Hanoi, Vietnam - 20 Apr 2017: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Five9 Vietnam has selected IBM Cloud to bring Cognitive Computing to enterprises and organizations in Vietnam. Five9 is the first organization in Vietnam to tap into Watson APIs on IBM Bluemix to create and bring to life solutions that transform industries and society, starting with the banking and finance sector, healthcare and television. IBM and Five9 will help businesses, academics, startups and everyday people in Vietnam leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and empower the next generation of developers to hone their AI skills and drive innovation.

The agreement will establish Five9 as the first company in Vietnam to use the IBM Cloud to build apps with cognitive capabilities that analyze unstructured data collected from social media to understand customer needs. For example, banking and finance companies can analyze their customers’ social interaction to anticipate their needs to deliver suitable and timely offers, such as financial loans for a car purchase or house renovation needs. Similarly, insurance companies can detect and prevent frauds and anticipate customers’ issues.

Nguyen Trong Huan, Chairman and CEO of Five9, said

“Social media is still a white space for analytics in Vietnam and is fast becoming a gold mine of data for local businesses and organizations as more people actively interact on these platforms. In a recent Stanford research report it was concluded that data collated via social technology often captures a person’s personality better than their friends, family and even spouse, just by simply analyzing items such as their “likes” on Facebook. Through our collaboration with IBM and the use of their cognitive technology, Five9 will help enterprises in Vietnam understand customers better in order to deliver timely customer services and launch suitable personalized products.”

In the healthcare industry, organizations will be able to take previously disparate data sets, including patients’ medical records and personal data with the patients’ consent, like diet and exercise habits, and combine them with professional documentation, to quickly generate a list of potential treatment options ranked by applicability for doctors and patients to consider.

In the television and broadcasting industry, Five9 will develop apps to help television channels gain insight into audience attitudes, expressed through comments posted on a wide range of social networks and online forums. As such, they can improve program content and viewer experience, maximize advertising revenue by demonstrating to sponsors a more precise and detailed ratings forecast.

“The adoption of AI and cognitive computing for the delivery of improved personalized services is constantly increasing,” said Eric Yeo, IBM Vietnam Country General Manager. “Cognitive technology is not only about AI systems that can learn, reason and process natural languages – but also augment human intelligence and performance to make smarter business decisions. By collaborating with Five9 in the delivery of cognitive capabilities, IBM hopes to empower a community of “cognitive builders” in Vietnam, and change the way people in Vietnam extend their expertise across any domain of knowledge to solve complex problems.”

Five9’s cognitive capabilities powered by Watson APIs are built on the IBM Cloud (Bluemix) platform. For a long time, cloud choices were either “build your own” private cloud or put it all out there into a public cloud. IBM Cloud enables a hybrid infrastructure that delivers the security and control of an on-premise or private cloud with the flexibility and ease of managing data on the public cloud.

Through the new partnership, Five9 will also have access to IBM’s global network of technical and industry expertise, education, mentoring and enterprise customers and business partners, all of which can help to bring new and innovative cognitive products to Vietnam’s market quickly.