Five9 Completes Acquisition of Inference Solutions, the Market Leading Intelligent Virtual Agent Platform

We are excited to announce that Five9 has completed the acquisition of Inference Solutions, the market leading provider of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) as of November 18, 2020.

The comedian Ronny Chieng recently posted a hilarious video satirizing the new culture of customer expectation. He sharply colors how relatively recent innovations, such as same-day-delivery, no longer make the grade. We want everything right now!

The underlying truth of Chieng’s message is something we experience daily at Five9. In response to the explosive growth of ecommerce and customer expectations for instant gratification, we see the contact center quickly becoming the front door for business. While this trend has been made poignant by the demands of COVID-19, turning the contact center into a differentiated source of loyalty, revenue, and profitability is at the forefront of the digital transformation agenda.

Five9 has worked with thousands of customers across the globe on their digital transformation, and we’ve found success can hinge on introducing automation to optimize agent effectiveness and efficiency. To point, labor spend in the contact center is massive, estimated at over $210B annually. Done right, bringing automation to bear not only immediately reduces and improves the effectiveness of that spend, but also enables what customers are asking for – resolution right now!

At Five9, we are focused on delivering the industry’s most modern cloud portfolio for contact center automation. Over the last year alone, we have added new market leading offers for Agent Assistance, Workflow Automation, and Workforce Optimization. Five9’s acquisition of Inference is the latest, exciting step in the execution of this strategy.

Inference’s platform brings the power of advanced IVA-driven automation to companies of every size, technology which was previously only available to the world’s largest organizations. With Inference, no coding is required to configure and manage multi-lingual, omnichannel IVAs that utilize leading-edge artificial intelligence. As a result, within a matter of days, customers can successfully offload many tasks to virtual agents at a fraction of the cost. Allowing human agents to focus on higher value add activities.

While Five9 and Inference already work together out-of-the-box, we will be deeply integrating our user experiences and data insights. At the same time, we’ll also be working with our complimentary distribution and technology partners to create more customer value.

We’re thrilled to welcome the Inference team to Five9 and we look forward to sharing more details on our technology and commercial integration in the future.