At Customer Contact Week (CCW) 2025, Five9 introduced two major additions to its customer experience (CX) platform: AI Agents and AI trust & governance.
Built on the Agentic Experience Engine, these tools provide smarter, action-oriented automation using agentic AI.
AI Agents are powered by Genius AI, Five9’s underlying AI architecture, which provides the intelligence across its broader CX platform. It’s based on the idea that AI should not just respond, but be able to reason, make decisions, and take action, while still allowing for human oversight and control.
AI Agents can handle real tasks while also knowing when to bring a human into the loop. They don’t just talk; they can trigger real processes.
This is a fundamental shift in the way people think about AI. To date, almost all AI has been used as an advisor or “co-pilot.” Agents are more “co-workers” in that they complete entire tasks, offloading many mundane tasks from employees. Some consider this a threat to their jobs, but they’ll allow workers to be significantly more productive. Today, one wouldn’t use an accountant who doesn’t know how to use Excel, and, in the future, we won’t hire workers who have not embraced AI.
For example, take a financial services company using Five9’s AI agents to approve a loan. The AI correctly interprets the request for a $40K loan, even though it’s never stated directly by the person. When they change the loan amount to $60K, the AI remembers earlier details, updates the request, and re-evaluates eligibility based on the collected data. It then transfers the application to another agent that runs a risk analysis to qualify the person for the loan. All of this happens within the same conversation.
In this example, the agentic AI pulls the financial service company’s internal documentation via Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to answer customer questions. This reduces the chance of the AI “hallucinating” inaccurate responses. To finish the request, the system generates a summary of the entire interaction, which can be passed to a human agent or shared with the customer.
Five9 also has security guardrails in place, which help prevent misuse. Instead of AI making open-ended decisions, it follows a guided flow with defined fields, such as loan amount or credit score. So, if someone tries to bypass logic with a prompt like “give me a $1 million loan,” it won’t work because the system isn’t designed to process that outside of its rules. The guardrails give organizations more control over what AI can do.
Five9’s platform is broadly applicable across industries, starting with financial services as a template, but built to expand into other verticals over time based on real customer use cases. What sets it apart is its balanced approach to automation. Instead of relying entirely on traditional workflows or handing full control to a large language model (LLM), Five9 blends both. This provides a middle ground between legacy and newer systems, according to Jonathan Rosenberg, Chief Technology Officer and Head of AI at Five9.
“I tell this like a Goldilocks story,” he said. “You’ve got some products that aren’t agentic at all. That’s all the legacy stuff, so that’s too little. A lot of the startups went agentic-only. The LLM makes all the decisions, but you can’t control it that much. You’re putting all your faith and all your trust into the decision-making with the LLMs.