Customer service is no longer about scaling call centers or replacing agents with bots - it’s about amplifying human intelligence at every touchpoint. Cresta has emerged as one of the leading players in this new era of augmented intelligence, giving contact centers the tools to coach, assist, and automate in real time. Rather than offering generic chatbots or rigid automation, Cresta’s AI understands the nuance of live conversations, guiding agents toward the best actions and capturing insights that transform performance at scale.
Where many AI solutions still separate analytics from execution, Cresta unites them. Its platform delivers real-time agent assist, AI-powered quality management, and dynamic coaching built on large language models trained for business context. The result is a support ecosystem that learns continuously - turning every call, chat, or email into data-driven improvement. From improving conversion rates to reducing handle times, Cresta makes customer interactions more efficient and more human.
PixieBrix shares this philosophy of human-centered automation. While Cresta elevates what happens within conversations, PixieBrix extends AI into the browser itself - embedding intelligence across the tools agents already use. Together, they represent the next wave of enterprise enablement: AI that doesn’t replace people, but works seamlessly alongside them to orchestrate faster, smarter support.
Cresta is a next-generation AI platform designed specifically for enterprise contact centers, combining human intelligence with artificial intelligence to optimise customer conversations and workflows. Its solution suite includes real-time agent assistance, automated quality management, and conversational analytics that identify winning behaviors and drive performance improvements. The platform leverages deep language models and precise business logic to facilitate complex interactions and brand-safe automation - according to their recent case with Brinks Home the roll-out delivered significant gains in resolution rates and Net Promoter Score (NPS). By enabling firms to reduce cost per contact, accelerate coaching, and extract actionable insights from every interaction, Cresta positions itself as the competitive advantage in customer-centric enterprises.
Cresta (sometimes referenced as Cresta Intelligence, Inc.), founded in 2017 and based in Palo Alto, California, emerged from AI and robotics research to build generative-AI solutions for contact and customer-service centers. The company has secured a total of over $270M in funding, anchored by a $125M Series D round announced in November 2024. That round was led by World Innovation Lab (WiL) and the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), with participation from strategic players like Accenture, LG Technology Ventures, and Qualcomm Ventures. Earlier rounds include a Series C ($80M in March 2022) and a Series B ($50M in 2021), according to open-data sources. This capital base has enabled Cresta to scale its R&D, expand globally (including engineering hubs outside the U.S.), and deepen its mission of “human-centric AI” in customer-facing operations.
The core value proposition of Cresta positions it as a genAI-first platform focused on transforming enterprise contact centers into revenue-driving hubs, rather than merely cost-centers. According to a recent evaluation by Forrester Research, Cresta was named a Leader in the “Conversation Intelligence Solutions for Contact Centers, Q2 2025” report—earning the highest score for “current offering” and scoring top marks across 16 criteria, including: real-time guidance, insights-to-action, and revenue generation.
Cresta targets large enterprises with complex, high-volume customer interaction environments (e.g., telecommunications, retail, automotive, and finance) and positions its platform as a strategic lever for improving CSAT scores, shortening handle times, increasing agent productivity, and generating incremental revenue per contact.
In a market crowded with legacy contact-centre software and point solutions, Cresta differentiates via a proprietary AI stack, deep data-driven coaching, seamless integration into existing contact centre architectures, and a goal of delivering measurable business outcomes (not just automation or analytics).
After integrating Cresta tools across its contact centers, Brinks Home saw reduced calls driven by reductions in transfers, a dramatically higher first-call resolution (FCR) rate, improved Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and early improvements in lead-to-sale conversions.
Cresta’s analytics suite reports a +23% increase in customer satisfaction and a +73% boost in first-call resolution among user groups that implemented the recommendation-engine workflows.
By enabling contact centers to analyze 100% of conversations, identify high-impact agent behaviors and automate coaching, Cresta supports operational scalability, agent performance improvement and higher revenue lift at scale.
Cresta’s foundation is its real-time coaching engine, which provides agents with live prompts, behavioral guidance, and tailored knowledge as conversations unfold. This dynamic assistance helps agents reduce handle time, maintain consistent tone and accuracy, and deliver better customer outcomes.
The platform’s advanced conversation intelligence analyzes every call, chat, and message to detect sentiment, topics, and trends. By transforming raw dialogue into actionable insights, Cresta helps leaders understand what drives CSAT, identify friction points, and replicate top-performing agent behaviors across the team.
Cresta integrates generative AI models for summarization, auto-drafting, and workflow automation. These capabilities streamline post-call tasks, ensure consistent documentation, and enable supervisors to scale coaching across thousands of interactions.
Through its Opera interface, Cresta allows non-technical users to create rules, AI models, and automations without code. This democratizes AI deployment, accelerating time-to-value for organizations that want to operationalize insights quickly.
Cresta integrates seamlessly with leading CRM and contact-center platforms including Salesforce, Zendesk, Twilio, and Amazon Connect. This interoperability enables unified visibility across tech stacks and ensures teams can leverage AI directly within existing workflows.
Each customer interaction strengthens Cresta’s AI models. The platform uses continuous reinforcement to improve contextual understanding and prediction accuracy over time, allowing organizations to achieve compounding ROI as adoption scales.
Cresta helps contact centers enhance service quality by using real-time AI to guide agents during live interactions. The system suggests responses, retrieves relevant knowledge, and automates repetitive tasks—leading to faster resolution times, improved accuracy, and higher CSAT scores.
In sales environments, Cresta acts as a live performance coach. By analyzing call patterns and conversion data, it provides instant feedback, upsell prompts, and closing recommendations that boost revenue per rep and shorten sales cycles.
Cresta automates quality assurance by evaluating every customer interaction, not just samples. This enables leaders to monitor compliance, identify best practices, and tailor coaching programs based on data-driven insights - improving consistency across large agent teams.
Cresta’s AI models detect early signs of customer frustration or churn risk, guiding agents with the best language and offers to retain high-value accounts. In collections use cases, it helps agents stay empathetic while improving payment recovery rates.
By delivering real-time coaching and instant knowledge retrieval, Cresta shortens the time required for new hires to reach full productivity. Teams onboard faster with fewer manual training sessions and benefit from continuous reinforcement in live calls.
Cresta’s platform supports extensive integrations across telephony, CRM, knowledge, marketing, and data systems, enabling seamless embedding into a business’s existing stack. For example, it connects with telephony and chat solutions like Five9, Amazon Connect, and Genesys; CRM and customer-engagement platforms such as Salesforce, Zendesk, and Microsoft; marketing channels like HubSpot and Marketo; and data-orchestration tools including Databricks and Amazon SQS. These integrations allow organizations to feed CRM data, conversation logs, and knowledge assets into Cresta’s AI-driven workflows, and then output summaries, actionable insights, or updated records back into the enterprise ecosystem, making the implementation more fluid and less disruptive.
The implementation of Cresta’s enterprise-AI platform begins with integrating the platform into your existing contact-centre stack - connecting channels, CRM/telephony systems, and uploading historic conversation data so the system can train tailored models. Once installed, business teams can use Cresta’s no-code tools to build use-cases - such as real-time agent prompts, virtual-agent automation, or quality-management workflows - making deployment faster and less reliant on heavy engineering effort. On the ease-of-use front, users rate Cresta highly for usability and setup: reviewers on G2 score it around 9.2/10 for “ease of use” and 8.5/10 for “ease of setup,” noting that the intuitive UI and streamlined onboarding accelerate time-to-value.
Partnered with Cresta to automate and guide multi-step voice support, improving issue resolution and customer experience.
Reduced average handle time (AHT) by 40% while increasing automation of quality management to 100%.
Scaled its customer-facing operations using Cresta’s AI-driven agent assist to enhance experience and performance.
Transformed guest-experience workflows with Cresta’s AI Agent platform in the travel & hospitality vertical.
Improved agent experience and lifted revenue through a joint Cresta implementation in the travel segment.
Optimized its sales process and achieved cost savings by embedding Cresta’s real-time coaching and automation.
Drove over US $2 million in customer retention leveraging Cresta’s real-time AI at the contact-center edge.
The pricing model for Cresta is primarily custom-quoted and tailored to the complexity of each enterprise deployment, meaning there is no fixed “one-size” list price published broadly. One reported publicly available pricing tier on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace lists annual contracts at US $150,000 for up to 125,000 chat sessions or 100,000 voice calls, plus usage-based incremental fees of $1.20 per additional chat and $1.50 per additional call. Some smaller-scale buyers have cited starting contracts around US $60,000 annually (with monthly payment options available via financing), though this figure may reflect limited scope or promotional terms. Because Cresta’s platform spans agent-assist, conversation intelligence, and generative workflow automation, the cost depends on channel (chat vs voice), transaction volume, integration scope, and deployment services. When evaluating Cresta, organizations should budget for a full annual commitment and plan for incremental usage fees and potential infrastructure or professional-services uplift.
Cresta places security and compliance at the core of its enterprise-grade generative-AI platform, combining certified infrastructure, proactive protective measures, and rigorous governance of its AI agents. The company follows a Secure Development Lifecycle (SDLC) including static code analysis, dependency scanning, and mandatory secure-coding training for all engineers. It also holds the ISO/IEC 42001 certification for AI governance and adopts dataprivacy standards such as ISO 27701 and PCI-DSS, ensuring personally identifiable information (PII) is redacted and that models are trained exclusively on customer-approved data. For compliance and operational risk, the platform employs a three-pillar guardrail strategy - system-level rules embedded in the AI prompts and orchestration, real-time classifier-based supervision of user inputs, and adversarial testing using large-language-modeldriven attacker simulations to continuously stress-test defences. These measures make Cresta suitable for regulated industries such as financial services, insurance, and healthcare, helping customers demonstrate governance, transparency, and regulatory alignment.
While Cresta is widely celebrated for bringing generative-AI assistance to contact-centre agents, it does have a few notable areas where it falls short. Several user reviews highlight that the platform can be challenging to integrate with existing backend systems, and sometimes lacks customization for unique workflows or non-standard communication channels. Additionally, observers point out that when dealing with large-scale, complex operational environments, the solution may struggle with scalability and performance edge cases, particularly in high-volume settings. Another concern is around data access and vendor lock-in: one industry analysis flagged how enterprise-level platforms may restrict third-party AI access to data, which indirectly limits Cresta’s flexibility in some customers’ architectures. Finally, as with many AI-driven agent-assist tools, the risk of under-preparing for edge-case failures remains: sophisticated demonstrations don’t always translate into flawless live performance, meaning the gap between “works in pilot” and “works in production” still exists.
While Cresta focuses on contact-center agents, conversational intelligence and real-time assist, PixieBrix takes a different tack: it empowers teams to build low-code extensions of web apps and SaaS systems, embedding automation, AI copilots, and workflow augmentation directly where users work. If your goal is to enable super-powers in your frontline and internal applications - not just in the call-centre but across CRM, support, ops and revenue workflows - PixieBrix presents a compelling alternative. It offers flexibility, integrates with automation tools like Automation Anywhere, and can lighten the load of repetitive tasks that contact-centre-centric platforms only partially address. For organizations seeking to extend beyond agent assist into workflow automation + embedded intelligence, PixieBrix may offer broader ROI, faster adoption, and lower friction.
Positioned as a real-time AI coaching and conversation guidance platform for contact centre agents. It is listed by reviewers as “the best overall Cresta alternative” in the category of AI-customer support agent software. G2+1
Focused on “conversation intelligence” for contact centres, analysing 100% of interactions to surface insights for agent performance, retention and compliance.
AmplifAI enables 10,000+ CX teams to unify contact center data, drive agent performance, improve leader efficiency and business outcomes - all in one place.
A platform with advanced analytics, automated QA and voice-of-customer/agent support, noted explicitly as an alternative to Cresta.
Another conversation intelligence tool that reviews identify as comparable to Cresta in supporting sales/agent workflows with AI-driven insights.
Cresta is engineered around AI-agent assist and coaching within contact center environments, delivering real-time guidance, analytics, and workflow support for human agents. The alternatives listed above compete closely in that domain. On the other hand, PixieBrix takes a different (and for many teams, more flexible) approach: it’s a low-code platform that allows you to embed automation, AI insights, decision-trees and workflow enhancements directly into the web apps your teams already use (e.g., CRMs, help-desks, collaboration tools) rather than replacing or building separate agent-platforms.
That difference matters because with PixieBrix:
If your use-case emphasizes rapid deployment, workflow agility, cross-department applicability (not just contact center agents) and embedding intelligence where people already work - then PixieBrix may present a better, more adaptable choice than Cresta alone.
Cresta has proven the value of real-time AI coaching in the contact center, giving agents instant prompts and data insights to improve live interactions. Yet the next transformation in customer experience goes beyond call guidance - it’s about bringing intelligence into every tool and workflow an agent touches. PixieBrix takes that leap by embedding AI orchestration directly into the browser, uniting insights, automations, and actions across systems like Zendesk, Salesforce, and Slack. Instead of optimizing one moment in a call, PixieBrix transforms the entire support flow - from triage and escalation to post-resolution analysis. By empowering teams to design adaptive, no-code experiences, PixieBrix shifts CX from reactive assistance to proactive orchestration - turning every agent into a high-performing problem-solver equipped with real-time intelligence at their fingertips.
