Recently, Five9 reported its second quarter FY24 results. While the quarter was strong, the forward-looking guidance was light, which sent the stock tumbling over 25%. I asked the company about the light outlook, and a spokesperson stated, “We reduced our 2024 revenue guidance by 3.8%, primarily driven by macro headwinds.” While the company cited macro as an issue, its guidance contradicted Five9’s publicly traded peers, which all echoed a more consistent outlook.
To AI or not to AI? That’s the question for many contact center leaders today. AI agents are a double-edged sword in that if deployed with the proper use cases, businesses can benefit significantly with improved brand loyalty, increased sales, and lower operational expenses. If done incorrectly, using AI will create a negative experience and drive customers away. The key is understanding the capabilities, where to deploy, and where not.
The communications artificial intelligence wars continue unabated as every unified communications-as-a-service and contact center-as-a-service vendor loads its products with new capabilities to one-up the competition. Today RingCentral Inc. added several new capabilities to RingCX, its AI-powered contact center solution. The California-based contact center solutions provider has added about 300 features to RingCX in the past quarter, bringing the total to more than 1,300.
Juniper Networks Inc. is focusing on helping customers move artificial intelligence in their networks from vision to reality, and today it laid out its plans at its AI-Native NOW customer event at the New York Stock Exchange. Over the last several years, Juniper has developed strong AI networking products, and interest in AI for networking is extremely high, as engineers need help keeping up with modern networks’ complexity.
There hasn’t been a tech tailwind as strong as artificial intelligence since the early days of the internet. Many companies are vying to be the kingpin in the AI battleground, with Nvidia Corp. taking the early lead. The company has kept that position by taking a systems approach to AI. One of the key differentiators for Nvidia has been NVLink and NVSwitch, which enabled better and faster connectivity between graphic processing units to help with inferencing.