From Digital Transformation to Digital Employees: RingCentral’s New AI Receptionist

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rewriting the rules of business communications, rapidly transforming the way businesses operate and communicate while becoming a cornerstone of innovation for improving efficiency and customer experiences.

At RingCentral, we are focused on driving meaningful customer and employee conversations that reshape how businesses connect with their customers. With generative AI, we’re making all of the conversations on our platform more intelligent. We’re helping customers extract valuable insights from their conversation data with our intelligence engine, RingSense. And we’re helping customers leverage those insights to power effortless workflows so they can achieve more.

Now, we’re taking another step forward into the future where AI agents become ubiquitous – where every business and worker can have agents capable of interpreting human conversation, analyzing sentiment and emotion, synthesizing discussions, managing workflows, and taking action.

The potential for agentic AI to transform business operations is staggering. According to Gartner, by 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will feature agentic AI capabilities, growing from less than 1% today. Additionally, within the next five years, 15% of routine workplace decisions are predicted to be made autonomously by agentic AI. By the same timeframe, 70% of customer service journeys will begin and end with conversational AI assistants embedded in mobile devices, signaling the end of long IVR menus and tedious hold times.

Today, I am excited to share more insight into the next milestone in our AI journey with the launch of RingCentral’s AI Receptionist (AIR), an AI phone agent that uses generative AI to automatically answer customer questions and transfer callers just like traditional human receptionists. Unlike contact center IVAs, which are complex and costly to deploy, RingCentral AIR makes it so any business instantly can deploy this AI call automation solution easily to transform their business quickly and in significant ways.

RingCentral AIR is particularly timely in today’s macro environment where businesses are looking to scale without incurring more costs, and teams remain lean, scrambling to do more with less. It acts as a true “digital employee” and removes some of the more monotonous work, freeing teams to tackle the more complex high-value tasks that drive business growth.

Early adopters of AIR already are seeing tangible results. For example, a security solutions customer is seeing massive efficiency gains with agents each saving 20 hours per week – a full 50% decrease in time spent on inbound calls. Now, their agents have turned those saved hours into revenue-generating activities, like focusing on lead generation and client follow-ups, tripling the outbound calls they now have time to make – all without adding headcount. A large healthcare organization we support saw their call answer times drop from 12 seconds to zero with the implementation of RingCentral AIR. This is what organizations are looking for as they navigate AI adoption: practical AI with measurable outcomes that move the needle for their business.

This ongoing rapid advancement of AI, both at RingCentral and throughout the industry, foretells increased exciting opportunities. Whether it’s an AI agent for retail that checks inventory and suggests related products or an AI agent for restaurant owners that books reservations, adjusts times, and sends confirmations to customers, possibilities abound to automate processes and augment workflows.

The future is not just agentic; it’s one in which AI agents and humans work in concert with each other to make organizations dramatically more productive. At RingCentral, we’re taking communications beyond a way of connecting across modalities to driving personalized and effective communications experiences for customers, employees, and support agents – ultimately leading to better business outcomes. ‍ ‍

As a lifelong innovator, I’m energized by this pivotal moment in technology’s evolution. The promise of agentic AI is limitless, and I can’t wait to see -- and share -- the transformative breakthroughs we’ll unlock next!

Originally published on LinkedIn