Five9 builds Humantic contact centers instead of full automation
Contact centers have spent the past two years trying to maximize a single number, the share of calls AI can handle without a human ever picking up. That framing is starting to look too narrow, since the interactions that matter most — the highest-value, most complex or most sensitive calls — are exactly the ones customers still want a person to handle. The alternative taking shape isn’t man versus machine. It’s what one vendor calls Humantic, a contact center built around humans and AI agents working together rather than competing for the same calls.
Amit Mathradas (pictured), chief executive officer of Five9 Inc., a cloud contact center software provider, became CEO in February after leading Nintex and, before that, serving as president and chief operating officer of Avalara. The shift toward Humantic reflects a market correction, since full automation was never really the goal, even if it looked that way for a while, according to Mathradas.
“We at Five9 have a very strong belief that the future world is what we are calling Humantic,” Mathradas said. “Humantic is the combination of humans and agentic sitting in your contact center. I think there is a misconception that all humans are going away in the contact center. That is not true.”
Mathradas spoke with theCUBE Research’s Bob Laliberte and ZK Research’s Zeus Kerravala at “The AI ROI in Contact Center Summit,” during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed why Five9 is building a Humantic model of customer experience rather than pursuing full automation, and what separates contact center deployments that succeed from those that stall. ( Disclosure below.)*
Why Humantic keeps three kinds of calls in human hands
Five9 draws the line around three kinds of interactions, complexity, value and vulnerability, according to Mathradas. A call involving a company’s highest-value customer, a person navigating a death in the family or a request that requires walking through complex financial options warrants a human, while AI handles the high-volume, low-stakes cases such as password resets and balance checks.
“From the research we have done, we found one stat really amazing,” Mathradas said. “99% of business practitioners who are deploying AI think their contact centers and their serviceability has gotten better. Only 66% of actual users think the contact center has gotten better. More than 50% of them are saying the reason is, I want to access a human and I don’t get that.”
That gap helps explain why Five9 has pursued an open platform strategy rather than pushing customers onto an entirely new stack, an approach reflected in recent moves such as opening the company’s AI Agent Connect program to third-party voice AI vendors. One customer, moving and storage company PODS, is on pace to route more than 100,000 calls through Five9’s Voice AI Agents by year’s end, with the company reporting a 44% containment rate that exceeded its target.
“The next big thing is around how these systems of record all work together to enable the next shift that is coming,” Mathradas said. “Orchestration is the next big layer that a lot of customers should be thinking about, and companies like us are thinking about, in terms of where it needs to go.”
Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of “The AI ROI in Contact Center Summit”:
( Disclosure: Five9 sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Five9 nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)*
Photo: SiliconANGLE
Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE’s Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities.
- 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos , powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more
- 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni — Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network
Are you an AWS customer? Support SiliconANGLE financially by buying your AWS services from our Marketplace portal page and links: https://siliconangle.com/aws-marketplace/
About SiliconANGLE Media
theCUBE AIand theCUBE SuperStudios — with flagship locations in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange — SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology and AI.
Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Our new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.