Join executive leaders at the Conversational AI & Intelligent AI Assistants Summit, presented by Five9. During the pandemic, enterprises turned to automation to scale up their operations while freeing customer service reps to handle increasingly challenging workloads. According to Canam Research, 78% of contact centers in the U.S. now intend to deploy AI in the next 3 years. And research from The Harris Poll indicates that 46% of customer interactions are already automated, with the number expected to reach 59% by 2023. The panel touched on how AI assistants can coexist with humans and help them to perform their jobs, while at the same time respecting existing customer service guardrails. "We're talking about a spectrum of technologies," Schebella said of automation broadly.

After the stock market closed today, Five9 announced the acquisition of intelligent virtual agent (IVA) company Inference Solutions. The purchase price is $172 million, $148 million in cash and $24 million when certain bookings targets are met. Inference brings 550 customers, among them several joint Five9 customers -- including Chick-fil-A and Wyndham Hotels. Inference was founded in 2005, spun out from Telstra Research Labs -- think of it as the Australian version of Bell Labs. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company has additional offices in Austin, TX and Melbourne, Australia.