Hindmarch as head of channel for Asia Pacific, tasking him with leading the company's partner strategy across the region. Hindmarch will report to Carlos Quaderi, Zoom's head of APAC, and work with distributors, resellers, systems integrators and service providers to expand market reach and partner capabilities. Zoom said the role will also focus on supporting go-to-market efforts for products including ZoomMate, Zoom CX, Zoom Phone and Zoom Events. Zoom linked the appointment to increased interest among APAC organisations in embedding AI into workflows and customer experience programs, and the role partners play in implementing those initiatives. "Customers across APAC are looking at how AI can deliver value across more of their business, from how employees work to how they serve customers," Quaderi said. "Hindmarch brings deep CX expertise and a strong track record of building channel businesses across diverse markets. As demand for Zoom CX and our broader portfolio continues to grow, his experience will be invaluable in helping partners capture new growth opportunities, deliver greater value for customers, and help more organisations turn conversations and insights into action." Hindmarch said he was joining during a period when AI is changing how organisations operate and engage customers. "I'm excited to join Zoom at a time when AI is creating new opportunities for organisations to rethink how work gets done and how they engage with their customers," Hindmarch said. "Having spent much of my career in CX and scaling channel businesses, I've seen the critical role partners play in turning technology into real outcomes for customers. The breadth of Zoom's AI-powered solutions provides us with a strong opportunity to help partners address our customers' needs and grow their businesses across APAC." Hindmarch joins from NiCE, where Zoom said he led the customer experience channel business across APAC and the Middle East as vice president of partner and alliances. He has previously held senior roles at Avaya, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and 3Com, and will be based in Singapore. Zoom said it will continue advancing its channel strategy through its Zoom Up Partner Programme, aimed at providing partners with tools, enablement and support.

NiCE wins four Consumidor Moderno awards, highlighting leadership in Latin America. October 12, 2026 Once again NiCE has won Brazil's Consumidor Moderno (Modern Consumer) awards, which recognize excellence in customer experience (CX) solutions across Latin America. The 2026 awards were judged on three key indicators: customer satisfaction, continuity of use, and third-party recommendations. * Customer Experience Management * Quality Monitoring System * Self-Service Solution * Workforce Engagement Solution NiCE's AI-powered CX platform unifies data from every channel into real-time, actionable insight, helping organizations anticipate demand, reduce customer effort, improve efficiency, and deliver consistent experiences at scale. With NiCE Cognigy AI now part of the platform, conversational and agentic AI work alongside human agents for context-aware, autonomous interactions that bridge digital and human engagement. "Recognition across four categories underscores NiCE's leadership in helping Brazilian enterprises unify every customer interaction across AI and human agents. This achievement reflects the trust its customers place in Nice Ltd. to transform customer service at scale and deliver exceptional experiences every day, said Luiz Camargo, General Manager, CALA, NiCE. The results reflect NiCE's long-term commitment to innovation in CX, its ability to deliver measurable business value, and its leadership in AI-driven customer engagement. With several first-time category wins this year, NiCE's influence across the Latin American CX market continues to grow.

Meta & NiCE back AI agent protocol for customer service. Wed, 7th Oct 2026 (Today) Meta has previewed the Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard for interactions between consumers' AI agents and businesses. NiCE is co-developing the protocol with Meta, Sierra and other industry partners. The proposal outlines how a customer's personal AI agent can find a business, authenticate itself and act on the customer's behalf. It offers an early indication of how companies may need to handle a growing volume of requests initiated by software agents rather than people. According to NiCE, the standard is intended to address a series of operational questions for customer service teams, including how businesses verify which customer an agent represents, what the agent is allowed to do and how those interactions are managed across automated systems and human staff. It also points to a shift in demand patterns. Rather than reducing service volumes, personal agents could increase them by pursuing tasks customers might otherwise abandon, such as repeated follow-up questions, refund requests or booking changes. "Personal AI agents have endless time that consumers don't, and that brings a new era of growth for customer service. Customers' agents can sign in, ask follow-up questions on their behalf and get to resolution faster, which means more demand, more persistence and higher expectations. An open standard is how that demand reaches businesses with trust, and NiCE is proud to shape what comes next alongside Meta and others. Companies that compete every day agreeing on a standard so customers and enterprises both benefit is the industry at its best. Personal agents bring customers to the door, and resolution brings them back," said Scott Russell, Chief Executive Officer, NiCE. How It Works Under the proposed approach, a company would publish information at a known digital address telling personal agents where to sign in and which interfaces they can use. The protocol is designed so an agent can discover that information in a single request before continuing the interaction across application programming interfaces, web pages or conversational channels. NiCE said the model also relies on customer-specific authentication tokens, with access limited according to the business's own rules. That structure is intended to let companies decide which personal agents they will accept, what those agents may do and when a person should take over a case. Philipp Heltewig, Chief AI Officer at NiCE, said the protocol creates a common language between a customer's software agent and a company's systems. "Personal agents already work for consumers, and today a customer's agent and a company's agent share a common language. When a customer's agent arrives with a goal, like a refund or a rebooked flight, the business's AI agent checks who it represents and what it is allowed to do, then works the request to resolution using the systems the business already runs on. When the case needs judgment, a person joins the same conversation with the full context, and every reply says who is responding. That is AI agents and people working as one crew, with clear jobs, shared context and a clean handoff. Enterprises decide which agents they serve, what access those agents get and when a person steps in, and now the conversation turns to what we build with it," said Heltewig. Operational Pressure For contact centre operators and IT teams, the prospect of machine-driven customer requests raises questions not just about access, but also scale. Traditional service models have been built around human behaviour, where delays, drop-offs and limited persistence naturally constrain demand. Personal agents could change that pattern by sending requests at machine speed and continuing interactions without the time limits of a human customer. That would require businesses to think not only about external connections to personal agents, but also about internal routing between AI systems, workflows and staff. Neeraj Verma, Vice President, Agentic AI, NiCE, said the proposed design aims to keep those interactions consistent while preserving business control. "What I like about the Personal Agent Protocol is how much it solves with a simple design. A company publishes one document at a well-known address that lists its sign-in endpoints and interfaces, so an agent finds everything in a single request. Each personal agent gets its own token for each customer, with access scoped to what the company allows, and that same token works across APIs, web pages and conversations, so the experience stays consistent from first request to resolution. Every reply says whether an AI agent or a person is responding, and when a case calls for judgment, a person joins the same conversation with full context. Enterprises keep control throughout: they set which agents they serve, what access those agents get and when a person steps in," said Verma. The initiative comes as businesses across customer service, digital operations and enterprise software examine how personal AI assistants could change online interactions, particularly in sectors where identity, permissions and audit trails are central to the transaction. For companies preparing for that shift, the protocol suggests the challenge will extend beyond opening a technical connection. They will also need systems that can distinguish between customers, agents and staff at each stage of an interaction, while handling a potentially much higher volume of service requests than today.