The rise of agentic AI marks a new era in business communications. Its most ambitious promise is AI that functions as “digital employees,” ones which understand business context, manage complex workflows, trigger actions independently, and deliver measurable business results with minimal human oversight. 

At RingCentral, we are very excited about the future of agentic AI and see its potential to redefine how businesses connect with their customers. We’ve built agentic AI into our cloud phone to help businesses actively engage customers and ensure that calls are never missed.

After all, handling calls is mission-critical for many businesses—so much so that it can make the difference between missing or gaining another scheduled home repair, salon appointment, insurance quote, or restaurant reservation. Calls are often the critical moments that matter for businesses; calls directly impact business growth.

Our insight into how important customer connections are to our business and to yours is the inspiration behind RingCentral’s recent introduction of AI Receptionist (AIR), our own voice AI solution designed to answer calls 24/7, engage in natural conversations, resolve inquiries, and book appointments—all while maintaining a personal touch. 

Creating more effective customer experiences with RingCentral AIR

RingCentral AIR is fit-to-purpose and delivers immediate value, designed to work right out of the box to solve specific problems for businesses of all sizes. It’s easy to set up, easy to use, and easy to maintain. AIR is designed to handle all of these functions effectively and efficiently:

  • Answers every call on the first ring, 24/7/365
  • Engages callers in natural, contextually-aware conversations
  • Intelligently resolves routine inquiries without human intervention
  • Routes complex issues to the right specialist when necessary
  • Books appointments directly into your scheduling system
  • Sends automated SMS confirmations and reminders
  • Follows up after service to ensure customer satisfaction

Customers embrace the value proposition of a “digital employee”

When customers hear about RingCentral’s AIR capabilities, they are eager to explore the addition of a “digital employee,” as the value proposition is immediately clear: better customer service, increased capacity to handle inquiries, and no missed opportunities due to limited staffing or business hours.

For small and medium businesses, especially, the ability to have an agentic AI solution to handle calls without adding headcount represents a significant transformation in how they can compete and grow. These key reasons play a role in the substantial early success of our launch, with more than 200 customers activating AIR in its first several weeks.

Your data: The key to unlocking maximum value from your AI investment

What positions RingCentral uniquely in this space is our understanding of voice conversation data. For over two decades, we’ve been leading the cloud business communications evolution across calling, messaging, meetings, and texts. Now, with our conversational AI platform RingSense, we can enable organizations to harness the untapped power of business voice across every communication channel.

Within every customer conversation lies a wealth of deep insights ready to be unlocked. RingSense goes beyond capturing interactions; it transforms raw conversations into actionable intelligence that drive measurable business outcomes. This gives organizations the power to augment their team’s capabilities, accelerate decision-making, automate routine tasks, and provide intelligent assistance to all their employees.  

RingCentral unlocks the power of every business interaction: customer service calls, sales interactions, chats, texts, faxes, and video meetings. These interactions contain the authentic language of your organization: the specific terminology around your products, the nuanced ways you describe your solutions, and the distinctive value propositions that set your business apart from competitors. 

We view agentic AI as the next frontier in business communications and customer experience. And we are just getting started: AIR serves as the important foundation for our own agentic future in which we will expand into even more new agent possibilities. The future of business communications is about ensuring that every customer interaction yields an opportunity to strengthen relationships and drive business growth with meaningful AI that can be applied to the moments that matter most. 

To learn more about AIR, join us in our live virtual event, called AI Real Talk tomorrow on March 26th at 10:00 am PT, where we will focus on use cases, demos, examples and more. Register here.

Originally published Mar 25, 2025