Five9 vs NICE CXone (2026)

Secure tool calling connects AI agents to enterprise systems to perform real-time actions such as authenticating customers, updating records, processing transactions and completing service tasks, which write to a system of record. The Agentic Experience Engine accesses data across systems, and multi-event triggers and business rules fire automation across applications.

A joint solution with Google Cloud connects the Intelligent CX Platform to Gemini Enterprise and Vertex AI, and the platform ships pre-built CRM integrations covering Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Zendesk with screen pop, click-to-dial and activity logging.

Sourcefive9.com/news/news-releases/five9-launches-breakthrough-new-release-voice-ai-agents-power-next-generationread 2026-09-05

Agents reach external systems through the platform's own REST APIs and Studio actions and connect to Salesforce, SharePoint, Zendesk and Confluence among other systems. Virtual Agent Hub connects third-party virtual agent providers including Omilia and Amelia, with their credentials held in the hub. Mpower agents move across systems and trigger actions in front, middle and back office applications, not only in the contact center.

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Five9's Voice AI Agents run on a harness that enables autonomous workflows through coordinated multi-agent orchestration, with specialized agents working together across complex, multi-step journeys instead of one model handling everything.

The Agentic Experience Engine understands intent in real time, accesses data across systems and orchestrates personalized, goal-driven journeys, and the Agentic Voice Switch is a proprietary architecture that unifies speech, reasoning and voice generation natively in Five9's carrier-grade telephony.

Data, knowledge and orchestration are shared across the whole CX platform, and multi-event triggers and business rules sequence work across applications.

Sourcefive9.com/news/news-releases/five9-launches-breakthrough-new-release-voice-ai-agents-power-next-generationread 2026-09-05

Mpower agents are generated in AI Studio from outcome-based no-code prompts and run inside orchestrated workflows spanning front, middle and back office. They move across systems, trigger actions and work alongside humans and other AI agents to complete journeys such as claims processing and refund approval rather than single conversations. Underneath, Studio scripts, routing queues and skills carry deterministic call and case flow, with Virtual Agent Hub arbitrating handoff between bots and live agents.

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Five9 covers voice, digital, chat and social messaging from one platform, and the Agentic Voice Switch is built natively into its own carrier-grade telephony. Work starts when a customer calls or messages, when multi-event triggers and business rules fire automation across applications, and through outbound campaigns and calling lists, with Web2Campaign shown in Five9's developer samples as a route for an external system to push records into a campaign. Voice AI Agents handle the spoken channel end to end and hand off to live agents with context intact.

Sourcefive9.com/products/capabilities/conversational-generative-agentic-airead 2026-09-05

Autopilot runs as a voice virtual agent over the contact center's telephony and as a text virtual agent across chat-based digital channels, with Digital Experience carrying the digital channel set, Studio points of contact routing each channel to a script, and the proactive agent reaching customers over voice, SMS, WhatsApp, email and chat. Work also arrives from routing queues and digital skills that assign incoming cases to a bot's inbox.

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Five9's generative AI uses retrieval augmented generation to identify and summarize trusted answers from the customer's knowledge assets, so the agent answers from the enterprise's curated content rather than from model recall. Data, knowledge and orchestration are shared across the whole CX platform, so the same corpus serves self-service, agent assist and summarization. Five9 does not describe the index, refresh behavior, chunking or source level citation.

Sourcefive9.com/products/capabilities/conversational-generative-agentic-airead 2026-09-05

The platform's maintained knowledge layer is Knowledge Hub. Autopilot connects through it to CXone Mpower Expert or any third-party knowledge base and answers from the articles, returning composed responses, embedded links and images, and Autopilot Knowledge wires Bot Builder bots directly into Expert knowledge bases. CXone connects to Salesforce, SharePoint, Zendesk and Confluence as knowledge sources, so agents and people work from the same content. This is a structure NiCE maintains over the customer's corpus.

Sourcehelp.nicecxone.com/content/autopilot/autopilot.htmread 2026-09-05

Data, knowledge and orchestration are shared across the entire CX platform, the Agentic Experience Engine accesses data across systems to personalize a journey, and handoffs to human agents carry context so a customer does not restart. There is no persistent agent memory store with a set scope, lifetime or deletion control, and no memory product appears in the platform.

Sourcefive9.com/products/capabilities/ai-agentsread 2026-09-05

The platform names a memory component, Experience Memory, without describing its shape. It sits alongside APIs, Knowledge, Channels and Enlighten Models in the CXone Mpower ecosystem that Mpower Agents tap into, so persistence is separate from the knowledge corpus.

The Proactive AI Agent manages continuous journeys over several days or weeks, and millions of simultaneous customer journeys, without losing context. That context carries across sessions. NiCE gives no scope, lifetime, retention window or deletion control for Experience Memory, so a customer cannot tell what is retained or for how long.

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The dial of trust lets a business set its agents anywhere from fully scripted, for regulated sectors such as banking and healthcare, up to high trust, where the model manages multi-step conversations and calls APIs on its own, so the operator chooses how much latitude the agent has.

Around it sit built-in guardrails, LLM blinding so sensitive data is neither seen nor manipulated by the model, and workflow task verification, all part of an enterprise trust and governance layer that also includes automated post call AI evaluations.

Handoff to a person is a context-rich warm handoff, with AI and human agents working on the same unified platform instead of a cold transfer.

Sourcefive9.com/news/news-releases/five9-launches-breakthrough-new-release-voice-ai-agents-power-next-generationread 2026-09-05

Conversation guardrails from NiCE prevent excessive communication or miscommunication and enforce compliance with data privacy and industry regulation, applied before outreach rather than reviewed afterwards, and brand-specific guardrails can be configured. Autopilot virtual agents resolve autonomously but transfer to a live agent when the contact needs one, with the platform waiting on a completion or transfer signal, and Mpower Copilot carries the human side with dedicated versions for agents, supervisors and administrators.

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A live trust center lists SOC 2 Type 2, ISO/IEC 27001:2022, ISO/IEC 27017:2015, PCI DSS v4.0.1, HIPAA, HITECH, Cyber Essentials, C5, the CSA STAR registry, TX-RAMP Level 2, CPNI, CCPA, CPRA and GDPR, with a DORA compliance report alongside. The SOC 2 Type 2 report, a HIPAA Type 1 attestation, the ISO 27001 and ISO 27017 certificates and the PCI DSS report are available through an access request, and completed SIG, CAIQ and HECVAT questionnaires are published for due diligence.

Five9 is a Level 1 PCI DSS Service Provider that engages an independent QSA annually across all twelve requirements, and it operates as a HIPAA Business Associate. Multi-Factor Authentication and Audit Logging are named product security features, with Access Log Management, Least Privilege and Password Security under access control. Voice biometrics authenticates the calling consumer and is a product Five9 sells, not a control over the customer's own tenant.

Sourcetrustcenter.five9.comread 2026-09-05

Certifications include SOC 2 Type II and HITRUST for HIPAA, ISO 27001, PCI Level 1 attestation maintained for each cluster, FedRAMP ATO at the Moderate baseline and Sarbanes-Oxley 404 for the parent, plus BAA and GDPR DPA. Customer-facing controls include a tenant RBAC model with segregation of duties, multi-factor authentication, SSO, file integrity monitoring and customer-managed private keys, backed by annual third-party penetration testing, quarterly network scans and a 24x7 security operations center.

Sourcehelp.nice-incontact.com/content/globalfeatures/tsa/securitylayers/securitylayers.htmread 2026-09-05

Audit Logging is listed among the product security features alongside data security and multi-factor authentication, with Access Log Management under access control, so there is a record of who did what on the platform.

AI Agent Studio is the environment to build, test, deploy and monitor Voice AI Agents, automated post-call AI evaluations leave an assessed record of every interaction, and workflow task verification confirms whether the agent completed what it undertook. Five9's reporting layer sits underneath, and its trust and governance layer gives regulated enterprises granular visibility and control. No per decision reasoning trace or tool call log for an individual agent run is published.

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Interactions are recorded with metadata in CXone Mpower, and a Data Extraction API pulls recording interaction metadata, quality management workflow data and QM question-and-answer data for external reporting, each behind its own named permission, alongside prebuilt QM and business intelligence reports with drill-down and export. Quality Management for CRM Ticketing surfaces every interaction related to a ticket together with agent and system-generated comments.

What can be reconstructed is the conversation and its quality assessment, not the AI agent's own run, and there is no step-level decision trace, tool-call log or retrieval record. An Interactions Journey Summary view showing an entire interaction journey with segments, transfers, transcript and QM insights is announced for the 25.4 release but not yet shipped.

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Delivery is cloud only, serving more than 3,500 enterprises across 140-plus countries, with no self-hosted, on-premise or single-tenant option.

The trust center carries a Data Center Colocations entry under infrastructure alongside business continuity and failover documentation, and the certification set includes region-specific schemes that apply where data is handled locally, C5 for Germany, Cyber Essentials for the United Kingdom, TX-RAMP Level 2 for Texas public bodies, and a DORA compliance report for EU financial entities.

The data center detail sits behind the trust center's access request, and Five9 describes no way for a customer to choose or move its region.

Sourcetrustcenter.five9.comread 2026-09-05

The platform runs from geographically diverse data centers as independent regional clusters, with PCI Level 1 attestation maintained separately for each cluster and tenant endpoints scoped by region. NiCE states multi-region performance and support for sovereign data requirements alongside GDPR and FedRAMP, and the Agent SDK is available in all regions. Customers get no published menu of selectable regions and no published residency commitment.

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A suite of prepackaged self-service applications and code-free tooling streamlines Intelligent Virtual Agent and AI Agent deployment, so a common use case ships ready to adopt, and AI Agent Studio covers what the packaged set does not. Whether the packaged set can be browsed is not stated.

Sourcefive9.com/products/capabilities/ai-agentsread 2026-09-05

AI agents are generated in minutes in Mpower AI Studio from outcome-based, no-code conversational prompts, drawing on the platform's APIs, Knowledge, Experience Memory, Channels and Enlighten Models, with vibe-coding letting business users tailor an agent's personality and communication style, and prebuilt integrations supplied alongside.

Agents are generated from a prompt, and NiCE offers no catalog of prebuilt agents for the customer to browse and put into service. A reseller page claims more than thirty pre-configured industry AI agents for financial services, healthcare, utilities and telecommunications, but NiCE itself publishes no such catalog.

Sourcenice.com/resources/cxone-mpower-agents-ai-agents-built-for-cxread 2026-09-05

Models are blended by Five9, not chosen by the customer. Data, knowledge and orchestration are shared across the CX platform, and the Google Cloud partnership integrates the Intelligent CX Platform with Gemini Enterprise and Vertex AI, so more than one model provider is in play, with the Agentic Voice Switch unifying speech, reasoning and voice generation across them and Five9 choosing the model. Customers get no model selector, routing policy or bring your own key path, and the dial of trust governs how much autonomy a model gets, not which model runs.

Sourcefive9.com/news/news-releases/five9-launches-breakthrough-new-release-voice-ai-agents-power-next-generationread 2026-09-05

Proprietary Enlighten CX models trained on NiCE's own interaction corpus run Mpower agents, with Cognigy reasoning at the core after the latest platform refresh, and NiCE hosts models on AWS through an expanded Bedrock partnership. NiCE makes the selection itself, and there is no customer or admin model choice, routing control or bring-your-own-model path. Bedrock hosting of NiCE's models is infrastructure, not a customer choice of model.

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A Developer Program at five9.com/development offers comprehensive Cloud API documentation, a fully-featured sandbox, code samples on GitHub, dedicated developer support and early access to release previews for compatibility testing.

Five9's GitHub organization, Five9DeveloperProgram, publishes working samples against the Agent and Supervisor REST API, the Configuration Web Services API, the CRM SDK, Click-to-Dial and Web2Campaign, and third-party client libraries build against a REST and WebSocket API at api.five9.com covering admin, supervisor and Studio endpoints. AI Agent Studio is the build, test, deploy and monitor environment for Voice AI Agents. The full API documentation and sandbox sit behind Developer Program membership, while the sample repositories are public.

Sourcefive9.com/developmentread 2026-09-05

A public developer portal covers REST APIs grouped by function, including authentication, admin, agent sessions, digital engagement, media playback, business data and data extraction, testable in the portal against a live tenant, with OAuth 2.0 and a registration path for independent software vendors building multi-tenant apps. A TypeScript Agent SDK ships on npm and GitHub across ACD, Agent, Auth, Digital and Voice packages, and NiCE says it exposes the same APIs it uses for its own product development at no additional cost.

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Automated post-call AI evaluations assess every completed interaction instead of a supervisor's sample, and workflow task verification confirms the agent actually completed the task it undertook, giving a readable result on the customer's own agent. AI Agent Studio is a unified environment to build, test, deploy and monitor Voice AI Agents before release, and Developer Program members get a full sandbox plus release previews to test against new versions before general availability. Five9 also reports that containment targets were exceeded across 100,000 calls in an early rollout.

Sourcefive9.com/news/news-releases/five9-launches-breakthrough-new-release-voice-ai-agents-power-next-generationread 2026-09-05

A scored evaluation program runs over live interactions. Quality Planner creates quality plans that sample interactions against filters the customer defines, route them to named evaluators and score them against an attached evaluation form, with calibrations and self-assessments alongside and prebuilt QM and business intelligence reports carrying the results.

Quality Management Premium adds behavior performance indicators across all interactions. This is quality assurance after the fact over a sample. Neither Autopilot nor Mpower AI Studio has a prerelease test surface, a simulation environment or a scored evaluation of a proposed agent change before customers see it, and NiCE does not say whether AI agents, rather than human agents, are what gets evaluated.

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Agents act programmatically. Secure tool calling connects them to enterprise systems to authenticate customers, update records and process transactions, pre-built CRM integrations carry screen pop and activity logging into Salesforce, ServiceNow, Dynamics 365 and Zendesk, and the platform exposes REST and WebSocket APIs. Five9 agents work voice and digital CX channels through a carrier-grade telephony platform and do not control a browser, run hosted sessions or automate an interface.

Sourcefive9.com/products/capabilities/ai-agentsread 2026-09-05

NiCE has long sold a robotic process automation line, NiCE RPA, that drives desktop applications, but it does not say whether desktop automation ships as part of CXone Mpower or as a separate product bought alongside. Across Mpower Agents, the Proactive AI Agent, Autopilot, Quality Management and the Data Extraction API, action runs through APIs, integrations and channels.