November 6, 2026 • 6 min read
Five9 to Acquire Level AI for $325 Million, Drive Toward Its “Humantic CX” Vision
Director of Content & Market Research
November 6, 2026
Five9 has agreed to acquire Level AI for $325 million.
Level AI’s portfolio includes contact center quality assurance (QA), coaching, Agent Assist, virtual agent, and conversational intelligence solutions.
In offering these solutions, the company has faced significant competition, including from CCaaS providers such as Five9 itself.
Despite this, Level AI is growing fast, earning $20 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). That’s up 50% year-over-year (YoY), with similar growth expected over the next 12 months.
Now, Level AI will join Five9 and bolster the company’s offerings across the aforementioned areas.
Yet, capability is one thing. Amit Mathradas, CEO of Five9, identified two other core motivators for snapping up Level AI.
1. Level AI Will Accelerate Five9’s Drive Toward Humantic CX
With its Humantic CX vision, Five9 aims to help contact centers automate the right things, not everything.
Ultimately, that means benchmarking AI and human agent performance across specific scenarios and orchestrating work between them, where each performs best.
Notably, Level AI offers a unified framework for monitoring the hybrid-human AI workforce, which will likely help Five9 accelerate toward this vision.
2. Level AI Opens Up the On-Premise Contact Center Market
Five9 wants a slice of the on-premise contact center pie.
Increasingly, legacy contact centers are looking to layer AI onto their existing environments. Recognizing the effort involved in migrating to the cloud, alongside the urgency of adopting AI, many are prioritizing rapid AI deployments over an immediate cloud transformation.
Level AI offers Five9 a way to support this approach, enabling it to engage with more contact centers on their AI strategies and build relationships that could, over time, create opportunities for broader migrations.
“Level AI adds another starting point, addressing a customer's immediate AI needs while its existing contact center stays in place. That expands the customers we serve today.”
More Reasons Why Five9 Acquired Level AI
Mathradas also hinted at additional motivators behind the acquisition.
First, Level AI already integrates closely with Five9’s CCaaS solution, giving Five9 direct experience with the technology in customer environments and a foundation to build on.
Second, its team has significant AI know-how. Indeed, Level AI built its own tech stack, down to the GPU layer, controlling everything in-house. That includes specialized language models, designed for CX work.
Over time, if frontier model providers move away from a subsidized growth model, chase profitability, and jack up their pricing, this could enable significant cost efficiency that Five9 may pass on to its customers.
Lastly, Level AI may also add significant feature depth to Five9’s existing portfolio...
Level AI Capabilities That Should Excite Five9 Customers
Five9 already offers its own versions of the solutions it is acquiring from Level AI. However, when serving enterprise customers, it often relies on partners to provide specialized QA capabilities.
The acquisition of Level AI will enable the contact center giant to bring this advanced QA capability in-house.
"Level AI doesn't just do contact center QA. It does the hard part: turning QA insights into action."
To Stone's point, the vendor offers AI workers that help to not only improve QA insights, but leverage those insights in new ways.
Overall, the platform offers 11 AI Workers, alongside a studio that lets customers build their own. Three standout examples include:
- A Screen Recording Evaluation Worker that evaluates agent screen activity during conversations, helping contact centers track workarounds that slow down performance and better track how reps use AI support tools.
- A VoC Insights Worker that enriches QA evaluations with additional insights, so contact centers can track outcomes not only by what was said and done on the call, but what the customer did next.
- A Coaching Plan Worker that leverages that QA intelligence to auto-generate personalized coaching plans, delivered in the language likely to resonate with that rep. These plans may include AI customer roleplays, so agents can “redo” conversations they previously struggled with in a safe environment and learn.
Such capabilities could add real depth to Five9’s overall Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) suite and - again - further its push toward Humantic CX.
Outside of WEM, there are also several other capabilities Five9 could lift.
For instance, Level AI’s Agent Assist application allows reps to rewind through calls, see how their actions impacted sentiment, and coach themselves. That’s a unique feature.
More broadly, the acquisition creates opportunities for Five9 to further optimize human agent performance, particularly in the interactions where the human touch remains essential.
However, it’s key to stress that this acquisition will see Level AI continue to operate as a standalone solution, as well as part of Five9’s broader offering, as noted in a company blog.
“This move will expand Five9 offerings with Level AI as a standalone solution for enterprises on Five9 and other CX platforms, in the cloud and on-prem, and as part of the Five9 Genius CX Platform.”
More News from Five9’s Earnings
Five9 recorded another quarter of double-digit growth, with Q3 revenue hitting $323 million, up 13% YoY.
Mostly that’s driven by AI, with AI revenue rising by 91%. However, its core CCaaS business also increased by 8%.
After sharing these numbers during its earnings call, Five9’s executive team mostly fended questions about its acquisition.
However, the topic of personal agents also came up.
More customers are expected to use personal agents to engage with organizations moving forward, and analysts wanted to understand how Five9 plans to help contact centers.
In his response, Mathradas teased: “For agent-to-agent interactions, we're targeting a solution early next year.”
Eyes peeled, everyone!
A Week of CX M&A
In the days before the Five9-Level AI acquisition, two more customer experience stalwarts snapped up AI specialists.
First, Salesforce snapped up Cresta, which has expanded from its heritage as a conversational intelligence provider to deliver a similar portfolio to Level AI.
Second, Dialpad announced a merger with Ada, the conversational AI provider.
In a crowded and competitive CX landscape, consolidation was perhaps inevitable. However, this latest wave of acquisitions may signal that vendors are gaining greater clarity on their strategic direction and how they intend to position themselves for the future.
After all, this is about more than a technological revolution. Organizations are also restructuring their businesses and rethinking how key functions, including the contact center, should operate in an AI-driven world.
As organizations make sense of this and recognize where the new opportunities lie, further acquisitions are likely.