Cloud technologies and artificial intelligence are changing the way that call centers are doing business, and Five9, Inc. — a company dedicated to implementing innovation cloud integration and AI within call centers — has claimed growth in leaps and bounds, including a 31-percent revenue growth in the last quarter of 2018. So what is changing in call centers? And how is cloud and AI helping?

Dan Burkland (pictured), president of Five9, spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Enterprise Connect event in Kissimmee, Florida. They discussed call center strategies for cloud and AI and challenges faced within the industry (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Miniman: When I look at the cloud contact centers … you’re growing at a pretty good clip, but you’ve still got lots of headroom there. So talk about that dynamic. We’re past the evangelization phase, and now … cloud, it’s here. It’s still growing massively.

Burkland: And not only is it still here, it’s just the beginning. If you look at the cloud penetration rate to date, we now see that about 10 to 15 percent of companies have moved and transitioned to the cloud for their contact center needs. We see that continuing for a decade or more as we move forward. And some of the drivers for that … the fact that we’re recording 5 million minutes of conversations — and that is valuable, valuable data that we’re sitting on.

When you look at AI … lots of folks around this show are talking about how AI is going to revolutionize and change the way contact centers operate, and we know it’s going to do that. Lots of us are experimenting and building out proofs of concepts in areas like agent assistance. For the first time ever, we can get strong transcription tools that allow us to take speech and convert it into text at a very high rate, and be able to then apply natural language understanding tools to that same text to be able to derive what a customer’s asking for in real time. And, therefore, it takes the responsibility away from the agent and not burden the agent with having to go hunt and search for the solutions — but actually let the system go hunt and search for that while the agent can pay attention and focus on the client.

Martin: In terms of consumer influence, what are some ways in which Five9 can help agents really become empowered decision makers and help the businesses be able to have the content that they can, in real time, distribute through the appropriate channel?

Burkland: With AI coming, it can allow us to very quickly identify the caller, ask them why they’re calling, and through that natural language understanding … then we can derive why they’re calling and not only distribute the call to the right agent, but as I mentioned earlier, be able to actually provide the pertinent data that’ll help them interact with the consumer.

So as consumer expectations continue to rise and they expect to not have to give information more than once, regardless of the channel, it puts the onus on us as technology solution providers to build the solutions that will accomplish just that.

Miniman: I love that you brought up the digital transformation. When we talk to companies, data is so important to what they’re doing; it’s at the center of that digital transformation. Data plays a pretty important role in the contact centers. … When you talk about your field and your engagement with your customers, where does contact center fit into some of those big themes and big transformations?

Burkland: Data is critical, because it’s … really what’s going to allow us to teach the machine learning to be so much more accurate. You’ve got to have millions of conversations in order to do that effectively. The time is now to move to the cloud so that when the applications that we’re doing POCs with and we’re testing the different use cases, when those become relevant and prevalent within production environments, the first step is you need to be in the cloud already. And the next step is start recording your data today. So if you’re recording calls and you’re flushing those calls or you’re not saving them, the key is: That’s valuable data and can create valuable insights to what conversations are happening between your agents and your customers.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Enterprise Connect event. (* Disclosure: Five9, Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Five9 nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE