Ryan Shatzkamer, Director of Technical Services at outboundIQ, has been named the winner of the Contact Center AI Innovator of the Year 2026 award for creating open-source AI tools that build real contact center setups from plain English.
Ryan Shatzkamer, Director of Technical Services at outboundIQ, has been named the winner of the Contact Center AI Innovator of the Year 2026 award by American Recognition Awards. The award recognizes Shatzkamer's work creating open-source tools that let AI assistants build real contact center setups from plain English.
Shatzkamer built and open-sourced three contact center MCP servers in about a month, from August to September 2026: five9-mcp, genesys-mcp, and cxone-mcp. These tools allow AI assistants like Claude to build IVRs, queues, campaigns, dispositions, and AI virtual agents inside Five9, Genesys Cloud, and NiCE CXone. The servers are free and open source, and they are designed with guardrails: nothing deletes, campaigns are created switched off, nothing dials or goes live until a human presses go, and every IVR is drawn as a diagram in chat for review before it deploys.
The response from the contact center community has been significant. The genesys-mcp launch post drew about 28,000 LinkedIn impressions on day one. That tool now has 71 tools, including the full build, test, and evaluate lifecycle for Genesys AI virtual agents. The cxone-mcp launch drew more than 10,000 impressions in two days, and NiCE's corporate account commented on the launch. The community votes on which platform comes next, with Twilio and Amazon Connect up next. The code is public on GitHub and the full portfolio is at ryan-shatzkamer.com.
Shatzkamer's path to this award started in his teens. He became Director of Technical Services at outboundIQ at 21 and is 5x Five9 certified. His day job is inside customers' dialers: Five9, Genesys, NiCE CXone, and VICIdial. He watched admins lose days clicking through consoles to build an IVR, a campaign, or a set of dispositions. When AI assistants gained the ability to use tools through the Model Context Protocol, he built five9-mcp so Claude could do that build from a plain-English request, then shipped versions for Genesys Cloud and NiCE CXone.
His work serves contact center leaders and the operations, IT, and admin teams who run outbound calling, mostly in healthcare, home services, lending, and insurance. The open-source tools are also used by developers and contact center engineers who want AI to handle platform builds. Unlike most AI tools for contact centers that either just answer questions or hand the AI raw, unrestricted API access, Shatzkamer's servers actually build, and they are safe by design.
"I didn't build these to replace anyone. I built them because the people running contact centers are buried in repetitive setup work, and AI is finally good enough to take that off their plate. The whole point is that a human stays in control: the AI builds, you review, you press go. If it saves one admin a weekend of clicking through a console, it was worth open-sourcing."
Shatzkamer is based in Boca Raton, Florida, where he continues to develop and maintain the open-source tools while working with outboundIQ customers.