88% Buy Five9 AI, Only 25% Use It: US Call-Centers Face Bot-or-Human Cliff

TL;DR

• Five9 Appoints Jay Lee as Chief Marketing and Growth Officer to Accelerate AI-Driven Enterprise CX Innovation
• Circulate Capital Raises $220M for Asia II Fund to Scale Circular Supply Chains in Southeast Asia, Targeting 50M Tons of CO2 Avoidance
• Rocket Lab Acquires Mynaric for $1.3B to Integrate Satellite Laser Communications, Strengthening U.S. National Security Capabilities

🤖 Five9 AI Surges 41% Yet 75% of Clients Still Run on Manual: US CX Gold Rush

88% of big brands have Five9’s AI... but only 25% actually USE it daily 🤯 That’s like owning a Tesla and never hitting autopilot. 41% AI revenue spike says the other 63% are next in line. US contact-center race is on—will your call get the bot or the human? 🫣

Five9’s board didn’t pick a new marketing boss—they picked a growth engine. On Monday the Vista-backed cloud-call outfit tapped Jay Lee to merge every dollar-finding function—brand, revenue ops, global campaigns—under one roof. The mandate: turn an 88 % AI-adoption headline into cash before rivals do.

How 88 % adoption still hides a 75 % problem

Almost nine in ten Five9 customers have flipped on some AI widget, yet only one in four uses it daily. Translation: the platform touches 1.1 million agents, but roughly 825,000 still route calls like it’s 2019. Lee’s first job is to sell the other three-quarters the “why” and the “how.”

What the numbers say will happen next

• 2026: upsell push lifts AI revenue 30 %, nudging total sales to ~$1.3 B.
• 2027: operationalized AI crosses 50 % of clients; omnichannel share doubles to 12 %.
• 2028: Five9 pockets 2 % of a $16 B market—about $320 M in new AI cash alone.
• 2030: AI lines deliver >15 % of revenue, pushing the firm into the global top-three.

Where the wiggle room ends

Competition: AWS, Google, and Microsoft bundle AI voice tools at cloud-checkout.
Depth gap: 75 % “lite” users risk churn if ROI stays fuzzy.
Integration risk: one global playbook must fit 100-plus countries without tripping local data cops.

Bottom line

Lee’s unified war chest gives Five9 24 months to convert curiosity into contracts; if the 75 % dabblers start living inside AI workflows, today’s $1.1 B revenue line could swell past $2.4 B by decade-end. Miss that window and the $8.4 B price tag Vista paid starts looking like very expensive dial tone.

♻️ $220M Circulate Capital II Eyes 50M Tonnes CO₂ Cut Across SE Asia

$220M in 30 days 🚀—that’s like raising a Series C every single morning to mop up Asia’s trash. 50M tonnes of CO₂ dodged/year once it’s humming 🌏♻️. Your fave soda brands are footing the bill, but will your city’s waste rules let them? — Jakarta, ready to cash in?

Circulate Capital just locked in $220 million—about 70 % of its $300 million goal—for Asia II, a fund purpose-built to bankroll recycling plants, garbage-tracking apps and anything else that keeps plastic, e-waste and old T-shirts out of rivers. If the math holds, the portfolio will chew through two million tonnes of unmanaged waste a year and sidestep 50 million tonnes of CO₂ annually—equal to parking every car in Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines for 12 months.

How does the alchemy work?

The playbook is simple: buy into local collectors, bolt on optical sorters, sign decade-long supply contracts with Coca-Cola or Danone, then let digital traceability prove every kilo really stayed out of landfill. Early deals—Recykal’s waste-commerce platform in India, Lucro’s stretch-film plant—already returned cash in under four years, showing exits don’t have to wait for the planet to cool.

Why it matters—now

• Climate: 50 Mt CO₂ avoided/year → erases the yearly footprint of 8 million Indonesians.
• Waste: 30 Mt diverted over ten years → fills Jakarta’s biggest dump 15 times over.
• Gender: half the portfolio must meet “2×” women-focused metrics → moves capital to female-run plants and pickers’ cooperatives.
• Money: 2–3× targeted cash-on-cash → aims to beat traditional infra funds while the trash keeps flowing.

Short, mid, long—mark your calendar

• 2026–2027: Deploy first $66 M across 4–6 plants; 250 000 t waste corralled, 4 Mt CO₂ dodged.
• 2028–2029: Hit 1 Mt/yr processing; gender-smart quota locked; early exits seed Fund III chatter.
• 2030–2035: Full $300 M out the door; 2 Mt/yr base load; 50 Mt CO₂ annual avoidance sticks; multinationals line up to buy mature assets.

The wobble points

• Price swings: Virgin plastic can dip below recycled resin, squeezing margins → long-term Coke/Danone contracts act as shock absorbers.
• Rule chaos: Vietnam’s EPR draft still in pencil, Indonesia’s in pen → DFI muscle nudges toward single regional standard.
• China Inc: Beijing’s own recyclers eye Jakarta → differentiation via local feedstock contracts and AI sorters keeps them at bay.

Bottom line: Asia’s trash heap isn’t disappearing, but for $220 million—and a plan that turns garbage into balance-sheet credits—Circulate Capital is making the business of cleaning up look like the region’s next infrastructure staple.

🛰️ $1.3B Rocket Lab-Mynaric Deal Mirrors Pentagon Laser Tab

Rocket Lab just bought a German laser-link firm for $1.3 B—same price tag as the Pentagon’s entire order book for those zippy light-beam terminals 🚀⚡️ That’s like paying for one pizza and getting the delivery fleet free. Munich keeps the engineers, Virginia gets the factory, and your tax receipt just funded warp-speed secret Wi-Fi in space. Ready for NATO Netflix at 10 Gbps?

Rocket Lab just closed the tab on Germany’s Mynaric for $1.3 billion—exactly the sum it already has locked in Pentagon laser-comms work. Translation: the launch outfit paid for itself with its own contract backlog and walked out owning the optical modems that move secret data at 10 Gbps between low-orbiting spy sats. Berlin signed off 30 March; the keys change hands this month.

How a photon becomes a weapon

CondOR Mk3 terminals—each smaller than a carry-on—fire invisible infrared beams satellite-to-satellite, cutting latency 30 % versus radio links. Rocket Lab will keep the Munich factory humming (30 k units/yr today) while pumping cash to reach 50 k/yr by 2028. The hardware is already riding on 18 SDA missile-tracking satellites; the next 100+ are penciled in for 2026-29.

What flips when light replaces radio

Security: no jamming, no spectrum license, no foreign vendor—DoD gets a “trusted-supplier” pipeline inside Rocket Lab’s Virginia clean-room.
Speed: a 100-second hypersonic warning now arrives 30 seconds earlier—think a 200 km head-start for interceptors.
Cash: hardware sales add $150-200 M annually by 2029, turning Rocket Lab from a “launch-only” firm into a space version of launch-and-link.

Risks hiding in the optics

• Regulatory: ITAR auditors will crawl over every lens; export licenses must survive U.S.-German dual rules.
• Factory: scaling precision optics is harder than ramping rocket engines—one coating vendor strike stalls 1,000 satellites.
• Competition: SpaceX and Blue Origin still buy third-party lasers; if they clone the model, prices drop 40 % overnight.

Calendar to watch

• Q3 2026: CondOR Mk3 certified for SDA’s next 50-sat batch.
• Mid-2026: first joint HASTE launch beams live missile data via laser.
• 2027: NATO allies invited to shop from the same catalog—potential +$300 M annual sales.
• 2028: ≥50 k terminals/yr output; Rocket Lab could spin off a stand-alone laser-comms unit.

Bottom line

A single Munich factory and a stack of invisible light beams just gave America a faster, quieter space nervous system—paid for, ironically, by the very satellites it will now connect.

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