Reclaiming the Customer Experience with Five9’s CTO Jonathan Rosenberg [Video]

Episode Summary:
In this episode, Maribel Lopez speaks with Five9’s CTO and Head of AI Jonathan Rosenberg on AI’s potential in the Customer Experience (CX) and Contact Center as a Service (CcaaS) space. Currently, customers are often unsatisfied with chatbot communication services at contact centers. However, AI’s increasing generative capabilities show potential for exciting future applications.

Key Themes:
Maribel and Jonathan begin by discussing the current state of AI in CcaaS, and how many customers are unsatisfied with their experiences with automated calls. Contact centers have long attempted to automate aspects of the CX experience, first with DTMF and later with directed dialogue.
Unlike these technologies, generative AI has seen widespread adoption. Consumer familiarity with artificial intelligence will lead to them understanding how to interact with generative AI over the phone. Jonathan and Maribel also discuss their predictions for how AI will impact jobs in at contact centers. Jonathan believes that jobs will change, but they will not disappear.

Last, Jonathan defines open platforms and explains how their unique features allow for useful CX capabilities. The future of AI in CX depends on how quickly companies eliminate AI hallucinations. Once models overcome this obstacle, Jonathan predicts that AI will see wide adoption in the CX space.

For detailed show notes, navigate using the time stamps below:

[1:29] Maribel introduces Jonathan Rosenberg, the CTO and Head of AI at Five9. Five9 is a provider of cloud contact center software recently expanding its AI portfolio to better address the CX landscape.

[2:41] As an industry, the customer experience with contact centers, especially when working with a chatbot, is a negative experience. That is a signal to the industry that it needs to improve. Customers find the service impersonal.

[4:28] Is AI making contact centers better? Jonathan thinks that the future is promising. In the beginning, there were DTMF menus for self-service, which customers were not satisfied with. This was followed by directed dialogue, which people also disliked.

[5:45] One large piece of evidence for positive consumer experiences with these technologies is the number of active users on ChatGPT. Generative chatbots have shown extreme promise and widespread adoption.

[7:40] Maribel notes that once a broad populace gets used to using something in their personal life, organizations can more easily adopt it on the CX side.

[8:30] Will AI result in the elimination of jobs in contact centers? According to Jonathan, it will not eliminate jobs – it will change them. The daily life of a worker at a contact center will change, perhaps resembling something closer to a sales role.

[12:46] With AI, you are only as good as your data. Jonathan explains that new models need an incomprehensible amount of data to train. With this type of training, people have to prompt AI to use it for personalized purposes. The data that you feed to the Gen AI in these cases is contextual data. In a CX case, this allows customers to give the model large amounts of information and receive a personalized answer. For contact centers, the model would be fed transcripts from previous calls and information about the caller, allowing it to give contextualized responses.

[17:24] Maribel discusses the predictive opportunities available through the modern age of AI. Companies have been interested in these implementations in the past, but have not been able to deliver on them.

[19:35] What is an open platform? Jonathan gives two dimensions of open platforms: they are engine agnostic and. Engine agnosticism means that it is possible to utilize multiple AI models, swapping one for another as needed.

[21:55] The second dimension is AI APIs that allow third parties to build on AI applications. At Five9, this has led to a vendor ecosystem that provides consumers with competitive choices.

[23:58] When does the new CX become a reality? Jonathan believes there is still work to do. The largest factor for the advancement of this technology is handling hallucination.

[26:30] When things are 10x better than the products before them, brands get on board. CX AI could be a case of rapid improvement and adoption in this vein.

Follow Jonathan Rosenberg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanrosenberg1/

Follow Jonathan Rosenberg on X/Twitter: https://x.com/jdrosen2

Read Jonathan Rosenberg’s articles in the Forbes Technology Council: https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/people/jonathanrosenberg/

Read the Broken Earth series: https://www.amazon.com/Broken-Earth-Trilogy-Season-Obelisk/dp/031652719X