Two weeks ago, Five9 hosted its annual Industry Analyst Summit in Cabo. The event theme, “putting the new CX into action,” underscores Five9’s longstanding focus on execution.
Amid executive transitions, including Mike Burkland’s move to Chairman, the event gave Five9’s new leadership a platform to articulate its strategic direction.
Mike laid out Five9’s dual-engine growth strategy. While AI dominates attention, the CCaaS opportunity remains substantial, with fewer than 40% of contact centers transitioned to the cloud. Five9 positions AI as a second growth engine layered atop the CCaaS market opportunity. Leveraging its early move with the 2020 Inference acquisition, Five9 surpassed $100M ARR for AI last quarter. Mike noted that maintaining this trajectory alone could scale AI to $700M, representing 20% of company revenues within five years. He outlined a more ambitious aspiration: reaching $5B by leveraging these two growth engines.
The event also gave Chief Product Officer Ajay Awatramani, who joined the company a year ago, a platform to share his vision for AI. Since arriving, Ajay has strengthened the product organization with AI expertise and fresh perspectives, recruiting talent from Cresta, Freshworks, Genesys, Google, Observe, and Yellow. He outlined the core tenets of Five9’s Agentic CX platform: a human-in-the-loop system bringing together AI and humans, with specifics remaining under NDA. His team brought the vision to life through an end-to-end prescription refill journey. The demos showcased AI that spots trends, uncovers root causes, recommends preemptive actions, optimizes routing based on customer profile, intent, and sentiment, and leverages agentic quality management to elevate both experience and operational performance.
Matthew Tuckness, Five9’s new CRO, and President Andy Dignan discussed the go-to-market model they have been overhauling. Five9 is known for its white-glove deployment approach, built on teams of seasoned veterans recognized for their deep expertise and trustworthiness. The company has also established a CX Advisory practice to guide customers through digital transformation and AI adoption. During a customer panel, analysts were able to interact directly while employees stepped out of the room. Customers consistently cited Five9’s reliability and depth of expertise, noting improved reliability over prior solutions, whether on-premises or in the cloud.
Another panel featuring Mike Peres from Google, Ryan Swanger from TTEC Digital, and Timothy McDougal from Deloitte delivered an insightful discussion on the state of the CX market and AI adoption. Customer uncertainty is at an all-time high regarding how AI providers differ and what is truly ready for deployment, even as enterprises increasingly demand AI that delivers tangible outcomes. The panelists stressed that customers need more than technology and are seeking partners who can deploy AI effectively, provide forward-thinking guidance, and support increasingly ambitious AI goals. All three companies, each a highly influential CX participant, praised Five9 for its partner-centric approach.
The summit highlighted a company in rapid evolution, simultaneously pursuing the cloud contact center opportunity and building a differentiated AI capability. Backed by delivery teams with deep CX expertise and a culture rooted in transparency and customer-centricity, Five9 is well-positioned to make AI its second growth engine.