Five9 builds Humantic contact centers instead of full automation
SiliconANGLE Ryan Stevens
Five9 says contact centers shouldn’t go fully automated. It wants AI to handle the routine stuff and humans to keep the calls that actually matter.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Ryan Stevens — read the original for the full story.
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Five9 is pushing a different idea for customer service software: not fewer people, but better division of labor between people and AI. The company calls it “Humantic,” and the pitch is blunt. Some calls are too sensitive, too complex or too valuable to hand off to a machine, no matter how good the bot sounds.
That position cuts against the industry’s recent obsession with automation rates. Amit Mathradas, who became Five9’s CEO in February after running Nintex Global and earlier serving as president and COO of Avalara, said the promise of a fully automated contact center was always overstated. In his view, the real model is a mix of humans and agentic systems working in the same operation, not a contest to see who can take over more calls.
Five9’s framework draws a hard line around three cases: complexity, value and vulnerability. High-value customers, bereavement-related calls and tricky financial decisions stay with a person. Password resets and balance checks, by contrast, can go to AI. That’s the practical split Five9 is betting on, and it fits with the company’s broader open-platform approach rather than forcing customers into a closed replacement stack.
Mathradas pointed to research Five9 has done showing a wide perception gap. Ninety-nine percent of business practitioners deploying AI say their contact centers have improved, but only 66% of actual users agree. More than half of those users say the problem is simple: they want a human and can’t get one. That frustration helps explain why Five9 has opened its AI Agent Connect program to third-party voice AI vendors.
The company is also pointing to real customer usage. PODS, the moving and storage company, is on pace to send more than 100,000 calls through Five9’s Voice AI Agents by the end of the year and says it has reached a 44% containment rate above target. Five9’s next focus, Mathradas said, is orchestration — getting different systems of record to work together instead of treating AI as a stand-alone stunt.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
The market keeps trying to sell automation as a finish line, and that’s usually where the nonsense starts. Five9 sounds more sane: let AI do the repetitive work, keep humans for the calls where trust matters, and stop pretending customers enjoy arguing with a bot about a dead relative or a bank balance. The industry has spent enough time mistaking denial for innovation.
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