Five9: A look at its revamp and where it's headed

Five9 has revamped its management team, launched products aimed at the intersection of AI and contact center and is now looking to build on recent momentum.

The company has been building momentum since Amit Mathradas took over as CEO officially on Feb. 2. Since taking the reins, Mathradas has installed a new team and focused the company on its AI platform, or Intelligent CX Platform.

Mathradas, who used to be the CEO of Nintex and President and Chief Operating Officer of Avalara before that, has made the following moves. It didn't hurt Mathradas' 2026 that Five9 reported better than expected first quarter earnings April 30.

Here's a look at Five9's moves since Mathradas took over.

• The company named Jay Lee Chief Marketing and Growth officer April 6. Lee's missing is to integrate marketing, operations, data and analytics to accelerate innovation and deliver personalized customer experiences. Lee was the CMO of Icertis and CMO of Avalara before that.
• Five9 reported a solid first quarter with revenue of $305.3 million, up 9% from a year ago, with net income of $18.4 million, or 21 cents a share. Non-GAAP earnings were 62 cents a share. Those results and the guidance for the second quarter were ahead of estimates. On the earnings call, Mathradas laid out Five9's plan.
• The company launched a new release of Voice AI Agents, an agentic self-service platform, and a new architecture to migrate enterprises from scripted bots and legacy interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Voice AI Agents features a harness that enables autonomous workflows and multi-agent orchestration, human-like voice self-service and collaboration tools that link human and digital labor with guardrails. Five9's AI Agent Studio as also revamped to build and improve Voice AI agents.
• Mathradas solidified its team with the appointments of Niranjan Vijayaragavan as Five9's new Chief Technology Officer, Rob Hornish as its new Chief Sales Officer, and Sven Linsmaier as Executive Vice President, Transformation and Strategy. The executives have broad experience at technology vendors and consulting firms.

Shortly after taking over as CEO, Mathradas outlined the priorities. Mathradas described himself as a "strategic operator" that aims to drive scale and growth through an efficient model and allocate capital well.

His focus was on revenue acceleration, operate with discipline and find areas where it needs to double down on whether it be Five9's partnership with Google or platforms like Voice AI Agents. Mathradas also caught up with customers including midsized enterprises and CIOs wrestling with SaaS sprawl and trying to deploy AI.

• Constellation ShortList™ Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)

According to Mathradas, customers were "wanting us to invest both in CCaaS and in the AI play. And when I talk about CCaaS, not the bells and whistles and the functionality, sure, there is some of that. But it's really about how do you integrate and build the connection points so that your CCaaS engine can support all this AI tooling around it to be the 1 plus 1 equals 3. And so that was clear feedback that we got."

Mathradas added that Five9 had the potential to consolidate platforms and enable humans, software, systems and AI work better together.

In April, Five9 delivered its first quarter results, which marked the first full quarter as CEO for Mathradas.

He laid out four priorities for Five9:

• Build a performance-driven culture. "What is clear to me is that Five9 has talented people highly strategic assets and a real desire to win. But winning also requires clarity of mission, high standard urgency and accountability. We need a culture where performance is measured rigorously decisions are made quickly and leadership is held to a high standard. That starts with me. Transparency with the investor community is equally important. Over time, our story has become harder for investors to underwrite than I believe it should be," said Mathradas.
• Optimize operations. "We will operate more efficiently and effectively and build more disciplined foundation for innovation, growth and continued operating leverage over time," he said.
• Stabilize and strengthen the core of the business. "Historically, contact center spending has been overwhelmingly weighted towards labor, creating a difficult trade-off between lowering costs and delivering better experiences. AI is acting as a catalyst to change this. Customers now see the potential to reallocate a portion of their labor spend to fund the combination of AI and enhanced CX," said Mathradas.
• Win in AI empowered customer experiences. "Customers must now consider how AI is incorporated into their CCaaS platform because they want to avoid a sprawling collection of disparate tools that cannot seamlessly coordinate between their human agents," he added.

Where Five9 is headed

On the first quarter earnings call, Mathradas indicated that Five9 will provide a platform that sits at the intersection of AI and CX. Five9's Voice AI Agents are just the start.

"Human-based intelligence and case resolution provides a critical feedback loop for training AI agents, which in turn drives continuous performance improvements of the entire unified platform and further differentiates Five9. This evolution is about more than just efficiency. It's about value capture," said Mathradas. "As AI reduces the customer's traditional labor spend that budget shifts towards technology. We believe this fundamentally expands our monetizable service area. By enabling entirely new use cases and more differentiated customer experiences, our path to success is no longer about simply selling seats."

In other words, Five9 is looking to sell its platform based on capabilities and consumption and the bet is the CX industry as a whole will need to go in that direction.

"We are not assuming success here. We must earn it, and we will measure ourselves not by demos, but by production, adoption and customer outcomes. We are seeing signs that our strategy is working," said Mathradas.

Indeed, Five9 has delivered two consecutive quarters of year-over-year accelerating subscription revenue growth. Now the company has to get AI adoption as an integrated part of its CX platform.

Mathradas said he is continuing to dive into the technology underpinning Five9 and where the company needs to go. His move to hire a new CTO may indicate that changes are ahead.

Directionally, Five9 is looking to go beyond contact center and into AI, orchestration of agents and marrying voice, digital and AI. Mathradas said:

"If you just fast forward even 6 months, even a year, most customers are basically saying, if I have humans that are going to be around with AI, I need it all to be on one platform because there are certain functions I cannot do through point solutions.

Here at Five9, we're talking about humantic, which is the combination of humans and agents doing things that have not been thought about before. And so that is the direction we're going, and that is where I see this all coming together. There's obviously more work to be done, and we continue to build upon this momentum and look to capitalize on the larger market opportunity for AI and CX."

Constellation Research’s point of view

Constellation Research analyst Liz Miller said Mathradas is off to a solid start.

“Five9's leadership change has come at an interesting time, mirroring some of the same exercises in operational focus and rigor that contact centers and engagement leaders globally are also addressing. Contact center and service leaders are feeling the pull of a more focused and strategic AI vision that actively turns away from the big fantastical myths of AI as a magical (and magically simple) solution to their biggest problems. What we see in Mathradas' early moves is an understanding that while the market wants to dream and run, customers want tangible and realistic partners.

The contact center is still in transition, with many leaders still trying to navigate their path to a more efficient foundation in the cloud with a CCaaS partner. While some in the market are making big acquisition moves, Five9 is leaning into partnerships, focused on meeting their customers where they are, and meeting them with a more streamlined offering, vision and approach.”