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Five9 CEO Pushes 'Humantic' Contact Centers as Full Automation Falls Short

Five9 CEO Amit Mathradas says the contact center future will combine humans and AI agents, not replace people entirely. He identified three call types that should stay with humans and cited a customer set to route about 100,000 calls a year through Five9's agentic stack.

AI News Feed · 2026-09-12 05:23

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, according to SiliconANGLE. He took over as Five9's CEO in February after leading Nintex and previously serving as president and chief operating officer of Avalara.

"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 said the shift reflects a market correction. Five9 draws the line around three kinds of interactions, he said: complexity, value and vulnerability. 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. AI handles high-volume, low-stakes cases such as password resets and balance checks.

He cited research showing that 99% of business practitioners deploying AI think their contact centers and serviceability have gotten better, while only 66% of actual users think the contact center has gotten better. More than 50% of those users say the reason is that they want access to a human and do not get it, Mathradas said.

That gap helps explain why Five9 has pursued an open platform strategy rather than pushing customers onto an entirely new stack. The approach is reflected in recent moves such as opening the company's AI Agent Connect program to third-party voice AI vendors. One customer, a 25-year moving and storage company, is on track to route about 100,000 calls a year through Five9's agentic stack by year's end, with containment climbing past 50% and agent turnover falling as routine work shifts to AI, Mathradas said.

"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."