Will AI in Financial Services Hit Its Stride or Its Limit in 2025?
February 26, 2025
The answer is absolutely not. The AI party is just getting started in Financial Services.
AI’s potential to transform customer service for banks, lenders, insurers, and wealth managers has been discussed for decades. The promise of 24/7 self-service that delights customers, eases the employee workload, and enhances management oversight is hard to ignore. Yet, widespread AI adoption has remained just out of reach—until now.
The latest evolution of generative AI (GenAI) has changed the game. According to ChatGPT, GenAI is a type of AI that creates new content by learning patterns from existing data. It uses advanced machine learning models, like neural networks, to generate human-like outputs based on prompts or inputs. And GenAI is so effective that it's spreading like wildfire through the Contact Center industry.
Why is GenAI so transformative for contact centers?
To give some perspective, I began working in the Contact Center industry 15 years ago. If we had even considered GenAI as it exists today, it would have seemed like science fiction. Accessible from the Internet? AI back then was installed on-premises like the ACD boxes on the wall. Affordable? At least compared to 2010’s high-price, inflexible, code-heavy AI programs purchased only by Forbes 50 enterprises with IBM-worthy gargantuan IT budgets. Easy to use? Lots of flexibility in implementation. And it can master inferences? Like when I’m awkwardly rambling about some late-fee nonsense that totally wasn’t my fault—because I have no idea how to say it in my lender’s terms.
That kind of AI sounded like fiction. Fast forward to 2025, Financial Services is Five9’s second most important set of customers in terms of annual revenue, and Five9 Genius AI is discussed in almost every conversation.
For example, last year, Five9 signed its “largest deal ever” with a prominent Fortune 500 US bank with 70 million customers worldwide that managed 4–5 million calls per day. As expected, Five9 AI agents and Agent Assist were included. But what really caught my eye was the inclusion of Five9’s new click-and-customize GenAI Studio.
This tech is essential because it permits Five9 customers to choose their AI engine and combine it with Five9’s contextual data pulled from customer conversations. Plus, as nearly every AI-powered contact center is discovering, AI isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it solution—it needs ongoing attention as your business evolves (e.g. keeping up with security, introducing a new product or campaign, fine tuning the models, etc). Five9 GenAI Studio provides the tools to build, deploy, and test GenAI-powered applications. The ease of these features is a night-and-day difference compared to most AI from 2005 to 2020.
Here’s one more interesting data point that highlights the widespread adoption of GenAI in financial services. And, it comes from the least likely source–Community Credit Unions. This is the most frugal crowd of IT buyers at the exuberant Financial Services AI party. They never pay for anything they can't build from scratch or go without. They would not embrace GenAI unless everyone is seeing real measurable change across the board. At 2024’s Enterprise Connect, I have never seen so many credit unions come to the Five9 booth asking about Five9 Genius AI.
Who’s to say whether GenAI will eventually lose its stride. But for now, the surge in Generative AI is proving its worth, from big banks to credit unions, with significant gains in self-service, agent performance, contact center control, and IT administration.
If you'd like to learn more about how Five9 AI Genius could help improve your contact center, download our E-book: Financial Services, The New CX Starts Here.
