ConnectHubFive9 buys Level AI for about $325 million
The contact-centre company adds AI quality assurance and agent assist that also works on rival platforms.
The deal
Five9, a cloud contact-centre provider, has agreed to buy Level AI for about $325 million in cash, paid from its own balance sheet. It announced the deal alongside its third-quarter results and expects it to close by the end of 2026, subject to the usual conditions.
The two companies are not strangers. They have partnered since 2022, and Level AI's products already plug into Five9's platform.
What Level AI does
Level AI builds software that analyses customer conversations across phone and digital channels. Its products cover conversation analytics, real-time help for human agents, quality management and automating parts of conversations.
According to Five9, Level AI had about $20 million of annual recurring revenue at the end of October, growing about 50% a year. Five9 expects that pace to continue over the next 12 months, before counting any sales to its own customers.
Selling beyond its own platform
The notable part of the plan is that Five9 will keep selling Level AI on its own, to companies that use a rival contact-centre platform or older on-premises systems. Those customers will not have to move to Five9 first.
The idea is to meet businesses that want AI now but are not ready to replace their contact-centre system, and win that bigger contract later. For existing Five9 customers, Level AI will be tied more closely into call routing, so conversation data can feed coaching, quality checks and decisions about which conversations to automate.
Five9's chief executive, Amit Mathradas, argued that the winners will be the companies that automate the right conversations, not the ones that automate the most.
The cost to Five9
Five9 reported third-quarter revenue of $323.3 million, up 13% from $285.8 million a year earlier, with subscription revenue up 16%. Net income fell to $14.5 million from $18 million.
The company expects the deal to reduce its adjusted EBITDA margin by about one percentage point in 2027. It expects Level AI to break even within about six months and to lift margins from 2028.
What analysts say
Michael Fauscette of Arion Research sees the deal as a faster route into AI applications, since many large companies want AI quality management and agent assist without a platform migration. The risk, he said, is execution: Level AI has to stay credible on competitors' platforms while being folded into Five9's own Genius CX product.
Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research expects the next phase to be won by vendors that own the full customer-service stack, and suggested this could make Five9 an acquisition target itself.
The deal is part of a wider buying spree. NiCE paid about $955 million for conversational AI company Cognigy in 2025, and Salesforce announced it would buy voice AI company Cresta on November 2.
Why it matters for your business
Customer service is where AI agents pay back fastest, because conversations are frequent, measurable and often repetitive. Large platforms are now paying hundreds of millions of dollars to own that capability.
Five9's own plan makes a useful point: you don't need to replace your contact-centre system to get the benefit. AI that reads conversations, scores quality and helps agents can sit on top of what you already run.
Smaller teams can do the same at a fraction of the cost. We connect agents to the help desk and CRM you already use, starting with the conversations that are most common and lowest risk.
What to do next
- Pull your top 20 support conversation types and how many of each you get a month
- Pick the most common, lowest-risk type as the first one to automate
- Start AI quality scoring on a sample of conversations before automating any of them
