April 6, 2026 • 3 min read
Five9 Welcomes Jay Lee as Chief Marketing and Growth Officer
CX Analyst & Thought Leader
April 6, 2026
On April 6, Intelligent CX provider Five9 announced Jay Lee as Chief Marketing and Growth Officer, effective immediately. Lee brings over 20 years of experience to the new position, spanning enterprise technology, consulting, marketing, payments, and financial services. Lee's role unites global marketing and revenue strategies, eliminating silos between how Five9 sells, markets, and supports customers to provide a smoother, more connected experience at every stage.
I’m thrilled to join Five9 at such a pivotal moment. Customer experience, data, and commerce are converging faster than ever, and Five9 is uniquely positioned to lead that transformation. I look forward to working with the team to strengthen our brand further, deepen customer relationships, and drive measurable business impact through innovative, data-driven marketing and GTM strategies.
Lee joins Five9 directly from AI-native contract intelligence company Icertis, where he served as CMO. Previously, Lee served as the CMO of agentic tax and compliance platform Avalara, where his leadership more than doubled revenue from $380 million to over $800 million. Avalara was later acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $8.4 billion.
Lee also served as the Head of Marketing for Business Lending at Paypal and the Chief Marketing + Product Officer at Swift Financial. He holds an MBA in Finance from Columbia and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell.
Jay’s appointment comes at a defining moment for Five9 as we continue to accelerate our leadership in AI-powered customer experience. His ability to connect sales and customer-facing teams with underlying data and analytics to influence how we market is exactly what companies need in this next era of CX. Jay brings a rare combination of strategic marketing vision, creativity, and operational rigor, with a deep understanding of how to translate customer insight into meaningful business outcomes. As we advance our CX vision, where human expertise and AI work seamlessly together, Jay will be instrumental in helping our customers unlock greater value from their customer experience investments.
What This Means For Five9
Lee's appointment continues the significant transition period Five9 has been undergoing since Amit Mathradas took over as CEO on February 2, 2026. Mathradas - who, like Lee, is also an Avalara alum - replaced Mike Burkland, the former Five9 CEO who built Five9 from an 80-person company into a 2,000-person organization, growing annual revenue from $10 million to over $1 billion over the course of two decades.
Lee's appointment emphasizes Mathradas' commitment to operational discipline, partner-led expansion, and implementation support at scale. Five9, previously criticized for being comparatively slow on AI adoption, seems to be quietly rewriting its go-to-market playbook. The pitch is shifting from "look what AI can do" to "here's how we actually help you get this deployed." Five9's January announcement of a Google Cloud Joint Enterprise CX AI Solution and the March launch of the Five9 Fusion partner program further highlight the platform's renewed commitment to partner-led expansion.
Five9 has historically centered its messaging around the contact center. While the contact center isn't going away, enterprise software buying decisions today increasingly rely on IT teams - a vastly different audience than contact center leaders. IT leaders want to understand how a CX platform integrates, how it scales, and what happens when it breaks. If Mathradas is setting the new strategic direction, then Lee's job is to translate that direction to much more technical IT buyers.