Five9 has revealed that the company has surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue run rate.
Announced during the organization’s Q2 2024 earnings call, CEO and Chairman Mike Burland confirmed that Enterprise subscriptions were the key driver behind the milestone, having grown 21 percent year-over-year.
Within the Enterprise sector, Barry Zwarenstein, Chief Financial Officer, singled out Five9’s AI and automation portfolio as the “fastest growing category,” with it currently accounting for eight percent of all Enterprise subscription revenue.
In particular, the performance of Five9’s AI Agent Assist received praise for its impressive 111% year-over-year growth, making it the second biggest AI product after RVA.
In discussing the strong performance of Five9’s AI and automation solutions, Mike Burkland reiterated the company’s vision of “harnessing the power of AI to elevate CX.”
“Today, consumers will tell you that their interactions with many brands are disjointed and not satisfactory. This is often due to customer interactions being spread across many platforms and touch points, each of which is siloed.
This has driven our ambition to orchestrate every interaction between a consumer and a brand through Five9’s Intelligence CX platform powered by Five9 Genius AI.
The Intelligence platform enhances customer experiences by personalizing interactions with contextual data.
By integrating AI across their platform, Mike Burkland believes Five9 is able to provide practical solutions that deliver real business value, as well as helping customers to use AI responsibly.
The CEO and Chairman also highlighted the company’s engine-agnostic approach, which allows clients to benefit from rapid AI advancements.
Use Cases
As well as the performance statistics of the company’s AI sector and solutions, Mike Burkland also discussed three specific real-life examples of Five9 customers who successfully adopted the tech.
The first example was a healthcare company that has been a Five9 customer for a long time and operates with 1,000 agents, supplying medical test kits.
Faced with rising call volumes, they implemented Five9’s Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA), which allowed patients to schedule pickups or deliveries three times faster without waiting in queue for an agent.
This led to a 10% reduction in overall agent handle time for the company, as well as a 20% increase in subscription revenue for Five9
The second example involves a financial institution experiencing growing call volumes.
After integrating Five9’s IVA, they achieved an 8% reduction in agent talk time and enhanced customer satisfaction through faster response times.
This improvement resulted in a 30% increase in Five9’s total subscription revenue from the client.
The third example features a Fortune 500 medical device company.
With the deployment of Five9’s IVA, they reduced overall call duration by 16%, which helped lower costs.
This efficiency boost contributed to a 30% increase in Five9’s subscription revenue from this customer.
Sales Challenges
Despite reaching the $1bn annual revenue run rate milestone and the AI successes, Five9 still experienced a “challenging bookings quarter.”
President Dan Burkland confirmed that the company failed to land any “mega deals” during the quarter, and also secured less $1 million ARR deals than anticipated.
Apparently in response to this underwhelming quarter, the organization has decided to promote an “accomplished 10-year Five9 veteran” to the position of EVP of Sales, replacing Dan Burkland who had taken over the duties of the role when the former EVP left four years ago.
When pushed on whether this was a “knee-jerk” reaction to one poor quarter, Dan Burkland was unequivocal in his response, stating that it was “absolutely not a knee-jerk reaction in any way, shape, or form.”
It’s really just adding more expertise and more focus into the sales execution. And that’s going to be for the long haul.
“We had an EVP of sales leave about four years ago. And I said, I’m not going to replace them. I’ll just roll up my sleeves and do it all.
“And we’ve now come to a point where we’re a $1 billion company on a run rate basis and really feel like we need to add to the leadership team.”
Fresh Capabilities
Away from the Intelligence CX platform, Five9’s executives also discussed one of the company’s newest solutions, AI Knowledge.
Powered by generative AI (GenAI), the latest addition to the Genius AI toolkit addresses a major CX challenge by helping agents provide faster responses to inquiries.
Five9 asserts that this solution offers answers based on contextual data from an organization’s extensive knowledge sources, rather than just FAQs and knowledge bases.
Suitable for both live and virtual agents, the AI Knowledge tool analyzes customer inquiries in real-time to deliver the most relevant answers for each interaction.
Another topic discussed on the call was Five9’s planned acquisition of Acqueon.
The deal will integrate Acqueon’s AI-driven, omnichannel proactive customer engagement features into Five9’s Intelligent CX Platform.
This acquisition is part of Five9’s strategy to expand its AI capabilities and market presence.
Five9 views the acquisition as key to its goal of becoming the “orchestration engine” for all interactions throughout the customer journey, encompassing marketing, e-commerce, sales, and customer service.
According to Five9, Acqueon is highly skilled in delivering top-tier proactive outbound omnichannel customer engagement across diverse customer experience scenarios.
