December 18, 2025
Five9 Appoints New CEO Following Mike Burkland’s Planned Transition
Five9 has appointed a new Chief Executive Officer, with the change taking effect on February 2, 2026. The company said the appointment is part of a planned transition, with long-time CEO Mike Burkland staying on the Board of Directors to support handover and continuity.
Mathradas joins Five9 from automation software company Nintex, where he most recently served as CEO. Before that, he was President and Chief Operating Officer at Avalara, helping scale the business ahead of its $8.4 billion acquisition by Vista Equity Partners. Earlier in his career, he held senior leadership roles at PayPal, Web.com, and Dell.
A Planned Handover
Burkland’s move out of the CEO role was first teased in July 2025, when Five9 announced he would remain in post until a successor was appointed. The company said a committee of independent directors led a formal search with support from a nationally recognised executive search firm, targeting an appointment by year’s end.
Burkland has been closely tied to Five9’s growth story for years, serving as CEO from 2008 to 2017, and helping scale the business through major milestones, including a successful IPO in 2014 and revenue growth from $10 million to more than $1 billion annually.
After stepping down in 2017 following a cancer diagnosis, he returned to the CEO role in 2022. Since then, Five9 has doubled down on enterprise-grade cloud contact centre and AI-enabled customer service, while Burkland focused on readying the company for what comes next.
Why This Matters for Five9 Right Now
The leadership change lands during a busy stretch for Five9’s product direction: pushing AI deeper into the contact centre, while also making it easier for large organisations to connect CX tools without stitching everything together manually.
In other words, Five9 is trying to become the layer that helps enterprises reduce friction between systems, data, and channels, the issues that tend to slow agents down and frustrate customers.
In September, Five9 expanded its integration story with Five9 Fusion for ServiceNow to reduce fragmented CX systems by combining real-time transcription and unified routing with ServiceNow Customer Service Management. This gives teams a more joined-up operational view. Five9 also pointed to earlier Fusion integrations with Salesforce and Epic, and was named a Leader in Gartner’s latest CCaaS Magic Quadrant around the same period.
The company later unveiled new Genius AI updates at its CX Summit in Nashville, Tennessee, spanning routing, quality management, and analytics. Five9 described AI as a connective layer across the CX environment, with early results including a reported drop in abandonment rates from 19% to 4% at Pilot Flying J.
