The Five9 AI Agents launch news marked a bright spot for the week in CX news. It’s not an overstatement to say that the contact center experience is broken; in far too many instances, contact centers are built around what makes sense for brands rather than serving customers — and that has long needed to change.
The expansion of the Five9 Genius AI Suite with the launch of gen AI- powered Five9 AI Agents, could well signal a significant shift in how businesses approach customer service and I am here for it.
Five9 AI Agents: Focused on Delivering Bottom-Line Business Value
The holy grail every organization is chasing today is centered on delivering bottom-line business value with AI. Five9, by optimizing every customer touchpoint with its AI-powered contact center solutions, appears to be working to help customers do just that.
The contact-center-as-a-service provider has expanded its Five9 Genius AI suite with its Five9 AI Agents, new intelligent virtual agents that leverage generative AI and natural language processing to create more human-like conversations. This development comes at a crucial time, as recent research shows 56% of U.S. and U.K. customers are frustrated by traditional self-service chatbots — and with good reason, they’re awful.
Five9 AI Agents are gen AI-powered and designed to work as an integral part of the Five9 Genius AI Suite, joining Five9’s AI Knowledge, Agent Assist, and Gen AI studio as a full suite of scalable, self-service offerings.
Five9 AI Agents aren’t yet another set of bots, rather they are intelligent and able to provide personalized, contextual information and responses to customer inquiries and designed to work seamlessly along human contact center agents in a collaborative manner.
Genuis AI Suite: How it Works
Five9 announced the Genius AI Suite in August of this year. What I like most about it is that it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution but rather an end-to-end solution designed to help companies create their own custom AI roadmaps, optimizing CX operations in a manner perfectly suited to their individual needs.
The Five9 Genius AI Suite is a flywheel solution designed to deliver best-in-class customer experiences powered by intelligent AI that is continuously improving. Here’s a look at that flywheel:
Image source: Five9
Although fairly self-explanatory, the process looks like this:
Listen. The first step of the process is for the platform to listen, capturing engagement data and helping deliver a deeper understanding of the customer.
Analyze. The second step of the process is the intelligent AI identifying trends and insights within the data and providing actionable recommendations.
Tailor. The next step in the process is tailoring the solution to individual customer needs, building customized AI models using contextual data and knowledge, while also establishing guardrails and leaning into responsible AI.
Apply. The last step of the Five9 Genuis AI process is using the knowledge and insights gained from the first three steps and leveraging a complete set of AI tools to activate and deliver both automated and assisted experiences across all customer touchpoints.
In a nutshell, the goal of Five9 with this Genius AI Suite is to make every interaction intelligent, highly personalized and, most importantly, delivering satisfying, dare I say even ‘enjoyable’ customer experiences along the way.
Five9 AI Agents: Bridging the Gap Between Chatbots and Humans
Five9’s AI Agents are clearly designed to bridge the gap between chatbots, which are loathed by most customers, and humans, or human-like experiences, and this is an evolution of the contact center that is much needed.
In a recent conversation with Jonathan Rosenberg, Five9’s CTO and head of AI, I had the opportunity to dive into this topic in more detail, as we discussed how generative AI is poised to bridge the gap between customer expectations and reality. “As an industry, we hope, and I believe that we’re finally at a place where we have the technology that’s going to allow us to bridge together the customer expectations with the reality of the CX experience,” Rosenberg explained.
You can watch or listen to our full conversation here —
With Five9’s new AI Agents, we are there — bridging that gap. What I find particularly impressive about Five9’s new AI Agents is their ability to balance flexibility and control, which sets Five9 apart from competitors. Organizations can fine-tune the amount of generative AI and traditional pre-defined AI used in conversations, addressing one of the biggest challenges in current chatbot implementations. As Rosenberg noted during our discussion, “It’s not that chatbots themselves are fundamentally the problem, it’s that today’s chatbots don’t work well.”
The new offering allows for agents’ responses to be scripted when needed or flexible depending on the customer’s needs. This is particularly important given that many existing chatbots rely on limited knowledge bases and scripted responses, making them unsuitable for handling complex or dynamic requests. Five9’s approach using descriptive design significantly reduces the complexity and cost of enabling effective customer self-service.
Context and Trust are Key when Using AI Agents
One of the most impressive features of the Five9 AI Agents is their ability to understand and utilize context. For instance, when a customer queries about loyalty program status, the system can provide responses tailored to their specific mileage balance. This level of personalization has been a long-standing goal in customer service that’s finally becoming achievable through generative AI.
As I mentioned earlier, contextual intelligence is an important part of the Five9 AI Agents offering, and the agents can access and use data specific to customers in order to deliver the most personalized interactions possible, delivering efficient and meaningful customer experiences.
The system also includes automatic summarization of customer interactions across both voice and digital channels, addressing one of the most frustrating aspects of current contact center experiences – having to repeat information to multiple agents. As Rosenberg emphasized in our conversation, “In order for you not to do it, there have to be great notes about your interactions with the contact center… Generative AI is allowing us to do that.”
Trust is also a critical part of this equation. Five9’s careful approach to AI implementation is evident in its trust-level controls. Companies can adjust the autonomy level from “No Trust” to “High Trust,” using Five9’s “dial-of-trust” framework, allowing for a range of conversations from pre-scripted to complex language constructs. This granular control helps prevent AI hallucinations while still enabling sophisticated customer interactions, but equally as important, it lets organizations establish a baseline for AI autonomy based on regulatory and compliance requirements and their own internal comfort levels. This is especially important for highly regulated industries, like financial services and healthcare. The ability to leverage gen AI’s capabilities while at the same time maintaining the required control levels is sure to be attractive to customers.
Looking Ahead
The integration of the Five9 AI Agent solution with the broader Five9 Genius AI Suite is not only innovative, it creates a comprehensive ecosystem for customer service. This integration — which creates a comprehensive intelligence layer that can not only handle internal support needs like summarizing customer interactions across channels, but also customer-facing interactions, is a strategic move. More importantly, it’s crucial for delivering the kind of seamless, personalized experience that today’s customers expect.
The technology will be available in beta in the first quarter of 2025, as the company engages in real-world testing and refinement before a broader rollout. Given the importance of trust and retaining the ability to control any application that is customer-facing, and also acknowledging that we are still in the early days of AI-powered contact center solutions, I like Five9’s careful, measured approach here. And I’m guessing that will go a long way toward putting customers at ease.
All in all, the Five9 Genius AI Suite as a whole represents a significant step forward in contact center evolution and the addition of the Five9 AI Agents is significant. As Rosenberg noted, “We can envision building chatbots that honestly are fantastic. They know everything about you, so you don’t have to repeat anything. You could take the conversation wherever you need it. They can instantly respond, provide you knowledge, information — almost a super agent experience is possible.”
This development marks an important milestone in Five9’s AI journey, which began in 2018 with the launch of the company’s original Genius platform. It also signals a shift toward truly customer-centric service, delivering personalized, contextualized, human-like customer service experiences.
It will be interesting to watch as AI agents begin to gain traction in the industry. AI agents will have to be able to transition seamlessly between generative and scripted responses, adhering to the different trust levels established, and organizations will have to use the right solutions for the right use cases
I’m hopeful that advancements in contact center solutions like what we’re seeing here from Five9 represent a significant step toward resolving the longstanding tension between automation efficiency and customer experience quality in contact centers. If successful, this could set a new standard for how enterprises approach customer service automation, potentially influencing the broader industry’s direction in balancing AI capabilities with human oversight.
The real test will come when organizations begin implementing these AI Agents in production environments, particularly, as I mentioned earlier, in highly regulated industries where the stakes for accurate and compliant customer interactions are highest.
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