Five9 versus AINIRO

Five9 has 2,500 employees, and according to their own website, they're offering to "revolutionize your CX with generative AI". We therefor wanted to put their website chatbot to the test, and created a side by side comparison of their chatbot next to our chatbot. The results might surprise you.

Five9 doesn't have an AI chatbot

Five9's "AI" chatbot, at least the one they've got on their website, is probably not a generative AI chatbot. I have thrown dozens of questions at it, and it seems to be consistently coming back with one of the following 3 answers.

• "You can read more about Five9 at our about page"
• "I am sorry, I didn't understand that"
• "Do you want to speak to a human?"

The question you ask it is almost irrelevant, it always seems to come back with one of the above 3 answers, almost regardless of what you ask it. This is kind of surprising, since they seem to be marketing themselves as "the leader in generative AI" according to their website, and they're "on a mission to revolutionize your CX with generative AI". Below is a screenshot of how they're marketing themselves.

I tested their chatbot side by side with ours. Below are some of the answers it provided to me.

To give you an idea of how real generative AI actually works, you can click the button below to see how our AI chatbot responds to questions such as the above.

• What is AINIRO?

Below is a screenshot of what our AI chatbot came back with just now.

Why do we care?

A couple of months ago we were told by one of our leads the following.

Sorry, we're going to use Five9's AI chatbot

This implies that Five9's marketing is misleading, to the point where clients don't even know what they're buying from Five9. This is more common than you think in large companies. Five9 have probably provided customer service employees to the lead's company for decades. Customer service have been Five9's primary business model since they started in 2001, and for all I know, they might be amazing on these types of services. However, Five9 does not have an AI chatbot - At least not one you can embed on your website to improve customer experience and customer engagement.

We contacted the lead with an offer of a website AI chatbot. Still the lead told us they already have existing similar solutions from Five9, and that they were going to choose Five9 for these types of services. This implies that somebody in Five9 at some point told that guy that they could deliver an embeddable AI chatbot to them, that was based upon generative AI, and that would, and I quote "improve customer experience and engagement".

So basically, Five9 is stealing from us

AI washing

The chairman of the SEC have already started charging companies for Securites Fraud over something the SEC refers to as "AI washing". 36% of Fortune 500 companies have publicly declared themselves to be "an AI company", similarly to how Five9 is doing in their marketing efforts. This is actually a violation of the Securities Fraud act from 1933, and carries a maximum penalty of 25 years of prison for any CEO, and/or C-level executive found guilty.

The reasons for this is because companies are trying to leverage the AI hype to inflate their stock value with lies and deceptions. For a company like Five9, I assume there's also the ulterior motive of trying to use their market muscles to unfairly bully out smaller startups having legitimate AI chatbots because we're a threat to their existing business model. After all, Five9's primary business model is based upon filling a call centre with hundreds of employees, and charging clients money for providing them with customer support. According to their own data they delivered 14 billion minutes of phone conversations last year.

A real AI chatbot, such as our chatbot can decrease manual customer support by 30%. This is official research conducted by IBM and others in the industry. We've seen similar figures ourselves, with for instance Resolve that reduced manual tickets by 30% after going into production with our AI chatbot.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand how generative AI is a threat to Five9's existing business model

Wrapping up

Companies like Five9 needs to stop their AI washing initiatives - Basically, adapt or die. Because the way they are marketing themselves today might be a federal crime, punishable by up to 25 years of prison time for their CEO.

In addition, companies like Five9 are also hurting smaller startups, such as ours, with their lies and deceptive marketing rubbish. There are easily 10,000 AI chatbots out there that are better than Five9, but these companies are victimised by Five9 using link bombing techniques, SERP pollution, and black hat SEO tactics, with the sole aim of taking us out of business - Only because we have a better product than them - And there is something fundamentally wrong with that.

Psst, I will at-reply Five9 on both LinkedIn and Facebook when I share this. I doubt they will answer me though ...