Five9 Chief Marketing and Growth Officer Jay Lee on service as a growth engine
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström® | What CMOs Need to Know About Marketing Technology, AI & CXShow Notes
Jay Lee, Chief Marketing and Growth Officer at Five9, argues the contact center is not a cost line marketing inherits. It's where brand promises get tested, and where the richest first-party data a company owns already sits. He and Greg Kihlström get into what changes when marketing takes it seriously. Brand is what the system decides, not what the campaign says. When a bot, an agent, and the app give three different answers to the same exception request, customers don't read it as a service defect. They read it as the company. Service data is the first-party source marketing says it wants and rarely uses. Transcripts, chat logs, and sentiment are already there. Lee talks about where the handoff from service data to marketing action actually breaks down. "AI in the contact center" hides four very different decisions. Routing rules, churn scoring, drafted agent replies, and an agent that resolves and acts on its own carry different accuracy bars and different accountability. Lee talks about getting buying committees to name which one they're actually buying.
About Jay Lee Jay H. Lee is the Chief Marketing and Growth Officer at Five9. A growth-focused leader in enterprise software and fintech, Jay brings more than 20 years of experience driving go-to-market transformation, scaling global marketing organizations, and delivering measurable business outcomes.
Prior to joining Five9, Jay served as Chief Marketing Officer at Icertis, where he led the company’s global marketing organization and helped position the business for its next phase of growth. Previously, Jay was the Chief Marketing Officer at Avalara. There, he was instrumental in more than doubling the company’s revenue from approximately $380 million to over $800 million by building and scaling a high-performing global marketing team. This achievement was a key contribution to Avalara's $8.4 billion acquisition by Vista Equity Partners.
Earlier in his career, Jay held senior leadership roles at PayPal, American Express, and GE Capital, where he led initiatives across marketing, product, and business strategy. At PayPal, he led marketing for the Business Financing Solutions division, helping expand global lending and drive significant growth in originations.
Jay Lee on LinkedIn
---------- Resources ---------- Five9
The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://aglbrnd.co/r/2868abd8085a9703
Need to evaluate martech, AI, or CX platforms and don't know where to start? The Agile Brand Guide List is now in beta. We're building the most useful, free-to-use, and up-to-date way to assess what truly matters when evaluating platforms. See more here: https://aglbrnd.co/r/f76be3a33cc491bb
Reach your customers with Reddit. Spend $500 in ad spend, get $500 back in ad credit! Learn more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/491818c79fb1873f
Chaser is the only Slack-native project management platform that helps teams turn messages into tracked tasks, automate follow-ups, and maintain team-wide visibility, without adopting another tool. Now integrated with Claude and other GenAI tools. Learn more at trychaser.com and use code AGILEBRAND for a 3-month free trial (normal trial is 14 days).
Start building your own apps with Replit and get $20 off. Learn more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/93531742a7625a20
Enjoyed the show? Tell us more and give us a rating so others can find the show: https://aglbrnd.co/r/faaed112fc9887f3
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom
Don't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter, and check out Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://aglbrnd.co/r/35ded3ccfb6716ba
The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström® | What CMOs Need to Know About Marketing Technology, AI & CX
What if the biggest source of new marketing budget this year isn't a new line item from your CFO — but millions of dollars already sitting trapped inside the Google Ads campaigns you're running right now?
Creative has never been cheaper or faster to produce than it is right now — so why is it still so hard to say, with any confidence, which of it is actually worth the money?
Rahul Shah, CEO of CommerceIQ, argues that discoverability has replaced shelf position as the battleground in retail, and that keeping retail media and product content in separate teams is now a competitive liability. He and Greg Kihlström get into what replaces the old model. Discoverability is where the sale is decided. Product quality still matters, but an item that an AI-mediated retail environment can't read, verify, and surface never reaches the consideration set at all. Retail media and product content are one system, not two budgets. Paid performance should be changing organic content, and organic performance should be changing paid — the separation between them is an org chart artifact that now costs money. Automation runs at retail speed; humans keep it coherent. Shah on where AI-driven execution takes over from dashboard analysis, what humans have to keep owning as output scales, and how to attribute the resulting lift.
Kyla Malone, Director of Marketing at IDT, talks with Greg Kihlström at Braze Forge 2026 about earning trust from customers who rely on one company to stay connected to family abroad and send money home. Moving into money movement raises the bar for the brand. When the customer who buys calling credit also trusts IDT to move their money, the brand has more to prove. Malone explains how that shift changed the way her marketing team works, and how IDT balances name recognition across brands like BOSS Revolution and net2phone with giving customers what they actually need. Personalizing for customers across languages and home countries. How IDT puts Braze to work, and where AI helps the team do what it already did faster versus where it makes something new possible. Measuring personalization and setting the pace of change. How Malone judges whether personalized experiences and content are working, and how she keeps her team moving together while keeping up with customers.
Robin Ross, Digital, Analytics and Loyalty Executive at Activate Insight, on how brands compete when a consumer's AI agent controls the consideration set. Recorded live at MAICON 2026 with Greg Kihlström. - Brand preference is now decided before the customer sees the options. - When an agent builds the shortlist, the direct-to-customer relationship enterprises have invested in for decades runs through an intermediary the brand doesn't control. - Loyalty and first-party data have a second audience.