From Digital Signage to Mission-critical Digital Engagement: How Uniguest Is Scaling Intelligent Customer Experiences

Matt Goche, CEO, Uniguest, in conversation with Nitin Naik, Associate Partner & Global Practice Area Leader, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Frost & Sullivan

Download this Transformational Growth Leadership Discussion with Matt Goche

Digital signage and connected screen experiences are becoming increasingly embedded in the workflows of organizations across healthcare, hospitality, financial services, sports, education, and other industries. What was once viewed as a discretionary technology investment is increasingly becoming a business-critical layer for communicating with customers, patients, guests, employees, and fans.

Uniguest is responding to this evolution by expanding beyond standalone digital signage toward a more integrated digital engagement platform. The company is connecting screens, content, enterprise systems, data, and workflows while investing in vertical-specific capabilities, AI, integrations, and global expansion. Its strategy combines organic growth with acquisitions, using customer feedback and proven demand to guide where the company invests.

In this Transformational Growth Leadership discussion, Nitin Naik, Associate Partner & Global Practice Area Leader, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Frost & Sullivan, speaks with Matt Goche, CEO of Uniguest, about the evolution of digital engagement, the shift toward mission-critical screen infrastructure, platform integration, vertical specialization, AI-enabled innovation, global expansion, acquisitions, and the culture required to scale while keeping customers at the center.

“Change is inevitable. The pace seems to be increasing, but while that change certainly creates uncertainty, it also creates incredible opportunities.”

— Matt Goche, CEO, Uniguest

From Optional Screens to Mission-critical Infrastructure

Nitin Naik: Let’s start with the bigger picture. You have been in this space for a long time. What are some of the biggest shifts you are seeing in digital engagement today, and how are they changing what customers expect from providers like Uniguest?

Matt Goche: There are several, but I would start with the fact that screens have become mission critical and business critical. They have moved from being somewhat optional components of a workflow to becoming something that businesses increasingly cannot operate without.

Take healthcare, for example. If a patient is in a room and the television or screen experience is not working properly, that can affect the overall experience. The same principle applies across other industries. At a stadium, screens are fundamental to the fan experience. In hospitality, they help communicate with guests. Across different verticals, the screen has become much more integral to the customer workflow.

That shift is important for us because we have always focused on high uptime, security, compliance, and the requirements of sophisticated customers. As expectations have increased across the industry, those capabilities have become even more important.

The second major shift is toward integrated platforms and ecosystems. We still see customers managing content through many disconnected solutions. Increasingly, they want those systems to work together so that the right information can reach the right person at the right time.

The third is obviously AI. We are seeing more opportunities to use AI within our products, but also across our development, support, operations, and other functions. It is becoming an important part of how we operate and how we think about the future.

Building an Integrated Platform Around the Customer

Nitin Naik: And that brings me to integration. If customers are increasingly looking for everything to work together, how has that changed the way you are thinking about the product itself?

Matt Goche: We have made integration a very deliberate part of our product strategy. About 24 months ago, we created a dedicated part of our R&D organization focused specifically on integrations. We have a product manager whose responsibility is integrations, supported by a Scrum team focused on making our product more tightly connected with other solutions.

Today, we are integrated with a couple hundred different solutions. Some are competitors in certain situations, but most are other technology vendors or data repositories that provide information our customers need.

We would love to be the one vendor providing everything around screens and content, but we also recognize that we need to do what is in the best interest of our customers. They already have other tools, products, and vendors, and our job is to work with those systems to deliver the right information at the right time for the right user. That has become a critical part of our growth.

Designing for the Complexity of Vertical Markets

Nitin Naik: You have this common platform underneath, but the last mile can look very different in a hospital, a hotel, or a stadium. How do you make sure you really understand what each of those customer’s needs?

Matt Goche: It starts with a very sophisticated requirements-gathering process. Our customer advisory boards are a major part of that. We have advisory boards across different verticals, as well as broader end-user forums where we bring customers together across industries and regions to understand what is working, what is not working, and where they need the product to go.

The vertical advisory boards give us particularly valuable information. For example, with our hotel advisory board, we hear directly from senior leaders at hotel brands and management companies about what they need.

We also have our commercial team gathering requirements, our support organization regularly talking to customers, and our product management team bringing all those data points together. The product team then has to balance immediate customer requirements with longer-term investments. It is really about blending short-term customer needs with long-term product direction.

In terms of where we see opportunities, our platform can support content management, screen management, and content distribution across essentially every industry. We operate in more than 150 countries and across a broad range of verticals.

Historically, we have been particularly successful with customers that have sophisticated requirements around security, compliance, and the complexity of what they want to do with their screens. That includes large banks, healthcare systems, global hotel brands, and major stadiums.

At the same time, those requirements are moving further down the customer base. Security and the need to maximize the value of screens are becoming relevant to smaller businesses as well.

Using Proof Points to Guide Expansion

Nitin Naik: That’s interesting because you are getting all this feedback directly from customers. How does that then feed into the bigger growth decisions when you decide to build something yourself versus when you say, “We should go and acquire this capability”?

Matt Goche: Both are absolutely key. Since I joined Uniguest, we have acquired 16 businesses, while also seeing strong organic growth, particularly in our subscription licenses and recurring revenue.

One example is healthcare. We began evaluating healthcare several years ago and initially built some success organically. We won a number of hospitals in the United States and a smaller number in Europe. Once we had proven that we understood the customers, buyers, buying decisions, and economics, we made an acquisition in 2023 of P-Care in the United States. That became a jumping-off point for expanding more broadly in the US. We have since expanded into Europe as well with Hub IPS, our healthcare solution, and have already had a number of wins there.

Our approach is essentially to build proof points before making significant investments. When we are considering entering a new space or launching a new product, we want enough evidence that we understand the opportunity and have a high degree of confidence that we can be successful. We do not want to spend heavily and go all in before we have that conviction.

What Makes an Acquisition Strategically Valuable?

Nitin Naik: And once you have decided that an area is worth pursuing, what makes you look at a particular company and say, “This is someone we should bring into the Uniguest ecosystem”?

Matt Goche: There are four key things.

First, we identify the vertical and region we want to pursue. We want to establish that we have already been successful in that space and that there is a reasonable opportunity to generate a return on invested capital. Then, when we evaluate businesses, one important consideration is unique intellectual property that we can embed into our core product. We do not necessarily want the acquired business to operate separately forever. We want to bring that capability into the core platform so it can benefit the broader Uniguest ecosystem.

Second is brand presence. We look for acquisitions that can stabilize or expand our presence within a particular vertical. An acquisition may bring another group of customers and give us a stronger reference base from which to scale.

Third is regional expansion. When I joined Uniguest, approximately 99.8% of our revenue was US-based. Today, about two-thirds is from North America and one-third from the rest of the world. Acquisitions have helped us establish footholds in different regions, including London, Paris, Oslo, Dubai, and Singapore.

And fourth is culture fit. That is harder to put a precise measurement around. When you acquire a business, everyone may initially be aligned, but one month, one year, or several years later, circumstances change. Competition changes. Customer needs change. Things happen in the world. You need people who can solve problems together and deal with uncertainty together. When you have that, one plus one can become much more than two.

Combining Global Scale with Local Depth

Nitin Naik: You mentioned the shift from being almost entirely US-based to having a much more global business. What have you learned along the way about balancing that global scale with what customers actually need locally?

Matt Goche: If you look at an RFP from a banking customer in New York versus one from a stadium customer in Dubai, you will find that 80-85% of the requirements are essentially the same across digital signage, IPTV, and enterprise video.

We believe our core capabilities are very strong at that level. We have language support, local resources for installation and professional services, creative services, and 24/7/365 support across the world. But we also recognize that there is a last 15% that is highly specific to a particular vertical or region.

Healthcare is a good example. Electronic medical record integrations can differ by geography. Television content can be funded differently. Broadcast and satellite content can be encrypted differently. Requirements around casting and over-the-air content can vary.

So, we need to be very focused on the verticals that are important to us and build the depth required to deliver a complete solution. That is why we have product managers focused on specific market needs and commercial teams structured around regional and vertical requirements. We believe that combination of global scale and local expertise gives us the ability to move quickly while still getting very specific about what a customer needs.

AI as a Tool for Speed, Scale, and Better Customer Outcomes

Nitin Naik: We can’t really have this conversation without talking about AI. You have touched on it a few times already, but how are you actually using it inside Uniguest today and where do you think it could have the biggest impact?

Matt Goche: I view AI quite simply as a tool. Like many tools that have been introduced in the past, we need to leverage it to our best advantage. The difference is that this particular tool is impacting virtually every part of the business. We look at it across three areas:

The first is development. Our development teams are leveraging AI extensively, and it is increasing our pace and velocity at a level we have not seen before. Initially, we saw incremental improvements—10%, 20%. Now we are seeing multiplier effects on how quickly we can release products and how we can work on multiple releases at the same time. We are also using more than one AI model for different features, so we are seeing benefits across the broader AI landscape.

The second area is what I would call the back office—go-to-market, marketing, customer support, and operations. We have embraced AI there as well. One example is customer support, where AI can help customers solve issues more quickly, including automated self-healing in the field and giving customers the information they need to resolve problems themselves.

The third area is the product itself. This is probably the most exciting and also the most rapidly evolving because customers are discovering new ways to use AI. We are seeing applications where AI helps people find connections to individuals and activities, as well as applications in enterprise video where AI can help verify that someone has watched content through automatically generated tests. So, there are many individual use cases emerging. Long term, our product team is fully immersed in understanding how AI can directly improve the customer experience.

Ultimately, it is a tool that can make things better, faster, and cheaper in many areas, and it is core to our strategy moving forward.

Moving From Screens to Connected Customer Journeys

Nitin Naik: That’s an important distinction because AI isn’t really the outcome; it’s what AI enables the customer to achieve that matters. When you are talking to customers today, what are they actually asking you to help them accomplish?

Matt Goche: It varies significantly across our customer base. We have more than 25,000 customers across many verticals, so there is no single answer. But increasingly, customers recognize that screens can become part of the broader journey of their end users.

Healthcare provides a good example. In a fully developed hospital environment, our software may manage the screen in a patient’s room, smart whiteboards, door cards, and digital signs in common areas. Those systems then need to connect to electronic medical records, nurse rounding tools, cafeteria ordering, television systems, learning management systems, pharmacies, and other applications. They also need to meet security and compliance requirements such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and HITRUST (Health Information Trust Alliance). The objective is to provide the right information at the right time, while using automated triggers and AI where appropriate to improve the experience. At the same time, we have to operate in the physical world. We are dealing with screens, networks, media players, hardware, audio, security parameters, firewalls, and supply chain considerations. So, it is an interesting combination: we are improving workflows in the virtual environment while ensuring the technology works reliably in a very dynamic physical environment.

Scaling Without Losing the Culture

Nitin Naik: You have grown the business significantly, you have made a number of acquisitions, and you are now operating across very different markets. How do you keep the culture intact through all of that change?

Matt Goche: Products change. Offerings change. Deal economics change. But what makes great companies is the people building, selling, and managing those tools.

When I joined Uniguest, we had fewer than 100 employees. We have since grown five or six times in terms of employee count and expanded around the world. We are not all sitting in one office anymore, so maintaining alignment around our business goals is critical.

A few years ago, we introduced a new set of core values called EPIC.

E is Empowerment. We expect employees to do the right thing and give them the authority to make decisions. We do not need 15 sign-offs for basic decisions. We trust people to do what is right for our customers.

P is People. Our solutions are complex, so we need diverse ideas, talents, and perspectives from different locations. We want to identify the best people and empower them.

I is Innovation. We are a software company and want to build the best software we can. Innovation needs to come from formal product processes, but also from smart people looking for ways to make things better for customers and their end users.

And C is Customer Focus. As companies grow, functions can sometimes become several degrees removed from the customer. We continually ask ourselves: How are we delighting the customer? How is this business process helping create a better customer outcome?

Those EPIC values have served us well. They are designed to be enduring, while still allowing us to evolve as the business changes.

The Heart Behind the Technology

Nitin Naik: I like that idea of the mind and the heart coming together. If you step back from everything we have discussed—from the technology and AI to the acquisitions and global expansion—what’s the one thing you want customers and partners to really take away from the Uniguest journey?

Matt Goche: We are certainly going to use the mind—logic, technology, AI, processes, customer advisory boards, and everything we can—to build the best solutions.

But the heart is equally important. I think we do our best work with customers when they viscerally feel that we want them to be successful. If they have an issue or an outage, it hurts us as much as it hurts them. We genuinely feel that their success is our success.

We are in a fight with them. We are there to solve problems and, ideally, work together to continue innovating and evolving the digital engagement industry. More broadly, change is inevitable. The pace of change seems to be increasing, particularly with AI. Change creates uncertainty, but it also creates incredible opportunities.

The more the industry can embrace that change, the more opportunities we have to improve business effectiveness and, in our space, improve people’s lives. That is what we are focused on doing.

The Future of Digital Engagement Is About the Entire Experience

Uniguest’s evolution reflects a broader shift in how digital engagement technology is being used across organizations. Screens are increasingly becoming embedded within critical workflows rather than operating as standalone communication tools. As customers connect digital signage, IPTV, enterprise video, data, business systems, and AI-enabled capabilities, the value increasingly comes from how these technologies work together.

Matt Goche’s perspective also highlights the importance of combining scale with depth. Uniguest is building a common technology foundation that can serve customers globally while developing the vertical and regional capabilities required for specific environments. Its approach to acquisitions follows a similar model, using proof points to identify attractive spaces, then bringing intellectual property, customer relationships, regional presence, and talent into the broader organization.

At the center of this evolution is customer success. Whether through AI-enabled development, integrated workflows, customer advisory boards, vertical specialization, or the company’s EPIC values, Uniguest’s strategy repeatedly returns to one principle: technology needs to create a better outcome for the end user.

As Matt Goche puts it, change is inevitable, but it also creates opportunities. For Uniguest, the opportunity lies in turning that change into more connected, intelligent, and mission-critical digital experiences across the environments where people live, work, travel, receive care, and engage.

Matt Goche is the Chief Executive Officer of Uniguest, a global provider of connected technology and digital engagement solutions. He joined Uniguest in 2016 as Chief Operating Officer and subsequently served as President before becoming CEO in 2023. During his tenure, Uniguest has expanded its employee base, entered new markets, broadened its product portfolio, and grown through acquisitions. Before joining Uniguest, Matt served as Vice President of Global Security Services at Sungard Availability Services, where he built a cybersecurity business supporting more than 600 enterprise clients. Earlier in his career, he served as an officer in the U.S. Air Force and as a consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Penn State University and a master’s degree in information technology from the University of Maryland.

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Appendix: Shaping the Future of Digital Engagement

As digital engagement becomes increasingly embedded in critical customer workflows, organizations are moving beyond standalone screens toward integrated platforms that connect content, data, applications, and physical environments. At the same time, AI, platform consolidation, security, and vertical-specific requirements are reshaping how organizations deliver connected experiences at scale.

To support leaders navigating this transformation, Frost & Sullivan provides strategic intelligence across digital signage, digital experience platforms, AI-enabled technologies, and connected digital ecosystems, including:

📌 Frost Radar™: Digital Signage Platforms, 2026

📌 Frost Radar™: Digital Experience Platforms, 2026