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AI Customer Service Agents Are Closing Tickets Without You
Intercom's Fin, Ada, Forethought, Gupshup, Five9 and Amazon are racing to build support agents that resolve tickets on their own. As the platforms buy up the startups, here is who does what - and where the real money is going.
AI Customer Service Agents Are Eating the Call Center
A pack of well-funded startups - Decagon, Ada, Uniphore, Omilia - plus Amazon, Kore.ai, Capacity and Five9 are teaching software to resolve support tickets end to end. The prize is a customer service market worth hundreds of billions, and the humans who used to answer the phone.
Voice AI Is Quietly Winning the Customer Service War
Salesforce, Replicant, Rasa and Five9 are betting your next support agent won't be human. Here's who's ahead, what actually changed, and why the phone call became the last battleground.
AI Agents Are Quietly Taking Over the Contact Center
Observe.AI, Google, Five9 and Forethought are racing to hand your next support call to software. The prize is a customer-service market worth tens of billions - and the human seat on the other end of the line.
The Eight Platforms Deciding Whether You Reach a Human
Talkdesk, Five9, Salesforce, Zendesk, UJET, Convoso, CloudTalk and Broadvoice all promise to handle your customers. Here is what each one is actually built to do - and which business should pick which.
UJET Bet Its Whole Company on Being Google's Contact Center
The San Francisco startup rebuilt itself around Google Cloud's AI, handed its founder the chairman's chair, and is now selling the search giant's contact center to the small businesses everyone else ignores.
Nobody Loves the Call Center. These Four Are Rebuilding It
Four contact center software makers - the French dialer pioneer Vocalcom, the billion-dollar public company Five9, the private-equity roll-up Sharpen, and the Google-backed newcomer UJET - are betting on very different futures for the support call.
UJET vs Five9 and the Fight for the AI Contact Center
One is a billion-dollar public incumbent, the other a Google-backed challenger a fraction of its size. Both are betting the future of customer service is an AI agent, not a person in a headset.
The Compliance Tax Nobody Reads on the Invoice
Regulated industries buy contact center software differently. A fintech or lender is not comparing feature checklists, it is asking where customer data lives and who is liable when something goes wrong. This story examines the 'compliance tax' that financial services companies pay for cloud contact centers, and how UJET's CRM-first architecture answers it differently than Talkdesk or Five9 by keeping customer data and PII inside the system that already owns it. Capital on Tap, a UK-and-US business credit provider serving 200,000 small businesses, is the published example: after cycling through three CX vendors in two years, it lifted SLA attainment to 92% on UJET.
The Field Guide Every CCaaS Buyer Wishes Existed
A ranked 2026 field guide to the leading AI-first contact center (CCaaS) platforms, scored across five dimensions that actually matter to buyers: AI architecture, mobile capability, CRM and data security, deployment speed, and pricing transparency. The cohort covers UJET, Five9, NICE CXone, Genesys, Talkdesk, Amazon Connect and 8x8 — with an honest look at which platforms were engineered for AI from the ground up versus those retrofitting it onto legacy stacks.
The Best Customer Service Doesn't Sound Like a Call Center
A field report on the quiet revolution in customer service: the shift away from the scripted, hold-music call center toward conversations that sound human. It maps the companies rebuilding support from the ground up - Genesys, NICE CXone, Five9, UJET, Talkdesk, and Bret Taylor's Sierra - and argues that in an age of AI agents, the winners are the ones who make talking to a company feel less like filing a ticket and more like getting help from someone who remembers you.
The Underdog That Refused to Retrofit
UJET is a cloud-native, mobile-first, CRM-native contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) platform positioning itself as the modern 'Experience Center' alternative to legacy giants like Five9, NICE, Talkdesk, and Genesys. Built around enterprise-grade AI, a zero-PII-storage architecture, and two-month deployments, UJET has raised roughly $231M across five rounds at an estimated ~$500M valuation. This story sizes up where the underdog actually stands in a consolidating CCaaS market where every vendor is shouting the same AI promises.
Julie Iskow
Julie Iskow is the President and CEO of Workiva, the cloud platform behind a lot of the world's regulatory, ESG, and financial reporting. A Bay Area engineer who spent her first decade in robotics and automation, she scaled SaaS companies through IPOs and acquisitions before taking over from Workiva's founder in April 2023.
Rowan Trollope
Rowan Trollope is the CEO of Redis, the ubiquitous in-memory data platform powering real-time applications worldwide. A self-taught programmer who started coding on a Commodore 64 at age 11, he brings over 30 years of technology leadership across consumer products, cybersecurity, infrastructure, and collaboration software. Before Redis, he quadrupled revenue at Five9 and spent years at Cisco reinventing its collaboration business. At Redis, he has repositioned the company from a beloved developer caching tool into a critical AI infrastructure layer, launching semantic caching (LangCache), acquiring real-time data platform Decodable, and steering a controversial but successful licensing pivot that he says has produced record growth.