Over the past couple of years, many companies have focused on increasing the share of contact center calls AI can handle without human intervention. That measure is starting to look too narrow, since the highest-value, most complex or most sensitive interactions are often the ones customers still want a person to handle. Cloud contact center software provider Five9 Inc. is taking a different approach with what it calls Humantic, a contact center model built around humans and AI agents working together rather than competing for the same calls.

Amit Mathradas (pictured), chief executive officer of Five9, became CEO in February after leading Nintex Global Ltd. and, before that, serving as president and chief operating officer of Avalara Inc. 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, according to Mathradas.

“We at Five9 have a very strong belief that the future world is what we are calling Humantic,” he 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, according to Mathradas. 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, 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. “Ninety-nine percent 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, moving and storage company PODS Enterprises LLC, is on pace to route more than 100,000 calls through Five9’s Voice AI Agents by year’s end, with the company reporting a 44% containment rate that exceeded its target.

“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