Unlocking the Future of Customer Experience with Five9 Genius AI and IBM watsonx
June 26, 2025
CX That Moves at the Speed of Expectations
Customer experience is no longer just a differentiator—it’s the battleground where loyalty is earned or lost in seconds. According to the 2025 Business Leaders CX Report, 60% of consumers cite long wait times as their top frustration, yet less than half of business leaders rank it as a critical concern. And while most customers are open to using AI agents, they expect accurate answers, fast resolutions, and seamless handoffs to a human when needed.
At the same time, contact centers are dealing with increased interaction volumes, higher complexity, and growing pressure to deliver ROI—all while keeping agents engaged and operational overhead low. The result is a perfect storm of rising expectations and operational strain.
It’s in this environment that we designed Five9 Genius™ AI, built with IBM watsonx AI technologies, to create a solution purpose-built to help contact center and CX leaders deliver intelligent, scalable, and human-centered experiences.
Smarter service starts with a smarter foundation
We designed Five9 Genius™ AI built with IBM watsonx, IBM’s flagship portfolio of AI products, to help Contact Center and CX leaders tackle one of their toughest challenges: meeting rising customer expectations while managing cost and complexity. Our joint solution addresses this by combining the scalability of the Five9 intelligent CX platform with the enterprise-grade AI capabilities of IBM watsonx.
By embedding IBM Granite, IBM’s flagship family of AI models built for business, into Five9 Genius AI, we’re delivering enterprise-grade generative AI that powers agentic self-service, real-time agent assist, and root cause analytics—all with the transparency, security, and governance enterprises demand. Unlike typical LLMs, Granite models are trained on carefully curated data with industry-leading transparency about the data that went into them, optimized for business use, and built for responsible AI at scale. Granite includes open LLM / foundation models spanning multiple modalities including Code, Language, Time Series and Geospatial. Together, we’re reducing handle times, boosting first call resolution, and transforming the customer experience with quantifiable, real business value through smarter, faster, and more personalized engagement.
Designed for real results, at every touchpoint
What makes this partnership truly impactful is the way it strengthens every layer of the contact center. Watsonx.ai, an enterprise-grade AI developer platform that helps developers build and deploy AI solutions, brings industry-leading Gen AI capabilities into the Five9 Genius AI ecosystem, powering capabilities that help agents, supervisors, and customers alike. We’re leveraging IBM Granite as follows:
Real-time AI assistance and summarization
Call summarization that reduces after-call work
Automatic fact extraction to surface key data mid-call
Suggested next-best actions to improve outcomes
Sentiment analysis to better understand and respond to emotion
These enhancements give agents more time to focus on people—not note-taking— and help supervisors coach with greater clarity.
Bring your own model (BYOM) flexibility
Five9 customers can upload and integrate their own tuned AI models through watsonx.ai’s Custom Foundation Model (BYOM) capabilities. These custom models are hosted within watsonx and accessed via API, providing flexibility for organizations with specific industry or enterprise needs.
Natural language self-service
Additionally, Five9’s native speech-to-text capabilities currently support Watson Speech to Text, further streamlining transcription and analysis workflows across the contact center.
With watsonx embedded into Five9 Genius AI, customers can automate repetitive tasks, increase personalization, and elevate the role of AI in customer engagement—all while maintaining transparency, control, and scalability.
Built to grow with you
The success of Five9 Genius AI with IBM watsonx reflects more than just strong technology—it's a product of strategic alignment. Both platforms were built to scale, adapt, and evolve as customer expectations shift and AI capabilities advance. With enterprise-grade governance, domain-grounded responses, and models optimized for real business use cases, you get AI that’s not only powerful, but practical. Whether you’re taking your first step toward generative AI or deepening your transformation, this integration offers the foundation you need to build trust, personalize at scale, and operate with precision.
With built-in transparency, robust governance, and multi-model flexibility, businesses can deploy AI responsibly and with confidence. It's not about adding complexity—it’s about simplifying CX in all the right ways.
The New CX Starts Here
This is more than a technical integration—it’s a shift in how we think about customer experience. By combining Five9’s deep CX expertise with IBM’s leadership in responsible AI, we’re helping organizations reimagine what service can look like: more connected, more proactive, and more human—even when it’s automated.
The future of CX isn’t coming—it’s already here. And with Five9 Genius AI built with IBM watsonx, it’s within reach.
