>> Hello, and welcome to the special. Keep conversation here in Palo Alto, California John Furrier, Co-Host of the Cube. We're here with Jonathan Rosenberg, CTO chief technology officer and head of AI for Five9. Jonathan. Great. Great to see you. Thanks for coming in. >> Thanks. My pleasure to be here. >> So you've had a stellar career? Certainly. Technical career going way back to Lucent Technologies. Now here at Five9, Cisco along the way. You've been a really technical guru. You've seen the movie before. This's happening. Every wave of innovation, multiple ways you've been on. Now you're on the next wave, which is cloud AI, CTO Five9. Rapidly growing company. Yes, it is. What attracted you to five? >> Yeah, Great question. There's actually a lot of things that brought me to Five9. I think probably the most important thing is that I've got this belief, and I'm very motivated for myself. A least to do technology and innovate and create new things. And this belief that were on the cusp of the next generation of technology in the collaboration industry. And that next generation is going to be powered by artificial intelligence, and one of the ways I sort of talked about this is that if you look at the entire history of collaboration, up til now meetings, telephony, messaging was to figure out, a way to get the bits of data from one person to another person fast enough to have a conversation. That's it. You know, once we got the audio connected, we just moved the audio packets in the video packets and messaging from one place to another. And we didn't actually analyze any of that because we couldn't. We didn't have the technology to do that. But now, with the arrival of artificial intelligence and particular speech recognition, natural language processing, we can apply those technologies to that content and take all this dark data that's been basically thrown away the instant it was received, to process it and do things. And that is going to completely transform every field of collaboration, from meetings to messaging, to telephony. And I believe that so strongly, that is, That's great. That's going to be my next job. I wanna work on that. And it's going to start in the Contact Center because a contact center is the ideal place to do that. It's the tip of the spear for AI in collaboration, >> and it's in a really great area. Disruptive innovation are absolutely so Take us through the impact was one of things I have observed in this industry is you have You know, I don't want to say mainframe clients served to go back to date myself, but there was that wave of client server computer >> mainframes. Cool again. We just called clout. Now, hey, is >> exactly. So you have these structural industry waves take us through the waves of how we got here and what's different now? And why can't the old guard or the older incumbents surviving if you're not out in front that next wave your driftwood. So what? What's What's his ways mean? Why is this important? What has to change to be successful? >> Exactly. So there's been this this whole like you said these waves. So the first wave of telecommunications was like hardware: circuit switching, big iron switches, sitting in telco data centers, you know, And then that era transitioned to software and that was with the arrival voiceover IP and technologies like SIP, and that made it more less expensive. And anyone could do it, and it transformed the industry. The next wave, the third wave were still like halfway through and in some areas, actually, just beginning contact, center was early here, the third wave is cloud, right is now we're moving that software to a totally new delivery vehicle that allows us to deliver innovation and speed. And that wave has now enabled us to start the next wave, which is on ly in its infancy, which is AI right, and the application of machine learning techniques to automate all kinds of aspects of how people communicate in collaborate. >> I think cloud is a great example of Seen a. I, which had been a concept around when I was in computer science. Back in the eighties, there was a guy you know theory, and it's the science of it is not so much change, but computing's available. The data to be analysed for the first time is available. Yeah, you mentioned analyzing the bits writings. There's now a key part. What does it actually mean? Teo. Someone who's has a contact center has a large enterprise. Says, you know what? I got to modernize. How does A I fit them? What is actually going on, >> right? Great question. So a I actually consult lots different problem at the end of the day again, Hey, eyes like this, Let's. It's the biggest buzz word right on. It's in my title. So, like I'm a little guilty, right? >> We'll get a pay raise for, But >> what? It comes down to this, really this Korean machine learning, which is really like a fancy new algorithmic technique for taking a bunch of data and sort of making a decision based on it. So And it turns out, as we've learned that if you have enough data and you can have enough computing and we optimize the algorithms, you could do some amazing things, right? And it's been applied to areas like speech recognition and image recognition and all these kind of things. Self driving cars that are all about decision process is, Do I go left? I go right? Is this Bob? Is this Alice? Did the users say and or did they say or write those air all decision process? Is that these tools economy? What does it mean? The Contact Center? It means everything in the context. And if you look at the conduct center. It's all about decision. Process is, you know, where should this call get routed? What's the right agent to handle the call right now? When the agent gets the call, what kind of things should they be saying? What I do with the call after the call is done, How should the agent use their time? All those things are decision processes and their key to the contact center. So so, aye, aye. And Emily going to transform every aspect of it and, most importantly, analyzing what the person is saying connecting with the customer, allowing the age to >> be more. You know, I think this is really one of the most cutting edge areas of the business. And the technology and throw in CEO was talking about an emotional cognitive recognition around. Yeah, connecting with customers and data certainly is going to be a part of that. But as machine learning continues to get it, Sea legs. Yeah, you seeing kind of two schools of thought? I call it the Berklee School. Hard core mathematics. Throw math at it. And then you've got this other side of a machine learning which is much more learning. Yeah, it's less math. More about adaptive and self learning. One's deterministic one's non deterministic is starting to see these use cases where Yeah, there's a deterministic outcome, right throw machine learning at a great exactly helped humans come curate, create knowledge, create value that you've got a new emerging use case of non deterministic, like machine learning environments where I could be driving my test Look down the road or my company's run the Contact Center. I gotto understand what's gonna happen before it happens. Right? Talkabout this. What's your thoughts on this is This isn't really new, pioneering area. What's your view on >> this? Yeah, so I think it actually straight sort of a key point. I wantto narrow enough from what she said, which is that a lot of these problems still, it's about the combination of man and machine, right? It's that there's things that you know are going to be hard for the machine to predict. So the human in their usage of the product, teaches the machine, and the machine, as it observes, helped the human achieved mastery. And that human part, by the way, is even more important in the conduct centre than anywhere else. At the end of the day, your customer and you call up, you're reaching for human connection. You're calling this. You want to talk, you've got a problem. You need someone to not just give you the answers, but empathize with youto understand you. Right? And if you go back to anything about the best experience you've ever had when you called up for support or get a question answered. He was like it was someone who understood you who's friendly, polite, empathetic, funny. And they knew exactly what they were doing, right? And they solve it for you. So the way I think about that, is that actually the future of the context. Dinner is a combination of human and machine, and the human delivers the heart, and the machine delivers the master. >> And I just noticed your I'm looking at Twitter, right? And you just tweeted this forty minutes to go the future of Contact Center. Nice. A combination of human and machine human delivers heart. The machines lose mastery. I think this is so important because unpacking that words like trust come out True relationship. So you asked about my experiences is when I've gotten what I needed, You know, all ledger, the outcome I wanted. Plus I felt good about right. I trusted it. I trusted the truth. It was. And he's seeing that in media today with fake news. You're seeing it with Digital has kind of almost created, anonymous, non trustworthy its data. There's been no real human. Yeah, packaging. So I think you're I'm hearing you You're on the side of humans and machines, not just machines being the silver bullet. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And again, it goes back to sort of the history of the contact centre has been this desire to, like, just make it cheaper, right? But as the world is changing, and as customer experience is more important than ever before and is now, technology is enabling us to allow agents and human beings to be more effective through this. The symbiotic relationship that we're going to form with each other, like we can actually deliver amazing customer experiences. And that's what really matters. And that idea of trust I want to come back to that word that's like super Central to this entire thing. You know, you have that as a user, you have to trust the brand you have to trust the information you're getting from the agent. You have to trust the product that you're calling them talking about, and that's central to everything that we need to do. In fact, it's a It's a fundamental aspect of our entire business. In fact, if you again think about it for a moment here, we're going to customers who are looking to buy a context, and we're saying, Trust us, we're going to put it in the cloud, We're going to run it, We're going to operate it for you and we're going to deliver a great, highly reliable experience that takes trust to sew one of things that back to your early early question. Why did come two, five, nine? One of the things it has done is build this amazing trust with its customers to its huge, amazing reliability. Up time, a great human process of how we go in work with our customers. It's about building trust in every single >> way. So I want to put in the spot because I know you've seen many ways of innovation. You've seen a lot of different times, but now it's more accelerated. Got cloud computing at a much more accelerated innovation cycle. So as users expect interact with certain kind of environment. Roman talked about this in his interview. CEO Control. So you just want to be served on the channels that they want to be served in. So having a system that they have to go to to get support, They wanted where they are. And so how is the future of the customer interaction? Whether it's support our engagement is going to take place in context to nonlinear discovery, progression, meaning or digging a service themselves in the organic digital space. I honestly want to go to a site per se. How do you see the future evolving around this notion of organic discovery? Talking to their friends, finding things out? Does that impact how Five9 sees the future? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think it gets back to sort of an old idea of Omni channel. I mean, this is something that the context people been talking about for, like forever, like the last ten years, right? And and its original meeting was just this idea. Oh, you know, you can talk to us via chat, or you can send us an e mail or you can send us a text or you could call us right and we'll work with you on any of those, like you said. Actually, what's more interesting is as customers and users moved between those things, and it actually switches from reactive to proactive right where we actually treat those channels as well. Depending on what the situation is, we're going to gather information from all these different data sources, and then we're going toe, find the right way to reach out to you and allow you to reach out to us in the most official. >> So you see a real change in user expectation experience with relative rule contact? >> Yeah, I mean, I mean, the one thing that technology is delivered is a change in user expectations on how things work. And if you look at the way we as human beings communicate with each other, it's dramatically different today than it was really just just a few years ago. >> So, Johnny, let's look under the hood now in terms of the customer environment, because certainly I've seen Legacy after Legacy sisters being deployed. It's almost like cyber security kind of matches the same kind of trend that in your world, which is throw money at something and build it out. So there's a lot of sprawl of solutions out there and trying to solve these problems. How does the customer deal with that? And they're going forward there on this new wave. They want to be modernized, but they got legacy. They had legacy process, legacy, culture. What's the key technical architecture, How you see them deploying this? What's the steps of the patient and her opinion? >> It will surprise you not one drop when I say it's go to the cloud, all right, and there are real reasons for it and by the way, this is going to be going to be talking about this at Enterprise Connect. So, So tune in Enterprise Connect. I'm going to be talking about this. Um, there's a ton of reasons, five huge ones, actually, about why people need to get to the cloud. And one of them is actually one of the ones we've been talking about here, which is a lot of this. Modernization is rooted in artificial intelligence. It turns out you just cannot do artificial intelligence on promise you cannot. So the traditional gear, which used to be installed and operated by legacy vendors like a VIA, you know, they go in, and Genesis, they go in the install a thing and it works just for one customer at a time. The oly way artificial intelligence works is when it gathers data across multiple customers. So multi tendency and artificial intelligence go hand in hand. And so if you want to take any benefit from the stuff that we've been talking about this conversation, the first step is you gotta take your context int the cloud just to begin building and adding your data on the set and then leverage the technologies and they come out >> So data is the central equation And in all this because good data feed's good machine learning good machine learning feeds Great a. I So data is the heart of this, yes. So data making data in the cloud addressable seems to be a key. Thought Your reaction and what are you guys doing with? >> Absolutely, absolutely. And this is, by the way, another reason why I joined five nine, that I've been speculating here. I said, All right, if Date if ya if the future is about a I miss, I said, That's what I want to do in collaboration. You need data to do that. You actually have to work for a company that has a lot of data. So market leadership matters. And if you go look at the contact center and you go look at all the industry and analyst reports like it made it pretty obvious, like who to go to there is like the leader in cloud Conduct. Sonar with with tons of agents and tons of data is Five9 and ah, and so that's That's why you're so building the data aggregating data. That's one of the first things I'm working on here is how do we increase and utilize the data that we've been gathering for years. >> And and a lot of that we've had this conscious with many customs before about Silas Silas. Kill innovation When it comes to data address ability, your thoughts on that and what customs Khun due to start thinking about breaking down those silent >> exactly so In fact, Silas have been a big part of the history of especially on premise systems. Once in fact, Afghan one silo for inbound contacts and are different for outbound. Different departments, by the way, also had their own different comic centers. And then you had other tools that on the other data, if you don't like a separate tool over there for serum and a different tool over there for WFOR debut Fam and something else for Q M. And all these things were like barely integrated together in the cloud that becomes much more natural. Spring these technologies together and the data can begin to flow from the systems in and out of each other. And that means that we have a much greater access to data and correlated data across these different things that allows us to automate all over the place. So it's this positive reinforcement sile cycle that you only get one year when you've gone to the club. >> The question I want to ask you, it's more customers on pretend I'm a customer for second. I won't ask you, Jonathan, what's the core innovation for me to think about and bring to my organization? If I want to go down the modern monitors you. How do you answer that question? What is the core innovation? Stretch it. I should have Marcy moving through the cloud is one beyond that is itjust cloud. Then what else? What, Juanito? Be preaching internally and organizing my culture >> around. Yeah, great questions. So, I mean, I think the cloud is sort of the enabler of many of these different pieces of innovation. Right? So velocity and speed is one of them. And then setting up and adjusting these things used to be super super hard. Ah, you wanted to add agents seats? Oh, my gosh, enough to go binding hardware and racket stack boxes and whatever. So even simple things like reactive nous, right? That's something that's important to talk about is that many of our customers and our businesses are highly seasonal. Right? We've seen like someone showed me a graph. This was like, Oh, my gosh, it was It was a company that was doing ah, telethon. And they said, Here's how many agents they have over this year. It was like two agents, and then it shut up. It's like five hundred agents of phones. Two days exactly. Drop back down. And I'm like, if you think about a business like that, you could never even do that. And so the so cloud is nice, but the way you talk about it, and as an I t buyer of these technologies, you talk your business owners about reacted nous speed, velocity, right? That's what matters to a business and then customer experience. >> You're one of the things that just to kind of end of second, I want to get your thoughts on. I'm gonna bring kind of industry trend. That's I think, might be a way to kind of talk about some of these core problems on data. Most mainstream people look at Facebook and saying, Well, what a debacle. They used my data. These men against me. I'm not in control of my data. You're seeing that weaponization people saying elections were rigged. So weaponizing data for bad is this content, and this context ends right? An infrastructure that's right, >> that's right. >> But there's also the other side, which is, you actually make it for good. So you started thinking about this people starting to realize Wow, I should be thinking about my data and the infrastructure that I have to create a better outcome. That's right, Your thoughts on that as people start to think about II in terms of the business context, right? How did they get to that moment where they can saying, I don't want anyone weaponizing did against me. I want to use it for good. How did the head of the company comes back to >> trust, by the way, right? Is that you know, on and to some degree that's an uphill battle due to some of these debacles that you just talked about. But Contact Center is a different beast of the whole thing. And interestingly, it's an area where there's already been an assumption by users that when they interact with the contact center, that data is sort of used to improve the experience. I mean, every contacts and the first thing I say, by the way, this call may be recorded for training. Um, honoring purses, Captain, that they are right. It's it's already opt in. There's an assumption that that's exactly how that is being used. So it's This is another reason. By the way, what's a contact center is? It was the tip of the spear because it was a place where there was already permission, where the data is exactly the kind of stuff that had already been subject to analysis and Attock customer expectation that that's actually what was happening. The expectation was there they building action, that data what was missing. So now we're filling in the ability to action on that All that data with artificial intelligence >> and final question. What's your vision going forward? A CTO and aye, aye. What's the vision of Five9? What do what do you see? The twenty miles stair for Five9 within consciousness. We just talked about >> it. So? So it's It's about revolution. I'll be honest. Right on. I tell people like, I'm not like an incremental, steady Eddie CTo like I do things because I want to make big changes. And I believe that the context and R is on the cusp of a massive change. And my boss, Rohan said this and this has been actually central to how I'm thinking about this. The Contact Center in the next five years will be totally different than the twenty five years before that. It's a technologist. I say. Wow, five years like that's not very long in terms of softer development. That's what we were going pretty much rewrite our entire stack over the next five years. And show. What should that start to look like? So for me, it's about how do we completely reimagine every single aspect of the context center to revolutionize the experience by merging together, human and machine and totally new >> and the innovation strategies cloud in a cloud and and and data great job and great to have you on pleasure. Great, great conversation. Quick plug for you guys. Going to be a enterprise, connect to Cuba. Lbi. They're covering the event as well. What you going to talk about that? What? Some of the interactions? What will be the hallway conversations? What's your objective? What's your focus >> exactly? So so I'm going to be having my own session. We're going to be talking about the five reasons that you may not think about to goto context on the cloud. I've hinted already. A James of them. I think we're too well. That's you can you know, A. I is clearly central and I'm going to start to talk about the other four. >> Great, great conversation. A lot of change. Massive change happening. Great innovation Stretch. Great mission here at Five9. Great, great mission around. Changing and reimagine. More change the next five years in the past twenty five years. Again cloud computing eyes doing it will be winners. Will be losers will be following it here on the Cube. Jonathan Rosenberg, CTO ahead of AI at Five9. I'm John Furrier with the Cube. Thanks for watching.