Contact centers have spent the past two years trying to maximize a single number, the share of calls AI can handle without a human ever picking up. That framing is starting to look too narrow, since the interactions that matter most, the highest-value, most complex or most sensitive calls, are exactly the ones customers still want a person to handle. The alternative taking shape isn’t man versus machine. It’s what one vendor calls Humantic, a contact center built around humans and AI agents working the same floor rather than competing for the same calls.

Amit Mathradas (pictured), chief executive officer of Five9 Inc., the cloud contact center software provider, took over the company in February after leading Nintex and, before that, serving as president and chief operating officer of Avalara. The shift toward Humantic reflects a market correction, since full automation was never really the goal even if it looked that way for a while, Mathradas said.

“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 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. They discussed why Five9 is building a Humantic model of customer experience rather than pursuing full automation, and what separates contact center deployments that succeed from those that stall. (* Disclosure below.)

Why Humantic keeps three kinds of calls in human hands

Five9 draws the line around three kinds of interactions, complexity, value and vulnerability, Mathradas said. 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 all warrant a human, while AI handles the high-volume, low-stakes cases such as password resets and balance checks.

“From the research we have done, we found one stat really amazing,” Mathradas said. “99% of business practitioners who are deploying AI think their contact centers and their serviceability has gotten better. Only 66% of actual users think the contact center has gotten better. More than 50% of them are saying the reason is, I want to access a human and I don’t get that.”

That gap helps explain why Five9 has pursued an open platform strategy rather than pushing customers onto an entirely new stack, an approach 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.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of “The AI ROI in Contact Center Summit”:

(* Disclosure: Five9 sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Five9 nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE