The universe of cloud-based contact center providers has been a crowded place for some time. PBXs and ACDs have joined IVRs on the endangered species list as APIs and other connectors abound to support precision routing, interaction management, agent prompting and other elements of Intelligent Assistance. More than a dozen cloud-based platform providers, led by Genesys, NICE-InContact, 8×8, RingCentral and the subject of this post, Five9.

In this post, I discuss how Five9’s approach to supporting its customers and prospects’ efforts to introduce conversational AI differentiates it from the competition.

We last covered Five9 in May 2018, noting that Rowan Trollope, long time ring-master of Collaboration platforms at Cisco, had left the giant IP-router company to join a much smaller, focused business. We called his move “emblematic” of changes afoot that would have ripple effects across the entire “XaaS and “BYOxx” worlds. Fill in the “X” with “Contact Center”, “Communications Platform”, “Experience” or “You-Name it”.

As I explained, “The next big innovation could be the result of R&D efforts at Cisco, Amazon, Google or Microsoft. They may be put into practice at cloud services specialists like Five9, Interactions or Avaya. And it leaves a role for emerging, innovative companies like Accompany to be a source of new services and executive personnel.”

In January 2019 Jonathan Rosenberg joined Rowan at Five9 as Chief Technology Officer and, in very short order, started defining specific steps to offer enterprises a “path to AI”. Jonathan was lead author of the SIP protocol and has a deep knowledge of the application servers that provide the underpinnings of today’s CCaaS and CPaaS offerings. More recently, over the past fifteen years, he has been instrumental in defining how the VoIP-based collaboration platforms at Skype, Microsoft and Cisco employ the elements of so-called “artificial intelligence” – specifically speech processing, analytics and tagging, natural language processing and machine learning – to make employees more productive and customers interactions more efficient.

At its recent Analyst Summit Expect more details were shared under NDA. Suffice it to say that you’ll see the fruits of Five9’s Path to AI development efforts in general availability later this year.

Intelligent Assistance; not AI

It is gratifying to see a number of firms jump on the IA train. Five9 is a noteworthy case in point. As fellow analyst Zeus Karrravala points out in this post (with credit to Dave Michels), Five9 and its cohort are helping to define “agent augmentation”. This is a cut-to-the-chase way of noting that enterprises today will garner the highest return on investment in “Conversational AI” by using the resources that recognize a customer’s intent quickly and accurately to inform or prompt a customer support agent or advisor. This practice is not only inevitable; but it will also become routine.

Routine agent augmentation goes hand in hand with another phenomenon that defines Five9’s Path to AI. Foundational technologies have become commodities. Google, IBM, Amazon and Microsoft, among others, make speech recognition, transcription, text-to-speech, translation and, even natural language understanding available for pennies or even as a freemium offer through “open” APIs or services marketplaces. That makes them fair game or, more accurately, fodder for companies that deploy the Five9’s platform.

Handholding Still Required

In 1996, Esther Dyson’s EDventure Holding’s convened a PC Forum whose theme was “The Future Now: Some Assembly Required”. The World Wide Web was seven years old and the first order concerns of the leading minds in the computing and communications business surrounded the impact of this “network of networks” on existing communications infrastructures and businesses and individuals.

The themes of the conference parallel those that we should be considering now as we look at the applications of “AI” in the enterprise:

• Interoperability and openness: which, to a business, equates to avoiding lock-in to a single vendor while taking advantage of the resources that large companies have transformed into a commodity.
• Playing with toys: which has to do with treating service creation environments and “low-code” or “no-code” tools as the powerful toys that they are. Also refers to gamification of customer support conversations.
• Rebellious toys: which was the most prescient topic because it referred to the presence of malicious bots on the Internet. What happens when an artificial intelligence is not operating on an individual’s behalf.

And there were several others, but you get the idea. The “Path to AI” should feel familiar by now. A significant amount of assembly is required. Yet this is where Five9 is in a good position. Unlike many other CPaaS and CCaaS providers, there are a significant number of employees dedicated to customer support and professional services. As customers demand customer care “bots” and build their use cases, Five9 has defined an approach and its technicians are organized to respond to the demands placed on a solution provider by companies that are stretching the capabilities of their customer care contact centers.

In this context “Agent Augmentation”, by both humans and “artificial intelligence” is a very apt term.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants