Contact-center-as-a-service provider Five9 Inc. broke the billion-dollar revenue run rate mark today as it posted second-quarter sales of $252.1 million, up 13% from a year ago and surpassing analysts’ expectations. Even more promising as it focused on larger customers, its enterprise subscription revenue grew 21%. Its adjusted profit of 52 cents also beat estimates.
Over the past two decades, the contact center industry has promised capabilities that will significantly improve customer experience. This is important because CX is now the top brand differentiator, with many consumers switching loyalties because of a single bad experience. Though it’s true that the contact center providers have delivered new capabilities such as omnichannel communications, self-service tools and more, consumer satisfaction with contact centers remains low.
Accenture Plc Tuesday announced the launch of the Accenture AI Refinery framework, developed on Nvidia Corp.’s new AI Foundry service. The offering, designed to enable clients to build custom large language models using Llama 3.1 models, enables enterprises to refine and personalize these models with their own data and processes to create domain-specific generative AI solutions.
There has been plenty of hype and ballyhoo around artificial intelligence and networking, but much of the vendor focus has been AI for networking, where AI is used to improve network operations. The other side of the AI coin is networking for AI, where a network must be designed and provisioned to support an AI implementation. Though many businesses will likely deploy AI in the cloud, making the supporting network the problem of the hyperscaler, 58% of respondents to a recent ZK Research/theCube Research study stated they have deployed or will be deploying AI in their own private data center.
Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced an update on its commitment to responsible generative artificial intelligence at its annual Summit in New York. Before the summit, which is being covered by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s livestreaming studio, I spoke with two AWS team members — Diya Wynn, responsible AI lead, and Anubhav Mishra, principal product manager for Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock.