RingCentral, Inc. (RNG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good morning, New York, and good morning, good afternoon and good evening to everybody listening to us on the webcast. Thank you for joining us today. So hopefully, you get a chance to take a look at our safe harbor statement. You've seen it before, I'm sure, with our many, many earnings calls and these presentations. So just keep this in mind as we go through the comments today as well as when you're watching the replay of this, okay? All right. So today, we're going to cover a number of topics. We're going to be talking about, obviously, the corporate strategy and overall approach to how we're incorporating AI. Then we're going to get a little bit deeper into the innovation we're bringing forth with that strategy and how it goes into the products. We will show you -- discuss many of the products and show you them that we're going to move on, and you're going to get a chance to hear from our customers, from our channel partners and from our global service providers. And then we're going to finish up and do some Q&A. So the -- before we bring up Vlad, I just -- as many of you know, I'm relatively new here at RingCentral. I've been here for just a couple of weeks. And I spent some time -- actually, many of you covered Coupa software. I was there. And so it's good to see some familiar faces. The question that I've been getting asked is why did you join RingCentral? Why? Because I'm an investor like you, I'm investing my time, my career in joining RingCentral. And I was thinking back to my time at Coupa, where some of the most common questions I was getting was how is your free cash flow? How is your operating margin? How is -- are you focusing on stock-based comp, GAAP EPS, all of the things that RingCentral is excelling at right now. I was getting those questions all the time. So I think there's a big opportunity here for investors. And obviously, I'm not going to talk about valuation, but I think we have -- there's an opportunity. I'm excited to be a big part of it. So without further ado, I'm going to welcome Vladimir Shmunis on to the stage.

Great. Thank you, Steve. So I'm somewhat less news than Steve here. Great to see everyone. Thank you for making time on your very busy day. We'll try to make it worth your while, obviously. So again, I'm Vlad Shmunis, Founder, Chairman and CEO of RingCentral. This is my fourth time at the exchange. I think this is the first time we're so close to Thanksgiving. So our RingCentral Orange is mission appropriate at this point. Okay. So without further ado, look, so voice. So sometimes we hear that who needs voice, business voice is dead, and it's all going to be video, messaging and other means. Voice is what makes us human. That is the official definition of human race, it happens to be that we speak and no other animal does. It's far, far from dead. As a matter of fact, and we'll show you some hard data, we are seeing more voice, not less voice. We're seeing more voice on our network as a whole, more voice per customer, per user, et cetera. Voice is actually going through renaissance at this point, which is, believe it or not, being fueled by AI. So the other thing we hear sometimes is AI is going to eat voice, not so much. Voice is actually the new UI for human-to-human interactions. And clearly, with our leadership position in business voice, we're extremely well positioned to leverage and extend this trend. The rest of this presentation and day will be to share our experiences and our direction here with you. So RingCentral, for those of you new to the story, we happen to be a global leader in business voice. We are actually the original company who took business phone or business PBX into the cloud. And many people still think of RingCentral as a phone, which we are. We do have the world's best phone for business. We strongly believe that. But we're not in the phone business. We're in the business of customer engagement. And this is very important for people to realize. The connections that we make in the end, we are in business of connecting people to people. But these are not necessarily one-on-one connections, me calling Steven, but in many cases and growing the number of cases, it's consumers calling or texting their brands via RingCentral. That is customer engagement. We'll talk a bit more about that. So this customer engagement that we had a pretty heavy hand in establishing as a category, it's now being revolutionized via agentic voice AI, okay? And what makes RingCentral in a unique position to lead this next phase of really what is next technological revolution is the fact that we have very deep roots. We'll talk about those in a second. We have one of the world's largest and most robust networks. Very importantly, are the people. We have about 7,000 associates in the company as a whole, of which 2,000 are technical people, engineers, laser-focused on innovation in business voice, in customer engagement and now with agentic voice AI. We are here to stay. We're here to win. Okay. Look, numbers don't lie. We remain a strong leader in business voice by revenue, okay? This is a third-party slide from an industry analyst called Synergy Research. They're considered to be the ultimate expert in these types of matters. And as you can see, RingCentral continues to dominate. Our market share is approximately 20%. And it's -- sometimes some people try to catch up a bit, but then it generally stabilizes. With AI, we believe our leadership position will be further fortified, okay? We truly see RingCentral. You saw our opening slide. We truly see RingCentral as a voice of your business. This is how we position ourselves to our very large customer base. And again, numbers are not lying. The market tends to agree with that. Okay. So why is voice so important and will remain important? It's for one simple reason. People call on their brands. People call on their business service providers. If you -- this one is maybe a little bit hard to read. But if you see our top verticals, they include health care, financial services, retail, personal and consumer services, transportation, et cetera. And if you think about it, what do you do when you need to contact your dentist. You tend to call their office, at least I do. You tend to call your credit union. You tend to call your local pizza joint for delivery, okay? These trends are here to stay. And we have 500,000 businesses, 0.5 million businesses and about 8 million users on our system that are leveraging this -- that are leveraging and addressing this need. Okay. I promise to say a few words about route. So here is our route system, okay? So RingCentral started a bit over quarter century ago. That's a long time. But we started out by building a robust foundation. So we've built -- invented and built strictly speaking, what is to this day, one of the world's largest, most reliable and feature-rich business networks -- business communications networks or platforms, which again, this case remains to be to this day. We started out -- this is a bit of ancient history. We started out with a product called RingCentral Office. We now call it RingEX for employee engagement. This product was very well received. And starting literally from scratch, we have built now a business, as many of you know, we're a bit over $2.5 billion in revenue, starting from 0, that seems an okay position to be in. We are printing over $0.5 billion in free cash flow. Steven alluded to some financial metrics. This is a product day, so I'm not going to go there very deep. But if you look at our numbers, our free cash flow growth, free cash flow per share, management of SBC, all of them have really been on a tear and growing in strong double digits or better. Okay. Back to the product. So we're processing tens of billions of voice minutes per year, and this is growing, okay? We are processing over 1 billion voice calls and 0.25 billion of SMS texts every month. Again, from what we can tell, this is world scale. And again, I really want to impress you with how robust our core solution is. But having said all of this, this was then. That was then, okay? So RingCentral 2.0, okay? This was a few years ago when we realized the need to -- an opportunity to transform ourselves into a multiproduct portfolio company. So what we did is we extended our RingEX, our business phone with a full digital collaboration suite. So that would be video messaging, hybrid events. And very importantly, we've introduced our very own dedicated AI-led, AI-first contact center solution, which we call RingCX. You will hear a lot more about RingCX here, here some customers, partners and the senior management team that's responsible for this product is here to answer any questions during the break. Okay. A few more words about employees and customers. So -- sometimes people think that these are silos that there is employee-to-employer communication. That's on the left here. Yes. So that's personal calls, okay? And then there are dedicated contact centers, your 800-FLOWERS or United Airlines, those are the examples people usually come up with. And sometimes people think that the two shall never meet, that they are different solutions. You've got UC, UCaaS and CCaaS. Well, it so happens that situation is not so simple, okay? As you can see, according to IDC, there is -- and we see this firsthand, there is a very clear need for lightweight or hybrid contact centers, okay? And the difference between this use case and the dedicated contact center is just that. You have employees in your office, doing whatever creative work, selling, et cetera. But when the customer calls, they get to pick up the phone. So there is this overlap. So this is where people are still talking to consumers directly, but they have other work responsibilities. So the reality is that there is this new area that's emerging called Customer Engagement. And today, we've introduced our first customer engagement bundle, which addresses specifically this use case. So this is where you have, call it, a lightweight contact center with consumers calling a business. So they're not calling a business person by name. They're calling into a business and this call or text is being fielded by one of the personnel, okay? So between RingEX, our new customer engagement bundle, which is basically a tier of RingEX. And RingCX, we now have complete solution from very, very small to very, very large. Okay. Again, numbers don't lie. So if you look at use of RingEX in these lightweight contact centers, over 1/3 of our inbound calls are -- and again, we're talking billions here. Over 1/3 of our inbound calls are for this use case. We have another measure we look at is, so how many people are actually engaged? How many of these non-dedicated contact center agents are using our platform? Well, it happens to be well over 1 million. So this could make us one of the largest contact center providers in the world through the cloud. But again, in fairness with the caveat that these are not your traditional dedicated contact centers, which are in the end addressed by CX. Okay. So on that note, CX. So CX is about a year old, okay? And I believe it was the fastest CX or contact center product to reach 1,000 customers in individual accounts like in history. So now we have a bit over 1,000, 1,350 accounts, a little bit over that, and triple-digit growth year-over-year. So we're pretty happy with that. Having said that, we're just scratching the surface. There is still a lot of on-prem left. And over time, this -- and over time, most of the seats will end up in the cloud. With RingCX, we're absolutely taking market share with market growing in low to mid-double digits, call it, teens and with RingCX being in strong triple digits. Okay. So we've talked about 2.0, but that's not what we're here to talk about really. We're talking about RingCentral 3.0, okay? So what is RingCentral 3.0? So this 3 keeps on giving. Based on this platform, based on all of our experience with serving customer engagement needs from very small to medium to large to very large, we believe we are in a very unique position to lead this next phase in technology revolution. It's not evolution, it's revolution at this point, okay? So this week, we've introduced our agentic voice AI suite, which is comprised of the three As: AIR, AVA and ACE. What is AIR? It's an AI receptionist that answers your call before a human gets involved. What is AVA? It's an AI virtual assistant that monitors the call and provides useful hints and in certain cases, performs actions during a human-to-human interaction, okay? If you will, AVA is a form of a copilot. AIR is a form of an IVA, okay? And ACE, which we used to call RingSense, but now with some additions and enhancements, it's more than just making sense of Rings. It stands for AI communication -- AI conversation expert, ACE, okay? So this is where transcripts are being processed and analyzed for things like emotion, successful completion of a customer requests and other learnings that can be shared with an organization. Many people talk about AI, and it simply doesn't make sense to be in tech anymore and not want to have AI agents as part of your solution. What makes RingCentral uniquely positioned is, we simply happen to be most upstream, okay? So when people initiate a business transaction, again, they tend to call or they tend to text. And in that, they will, in many cases, hit RingEX or RingCX, okay? So Ring is answering the phone. Therefore, we are in a unique position to apply AI at the very get-go, which is exactly what we're doing with AIR as well as throughout the life cycle. Now clearly, every business provider -- business service provider will have their own AI. We are not going to do it all. But once we process what -- and we can address whatever we are addressing, then we are transferring to Salesforce ServiceNow, whomever it is, then we're transferring to specialists. But the first interaction, we're just in a good position to capture that. Okay. So again, I already mentioned, we have AI for now every phase of a transaction. And we will go into a lot more depth in the next few hours and let you experience and see how it works in real life. Okay. Here's a super interesting point. It's a virtuous circle. Everything is working together. AIR answers your phone, AVA aids during the conversation, ACE analyzes these learnings, the analysis are being fed back into AIR, back into AVA and then back into ACE. So the system is self-learning, self-modifying. And in the end, it's about generating progressively better outcomes for our customers. Our strong core belief is that a happy customer is a loyal customer and being that we have now transitioned ourselves or are transitioning more precisely from a just a transactional services provider into now a data repository, we think that this is what is going to fuel the next phase of our development as a company. Okay. Progress, again, numbers, not lying. Our new product portfolio is a little bit better than doubling year-over-year. There is quite a bit of action and energy in the field with many companies being funded and pretty nice valuations, certainly more power to them. But I don't think too many can boast this type of success, okay, to get from 0 to $100 million in 2 years, from $50 million to over $100 million plus in 1 year. We feel pretty good about it. Yes, it is still under 5% of our $2.5 billion revenue, but we absolutely have our sights on these new products, which are growing in triple digits, sometimes in triple digits sequentially. We have strong conviction that we will be at least 10% of our revenues within a couple of years and hopefully better than that. So this is our future here. Nothing is for free. And we are fortunate to be able to spend approximately $0.5 billion on product and tech every year. And majority of that spend is now dedicated to our AI-first portfolio. This is significant. Frankly, we think it's hard to match by many, if not most start-ups. And we are absolutely intent on keeping our laser focus on applying all of this energy to this one very important area of AI-led customer engagement. Okay. Routes to Market. You can have the best product in the world if 3 falling in the forest back to my 3 analogy. If nobody knows about it, it's probably not going to succeed. If you don't have a good product and you're screaming at the top of your lungs, you're also not going to succeed. But here, we happen to have both together. So we have a direct sales force, about 2,000 people strong, okay? It just so happens we have 2,000 engineers, 2,000 salespeople, okay, for whatever reason. But very importantly, we've talked over years about trust innovation. So we've talked a bit about trust today, reliability, innovation, rest of this presentation, partnerships. Partnerships are key to RingCentral. And with that in mind, we've built a network of channel partners over 16,000 strong. So these are individual businesses. As far as feet on the street, it's over 100,000. That's unique in the industry. Very importantly, we have this unique and absolutely differentiated channel via global service providers. So as you can see, some of the logos here are household names, AT&T, British Telecom, Charter Communications, Cox, Vodafone, et cetera. This list is growing. And very importantly, and I think it's an industry first that we know, many of these people are now picking up our multiproduct portfolio, including some of our newest products, for example AIR. In particular, we have just announced -- or more precisely, AT&T just announced that they're picking up AIR, putting it through their rather significant channel. We could not be happier than that -- could not be happier with that. And we think that this thing can go places with people like AT&T and a number of others reselling. Okay. Last, by far, far not least, team, okay? So like I say, about 7,000 people in the company with deep experience in our chosen field. This is our management team. And look, frankly, sometimes we hear, well, management turnover, some people came and went. That is true, but the core has stayed. If we actually went through this exercise. So if you add tenures of just the folks on this slide, it happens to be 150 years. That's a lot. Original architect of our technology is still with the company. He's sitting right there somewhere. You can raise your hand [indiscernible]. So if you have questions, that's him. Head of Engineering is here also for over 25 years. Kira has been with us for over 12 years and has led our product, our marketing and is now leading all day-to-day operations, so on and so forth, I don't need to bore you. Very importantly, we have a very deep bench with our 2,000 engineers, some of them literally going back decades. We're extremely fortunate in having this workforce in this powerhouse. And we truly believe that this field is our tools at this point. So without further ado -- with a little bit further ado, why? So why? Why? In the end, this is NYSE, and it is about dollars and cents. And there's lots and lots of dollars still to be had, okay? So in the bottom left here, you see the current markets that we are playing in, right? So that's, of course, UCaaS, still and not insignificant, approximately $30 billion market. It CCaaS, not that far behind at over $20 billion. Revenue intelligence. So ACE is a bit of a player in that. But all of this is going to be dwarfed by the emerging AI for customer experience and engagement. And this is estimated, I think it's a Gartner slide. It's estimated at $65 billion. Added all together, $150 billion, we're $2.5. We think we have a bit of open space still ahead of us. So again, this is my fourth time here at the exchange, hopefully, by far, not the last. And now [indiscernible], now that I've practiced [indiscernible] without further ado, here is Kira.

Thank you, Vlad. And hello, and thank you all for being here. I couldn't be more excited for the time that we're in. Vlad just described an incredible future for us for RingCentral, an incredible TAM that we're all staring at and are here to take advantage of. And -- let me start with our vision, summarizing everything that Vlad just covered. Our vision is that of building one Agentic Voice AI platform, where voice is really the springboard for all modalities of communication so that we basically unify in our conversation AI technology, every phase of the conversation and capture every moment, every insight, so that what we achieve out of that are outcomes. And that is really the value that we bring to our customers. Voice is, which is the most ubiquitous. It is the natural way that people communicate. Voice is the new UI, voice is most expressive. Voice is what we do better than anybody else, voice in the cloud. We are the clear leader and have deep roots and a growing ecosystem, and that will continues to grow. So with that, very early in the year, I actually outlined these 3 strategic priorities for us, which encompass our execution journey. One is continue to build upon our leadership with voice and now continue to build upon that with agentic voice AI, truly agentic. Second is grow our addressable market, grow our TAM, and it's led by our product, RingCX, which came into existence as part of RingCentral 2.0 and is now part of RingCentral 3.0 with a growing ecosystem of AI modules around it. And then finally, look, we're all going through a time of transformation. Every aspect of our company, every product, everything that we do is being transformed. And this is really what everybody is going through. We will show you how we run RingCentral on RingCentral and how we do what we do with doing more for less and more efficiently. And that is just the beginning of our journey as the company itself transforms with AI. So to sum up, how we're leading the future of voice -- of agentic voice AI and what are the stages, just summarizing where we are. We're in 3.0. And the 3.0, we're innovating faster than we've ever been, and we've always been a fast innovator. I even told ourselves that we have a history of market first. So yet, we're making the history of market first once again with RingCentral 3.0. We made a number of announcements on Monday. And let me just summarize them all in one place. AIR, product that rolled out at the beginning of the year, a lot more enhancements, a lot more value for our customers. AI Virtual Assistant, your copilot that basically is your assistance throughout your journey as a user, whether you're an employee of an employee, an agent and any job that you are, if you're using our product, then you have AVA that assists you. ACE that analyzes, summarizes and coaches you as well. RingWEM, which is the new addition to the suite, which is the combination of all of the quality management modules, including now our acquisition from CommunityWFM that builds up a suite of performance management for customer support agents, for example. And Vlad explained what customer engagement bundle is, which is really our formalization of capabilities for informal contact center or contact center light users. These new products, and they are all new products considering our history and considering how deep we go with our RingEX product, how deep our roots are, are growing extremely rapidly. Like look at the growth of AIR, look at the trajectory right here from essentially launching it in controlled availability in February to today having 5,800 customers and customers continue to sign up and customers continue to buy more of AIR, because it just does so much more for any one individual business, the enablement of never having to miss a call of now being able to set appointments whether these are, by the way, appointments, phone appointment, a video appointment, any kind of appointment that you can set. Doing things like contextual transfer. If AIR for some reason, cannot answer a call, then the AIR will transfer with context to a human being, and we'll show you more of how that works. And finally, look, every business wants to make money. So now with AIR, it's possible to capture lease. So no opportunity ever goes missed. And this is the test -- I mean, the customers are really the proof of that this thing is working. RingCX, Vlad mentioned rapid growth now at over 1,300 customers growing rapidly and innovating rapidly from a base product that does contact center management to adding a lot more AI so that, that contact center, the modern contact center is managed in the most efficient way. And some of the problems in contact centers that people have to solve is agent churn. That is a big problem. How do you solve this? You help the agent, you help the manager, you help the supervisor to basically coach them, monitor them and make the shifts operate more effectively. There are still a lot of human agents there assisted by virtual agents, and that is what this combination of the modules that we rolled out put together achieves. ACE, AI conversation expert, also rapid growth. Look at that kind of -- we like -- we call them the charts up and to the right. And when products -- newly introduced products do up and to the right, that means that customers like this [Technical Difficulty] we do this with our customers, and we have some of our channel partners in the audience, ask them how ACE helps them in their business. We're turning data into insights, data into outcomes, helping businesses beyond communications, helping businesses run their businesses better. And so let me just give you a couple of examples. Nothing -- again, nothing is a better testimonial to what we do than actually our customers. And nothing is better, especially to you people here in finance -- in financial industry, numbers speak volumes, right? So here's an example of a customer. This is a Fortune 500 insurance company that adopted [Technical Difficulty] they have enabled thousands of independent agents of this insurance conglomerate with RingCentral, starting with only '23 with a full RingEX rollout, then expanding that RingEX rollout based on the success of RingEX rollout, and this is typical of our customers. Our customers often start with an initial deployment of the product and then extend it. They expand it as they adapted [Technical Difficulty] for this customer of $6.8 million ultimately was achieved with adding RingEX and AI attached to RingEX that we will show you today in the demo. And the thing that is important here is beyond sort of rolling out these products. What's important is how we're transforming their business. We're transforming their customer experiences. And this is the value that RingCentral brings to our customers. The value in the transformation from being sort of in a dungeon with a PBX in somewhere in the basement or a customer engagement system being somewhere in the basement to this, which is a live system, which learns and adopts. And here's another example. This is a national casual restaurant chain that's growing very rapidly. These guys are adding 100 restaurants in a quarter or something like that, very rapid growth. They now have 900 throughout the country, and maybe that number now is higher. Again, they started with purchasing RingEX as their base core cloud phone system. They then expanded their RingEX deployment, getting to 1.5 uplift. And then we can see a 10x uplift to becoming a fairly sizable customer as they deployed it throughout all of their stores as they were bringing up stores online, every store -- sorry, every restaurant runs RingCentral and it runs RingCX. It runs ACE, it drives the quality management, and they continue to expand. And what's wonderful about this is that when we ask them, okay, so what's the value created? Better customer experience, certainly. But what is the actual value created? Can you try to quantify it? This is the number that's not coming from us. That's the number that's coming from them, 250% overall ROI with our products. This is why customers buy our products, and this is why we do what we do. Another example, this is a regional tire & auto service retailer. What's wonderful about these customers, this is what runs -- these are examples of what runs America. This is the companies and businesses that we all engage with every day. This is not just a cloud brand, like a big brand sort of in the sky. These are real businesses. And these real businesses need to solve day-to-day real business problems that we experience every day. And because of how many customers that we have, I'm sure that when you experience -- when you contact these businesses for customer support or any of the interactions and if it's a business running on RingCentral, hopefully, the experience is delightful. And that's what we try to do is make the sort of common American businesses delightful. So this tire company, again, started with RingEX, which is often a case for our products because that is our base and core product and what we're most known for. And then again, expanded with RingCX, ACE. And here, you see a 3x uplift in their total spend with us. And it so happens that it coincides with that their revenue rose 50% in that same time. So we'd like to believe that we're helping that company grow and delight their customers. And this is a good example of all these customers that I'm giving to you -- that I'm showing you of how our technology comes together for real growth for real outcomes. And then finally, this is a relatively small customer. This is an industrial equipment small business provider. They started and they purchased RingEX and purchased it for their needs. They're a small shop. 5,000, okay, well, they actually showed me 5,000. Well, because, first of all, we have a lot of small businesses running on RingCentral. And together, small businesses comprise a big chunk of our revenue as a company because America runs on small businesses because the world runs on small businesses. But what are we doing for these small businesses? Now with AIR, for example, we can increase wallet share for us. So we're doubling here going from 5,000 to 10,000. And the customer has now been able to never miss a call, be able to not have to hire extra front office receptionist, having to have all of the communication that comes through the front office, analyzed without actually having a human having to answer that call. And these guys get a lot of calls. Within a short period of time, they've actually extended AIR usage several times. And we love customers like that because this is solving, again, real problems with real outcomes. And while it has big words like AI around it, the real thing is this is AI helping humans run their businesses. So I talked earlier mentioned that we will tell you exactly how we use RingCentral. And this is an example of what we call RingCentral on RingCentral. We wouldn't be doing justice to our products if we weren't customer 0, and we're always customer 0 with all our products. So I'll show you just a couple of stats here. For sales, and this is Akshay's organization right there. He's sitting in the audience, amazing stat. Once they deployed ACE to all of the customer reps in North America, they were able to achieve a 10% quota increase for those using the product. That's like humongous, right? That -- it means that these reps are working more efficiently and that actually doesn't have to hire as many as the business is growing. In customer support, which actually also runs RingCX plus AVA plus AIR. So what does it do? With ACE -- I'm sorry, with AVA for quality management now within our customer support with Agent Assist, we're able to cut down average handle time for customer support by 15%. Again, what does that mean? That actually means beyond efficiency, customer delight because if customers' questions can be addressed faster with more accuracy, that creates customer loyalty and that's what we want as RingCentral for our customers, and that's what our customers want for their customers, obviously. With AIR, which is a relatively simple product, the beauty of it that it's very, very easy to install. It's very, very easy to change. It's very easy to adapt to the evolving needs of any business. And here at RingCentral, we have customers who call us on a number of what we call queues. So we were able to take the 20% of that volume already and put it on AIR. And that means that any call that comes in into that queue is answered by AIR. And again, for us, that [Technical Difficulty] and then combining sales and customer support, we were able to quickly deploy our RingWEM, which is a new module based on the acquisition of CommunityWFM and the rest of our AI quality management tools for agent performance to our 2,000 agents throughout our company, being able to score 100% of their interactions. All of that is just in a couple of weeks. There are, I guarantee you, not that many products in workforce engagement management that can be deployed to this size of a contact center in a matter of weeks. And again, that speaks to our values, RingCentral simplicity, ease of use, ease of deployment, ease of administration. [Audio Gap] the whole agentic voice AI voice platform is put together. This is a combination of all our products put together. And without further ado, I will pass it on to John to actually show you how. Thank you.

Good morning, everybody. My name is John Finch. I head up Product Marketing here at RingCentral. I like to say that I have 6 years of service. I've been at RingCentral earlier in my career, spent some time in some other places and have come back, and I'm really proud of the things that we're going to show you today. Everything has been about innovation and driving that innovation into the market for further success. And I sort of have the fun part of the presentation, if I may, because we've done a lot of great things with regards to these products, and they're really showcasing well in terms of how our customers are adopting them and using them to change the way that they do business and see the value of AI. So if we think about the value of artificial intelligence and how that seeds into what we do from an AI agentic business communications portfolio, it's really about the outcomes. Customers aren't buying products that have AI inserted in them for the sake of it, right? They're doing things to never miss a call, to book appointments, to capture leads, to provide customer service 24/7, to gain productivity, to improve and tighten business operations, staff efficiency -- efficiently, sorry, as well as understand CSAT, customer satisfaction across the board. These are tangible things that businesses are looking for us to give them the ROI and understand how AI is helping them. As Vlad and Kira also talked a lot about, we have a view of this of before, during and after the conversation. And I think this is a great way to showcase each of these products that we announced in the last couple of days, and really kind of show you exactly how the day in the life of, number one, a lightweight or formal contact center or customer engagement solution with RingEX will operate as well as number two, a formalized contact center and how that works where you're staffing agents and ensuring that customer engagement is happening inside of an organization. Before I do that, though, let's have a little fun. I'm going to show you a video that we've put out there as we're having fun in introducing AIR into the marketplace. And I got to say this thing is pretty good. So let me show you. [Presentation]

Pretty good. Let's see a round of applause for that one. I mean we've been having a lot of fun with AIR, and it's been having a lot of fun with us in the market as well. I mean, significant adoption, as you saw from Kira and Vlad, and we're continuing to innovate. Let's talk a little bit more about AIR. Air has been around since the beginning of the year. We did preannouncements on this product, and we've never seen something in the marketplace like this. The adoption of a product so significant that's AI and voice first is phenomenal. Each quarter, we've continued to innovate on this product. And the innovations continue to grow in its skill set and its abilities to answer questions and drive intelligent interactions across customers, so that businesses of all sizes never miss an opportunity and never miss a call. And this doesn't just now work with RingCentral's phone system. This works across any phone system. That's significant. Second daily to that, we've added some new things around calendar and booking appointments. Vlad mentioned calling into the dentist. I think most of us still do that. And that ability for this digital worker with the skill to book an appointment on behalf of a receptionist that could do other work inside the dental office, while that appointment is completely booked on calendars with Microsoft and Google, and soon to be many others, provides them with the real tools necessary to not have to staff that front desk to do that menial kind of work. In addition to missing calls, being able to capture the leads that are coming in, document those inside the knowledge base and even push those to a CRM are very important. So it provides businesses of all sizes that ability to actually handle those incoming opportunities. Next, let's talk about the contextual handoff. Kira mentioned that, and you'll see this in the demo. It's pretty cool because it actually provides the ability for AIR to handle an interaction up to a certain point, and then pass all that context off to the human being who will take that call and continue the conversation intelligently. No more of this, let me repeat myself 1,000 times and create frustration that many of us have had throughout the years. And finally, video, a dynamic RCV link that is sent via text message or an SMS message to a customer or a patient to actually invoke a live video conference on the spot on the mobile device. So as you all know, with our video, you don't have to download anything. You can use a web interactive tool. This provides that link and you can drive right from the app. Let's take a look at AVA and how easy it is to set up -- sorry, AIR, how easy it is to set up. [Presentation]

So that's the setup. That's how easy that is. Less than a couple of seconds to actually really set that up. And the ability for this solution, as Vlad had mentioned, to continue to learn and grow and perform better is all in the hands of the humans behind this. So the information that goes into the knowledge base, the FAQs, the website and other inputs that are made into the product as well as its ability to continue to grow over time and understand more, and you to be able to operationalize and optimize that solution continuously with the reporting and analytics that are on top of that is a significant value add to anybody in any business. If you don't even have that time to optimize, it's going to continue to do better work for you, the more it interacts with your customers. Let's take a look at what this looks like as a call-in from an actual call in to AIR. [Presentation]

There is the text message at the top and it's opened and the link and the information about the scheduled appointment. And now it's being transferred to a live agent. So what we're going to see on the next screen is the information that comes across to the agent who picks up the call. All the context and information and the agent's ability to leverage and utilize their tools, their AI tools like AIR and AVA to then pick up the conversation and continue the dialogue and solve the customer's issue. So pretty amazing, right? The impact of AIR has been pretty significant. These are just a representative of three different companies that have utilized and leveraged AIR with some significant results. They've been providing these customers with the outcomes and improvements on their business operations every day. Obviously, with 5,800 customers that we have today in the market using this product, we've got a significant bunch more that you can find on our website. But Access Integrated Health uses AIR to increase their patient intake, and they've seen an uptick of about 60% and increasing their revenue from utilizing AIR by $1.7 million. That's pretty good for an organization of that size. Televero Health has seen direct increase in customer satisfaction of 97% by utilizing AIR. They're not letting phone calls go on the wayside or ring no answer or going to a call queue or no one may answer that for a lengthy period of time. So that satisfaction has gone up significantly. And West Virginia 211 has the ability now to take 100-plus locations and effectively route 40,000 annual calls to the right locations inside that organization, so in West Virginia. So pretty significant results, and we're seeing this across the board as AIR continues its momentum in the market. If you want, you can take a picture of Natalie, who is our Agentic Air solution, and you can interact with her on your own. It's very great demo. You can call 1-844-5 try AIR, if you remember that. And you can interact. She'll tell you everything and anything that you want about herself, and you can even challenge her. I challenge you to challenge her and see if she'll go off base. I promise you she won't. Now let's talk about AVA. So we had great reception in terms of AVA in the marketplace as we launched this on Monday. And I think we have a lot more great things with her to come. In terms of being a virtual assistant across the board, right now, think of her as providing the notes and summaries for meetings and calls and chats. She's her copilot working alongside of you in your day-to-day inside RingCentral RingEX. She drives real-time insights. She drives prompts and information to help you to uncover the use of all of the products across the portfolio. So she's going to guide you through setup. She's going to guide you through discovery of information, and she's going to jump right to the areas for an administrator that are typically difficult to find or perceived, difficult to find. And it automates the setup of those administrative tasks as well, like changing time zones, business hours, other things. So she's not just across voice, she's also across video, she'll be across contact center and she'll be across the entire portfolio. And as we continue to release because what we announced on Monday was an early adopter sign-up program, we will continue to innovate upon her capabilities to really be proven in the market and significantly up-level RingCentral's users' experience across the board. So let's take a look at what AVA does. [Presentation]

So you saw here some very basic components, right? But I think as we go forward, you're going to start to see more and more of how AVA is going to interact across the board. So remember, video conferencing, meetings, events, contact center and the full portfolio of capabilities that we have across the board. So super excited about this. Stay tuned for more to come. This is definitely a flagship capability from RingCentral. Now let's talk about ACE. ACE is pretty cool. ACE is the new name for what we once called RingSense. And it really is taking and unlocking the data behind what your organization has to surface information on business insights. So I will start out with what's new today, and then I'll back into a little bit about the product that's been out for a couple of years because it has been out for a couple of years, and it's an amazing product all in all. What we have now that's new are those items I have listed there, which is the ability to surface key business insights to spot churn and potential risks with organization -- with customers that you have and track cancellations and friction that might be going on. What ACE has always been able to do is act as a universal solution to help improve the performance of teams or organizations or business divisions inside your organization like sales or an informal lightweight contact center solution or customer engagement solution to be able to coach those people to do better, to be able to perform better, to provide better customer service, to sell more faster. And all of the information that's transcribed during these conversations is also uploaded into a CRM, if necessary. So all those customer conversations across the board can be taken and put into the CRM for the record of the organization. Additionally, analyzing customer sentiment, as Vlad mentioned as well, a huge component, how is the customer feeling, how can you react to that? All of these key triggers go into overall performance improvement across the organization. What we announced on Monday is something called Insights. And what insights does is it takes this intelligence at this level and brings it to the business to make strategic business decisions. That's enormous. It provides the organization with those analytics, so they can look at their organization, look at the competitors, look at what customers are saying about new product launches, look at information about what's being communicated across organizationally, across teams, and it gives the organization at any level, executive on down, the ability to see the data, listen to conversations and react as a business, key elements in driving the success and leveraging and utilizing AI to do that. Let's take a look. [Presentation]

And at the end here, what you see are summarizations, but you are able to -- what's not coming up is you're able to interact with this, just like you would ChatGPT or any other AI tool to be able to ask specific questions. And it's going to provide you with feedback and information and blurbs as well as links to that information, so you can go listen to calls, view the dashboards and create your own intensive insight search into the product and into the areas of your business. So we've had a significant impact, obviously, since this product has been in the market for quite some time. Obviously, Insights is brand new. We have a number of customers in beta right now with us. But these are some of the customers that are currently using RingSense now called ACE. Endeavor Capital is one of them. They're increasing sales performance by using ACE. REE Medical has realized about a 300x increase in monthly call audits. So being able to go in and auto score conversations to improve sales performance. It's pretty huge. And then Brookstone Windows has also been able to analyze 100% automatically of its customer engagement calls, both inbound and outbound calls and improve those quality of those engagements. So you can see a lot of customers are using it already to leverage and utilize improvement of their business overall. And with Insights, we can see there's a whole lot more that customers will be able to do. So stay tuned for more customer references on what the new Insights product will provide. Now let's jump back a little bit and talk about RingEX. So obviously, on the tree of life, I'll call it, that Vlad had brought up, RingEX was the beginning for us. It is our business -- AI business phone system. It's the core. It's the PBX in the cloud. We've had great success with this product. And what we announced just today with a press release that went out is we announced the customer engagement bundle. So for lightweight or informal contact center solutions across the organization, those are individuals inside the organization who have other day jobs. They could be an accounting. They could just be with the front desk person; they could be anywhere inside the organization. When a call comes in for customer service or sales, they're able to answer those incoming calls. And so on top of this, this is a bundle that provides, number one, call queues, which is the ability for these calls to come in and the organization to set up a queue based on specific needs. So one could be customer service, one could be sales, one could be name your favorite department and bring those all the way across to be able to have people answer those as they're able to within their day job. In addition to that, we've provided some contact center type functionality that provides ultimate contact center solution on top of this. And what this is, is wait time and positioning queue. And this functionality is if an individual calls in and is in wait for a queue or an agent to pick up, they will get an estimated wait time, and they will also have the ability to hang up and have the solution call them back and they'll never leave their position in queue. Most of us who have had engagements with large contact centers have realized this experience. You probably all remember it. But now for informal contact centers, for every organization, for those 1.2 million that Vlad talked about, they have this solution as well. Additionally, there's an SMS inbox solution. Many of our small businesses leverage and utilize SMS or messaging more frequently sometimes than voice or as equally. So we see communications both inbound and outbound with SMS messaging for obviously, confirmation of appointments, for promotions, for other things, we all get them. This is a shared inbox that provides the capability for the organization to manage all of those communications. The ability to do that is significant because these smaller organizations needed one place to do that management, and it provides their ability for queues and other elements to come together and provide that informal contact center capability. On top of this is reporting and analytics, a necessary component to running an effective contact center solution. And it's not about analytics after the fact. It really is about analytics in real-time as well as after the fact. So having all of these features and functionalities inside of an informal lightweight contact center solution, we call customer engagement bundle. Also of note, all of our customers that currently have RingEX can leverage and utilize what we call boosters. They can add independently these solutions to their existing RingEX from RingCentral. So they don't have to go to the tier, which is an encompassing of all of these features for a price, but they can go and add boosters to certain users that they'd like to add that are already part of the RingCentral solution. Let me show you what this looks like. This is a short video. [Presentation]

So what you just saw there was the full bundle, the full suite of capabilities. It includes all the AI solutions we've been talking about up to this point today, including RingEX, AIR and ACE, call queues and SMS messaging. So all these features and functionalities lead to an AI-first customer engagement solution end-to-end for our customers now in RingEX. One of my favorite areas is customer engagement, obviously. And customer service has been a very important component for RingCentral. It is, as Vlad said, one of the fastest-growing new native contact center solutions in the industry. We ascertained more customers in one first year than any of our competitors ever did. This doesn't come without a ton of work and thinking about how the solution works end-to-end to provide a formal contact center. And the industry has been around for a long time. But for us to come out with a solution that is native as part of the RingCentral suite of solutions that provides 20-plus digital channels and includes voice, it's simple and easy to deploy, as Vlad said, and it's also priced just right. This adoption comes together and provides some great success. Now the one thing that makes this product significantly unique is that it is AI-first. And so every stage of the customer journey that we've gone through already, which I've gray out here, AI receptionist, we saw that at the front door answering the interactions that come in. We use this in an informal contact center type solution, which you see with AVA, being there to help and assist the informal agent and the employee. And then we saw ACE with business intelligence. And all of this is part of RingEX. Now let's talk about CX. But since we've already gone through AIR and what she can do at the front door at the beginning of the conversation to handle the interaction before it ever gets to human, let's talk about AVA Agent Assist and AVA Supervisor Assist during the call, what that does for an agent and how it helps to improve customer satisfaction and then after the call, let's talk about what ACE and the part of ACE that is Workforce Engagement Management, which we also launched on Monday and how that all works. So let me break this down. First, with RingCX AVA Agent Assist. This is a solution that provides agents with real-time guidance. It's pulling information and providing it to the agent with the right information at that right moment. So it's not a flood of information. It's not a script. It's not something where they're going to have to go and dig for the information, have long pauses with a customer on the line. They are able to see that information on the right-hand side, and I'm going to show you a demo right away that's listening contextually to the conversation, pulling information out from the knowledge base or other integrations that exist within the solution to provide that agent with the right information in real-time. It significantly improves customer satisfaction. We continue to see the adoption of our customers using this and requiring this in RFPs and other conversations that our sales teams are having at small, medium businesses and larger businesses that we utilize and sell RingCX to, and it's reducing handle times and increasing customer satisfaction overall. AVA Supervisor Assist is also pretty amazing. This is a solution that provides a supervisor the ability to save an interaction before it becomes a problem. AI at the forefront of this solution allows a supervisor to have a dashboard of every single agent in their mix. They will be identifying each of these callers as they're on live calls or live interactions with the ability to notice if there's sentiment or other components of the conversation that are driving this to potentially going south. It will signal that information on the dashboard and the supervisor can click on that interaction and bring that information up and see a transcript in real-time of the call, a note summary up to that point during the call and be able to listen, whisper and barge into the conversation where necessary. It ultimately saves interactions, customer interactions in the formal contact center before they ever become a problem. And finally, RingWEM or Workforce Engagement Management. We've done a lot with this. It's become a very robust solution that provides what we've announced a year ago, which is quality management and the ability to score every single interaction that happens with an agent and automate a scorecard behind that, and it's a quality management process that exists in the contact center world for many, many years. But what we've done with this is -- we've improved it by automating it fully with AI to provide a solution holistically where AI will do this for you for a supervisor, send this information to the agent, and you'll see this in the demo because I know it's a lot. And it will automatically provide a score for the agent for improvement activities. This is how you drive customer satisfaction, improvement in learning, along with what you saw with Agent Assist. Secondarily, interaction analytics. This is part of ACE, and this provides the ability for any contact center to understand customer satisfaction or CSAT at any moment. Only AI can do that. Most of the time, getting to a CSAT score was very difficult. And as Kira mentioned in her slides, our support organization actually is utilizing and leveraging this to improve customer satisfaction. We're seeing those gains, as Kira mentioned in her talk. And finally, workforce management. We made an acquisition in September of a company called Community WFM, and this rounded out our suite, which we now call RingWEM. This is a competitive component in the marketplace for us. It differentiates us holistically. We now compete with the likes of some very large contact center providers that are out there. We are a force to be reckoned with. Let me show you what this end-to-end solution looks like across the before, during and after experience of a contact center. [Presentation]

That is RingCX. We're proud of the customers that we've attained. There's been significant impact across these organizations from saving 10 hours per week in what was once a manual process of coaching and scoring interactions to saving those 10 hours is huge in any size organization, especially a formal contact center where you have 50, 100, 200, 1000s, 10,000s of agents. San Diego Symphony leverages RingCX to improve call abandon rates and really have seen an improvement in how people are buying tickets and decreasing hold times by 95%. It's really an effective solution across the board that provides them with that overall capability that we just saw. And Novatek is leveraging ACE or what we call AI quality management to automate the coaching as well. And they've seen a 20% improvement in customer service interactions on a daily basis. So if you think about the number of agents that are answering that and the revenue associated with the Symphony, that is a very big deal for them. So we've had quite a conversation, and I want to thank you all. We've talked a lot about what we're doing today in terms of the leadership that we have in Agentic voice AI. Additionally, we covered what Kira and I represented in terms of the AI announcements with AIR, AVA and ACE. And I also introduce to you the CE bundle and the details, customer engagement bundle for RingEX as well as our new RingWEM or Workforce Engagement Management. That's all I have for you right now. What I would like to do is let you know that we have a 10-minute break. So feel free to run around, use the restrooms, and then we're going to come back in here and pick up. Thanks, everybody. [Break]

Thanks, everybody. Everybody, if we can take a seat, we're going to get started with the second part of our big show here. So that was pretty impressive, right? It's amazing what I can put together in 2 weeks, right? No. Obviously, a huge thanks to our corporate marketing team and such for putting everything together. It was -- it's fantastic to be able to share all this with you. So now we're going to -- as we said earlier, we're going to go ahead and get started with giving you more insight by talking to some customers, some channel partners and some global service providers. So with that, I go to introduce Akshay, our go-to-market guru, if you can join us on stage.

Good morning. I'm thrilled to be here today. Just by way of introductions. I'm Akshay Srivastava, and I have the privilege of leading RingCentral's go-to-market organization, bringing together direct sales, channel sales, professional services, customer retention and most recently, our customer support organization. Now when I told my wife and my daughter that I was taking on customer support for RingCentral, my 16-year-old's first reaction was so dad, you really can't hide from all the customers you sold to. And I said, yes, that's kind of the point. We're bringing it all together in service to the best customer experience. Look, I've been with RingCentral for a little over 6 years at this point. I've worked in a variety of functions across the company in service to improving customer experience, partner experience, growing our revenue base. And that's been incredible. It's been incredible to see how the company has evolved and how our customers and partners are evolving with us. And as we evolved into RingCentral 3.0 that Vlad spoke about, the next chapter will require us to transform our go-to-market organization. It is all going to come down to customer experience. We're going to have to organize around the end-to-end customer experience, and we're going to have to do it with our amazing products and our AI innovation. We are 3,000-plus folks in my organization at RingCentral. Every single person is at present using our NPI products, our new products and every single person is using RingCentral's AI products. We are operating at scale within RingCentral using all of our products. And we're doing this in close partnership with our customers, our channel as well as our GSPs, or global service providers, that Homayoun will cover later. We have over 0.5 million customers that we're proudly serving today. We have over 16,000 channel partners that we work with. And all of this is happening globally. Our global reach is helping us accelerate our innovation and get our products out there better and faster than ever before. Now today, you will hear from the people who are making all this real. You will hear from our customers. You will hear from our channel partners and you will hear from one of our newest global service providers that Homayoun will introduce later. To start us off, Denise Lund from IDC will be coming on with our customers. From Envision Radiology we have Andrew Benson, Liesl Perez from Axis Health, and we have Paul Rapier from the Detroit Pistons. What's interesting about all of these customers, number one, diverse set of industries. It talks about that reach, that diversity in industry and vertical that we provide as a company. And secondly, all of these customers are using RingCentral's multiproduct portfolio, and all of them are using our AI to better improve their customers' experiences. So without further ado, please welcome Denise, Andrew, Lisa and Paul.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the RingCentral customer panel discussion. I'm Denise Lund, Research Vice President at IDC covering worldwide unified communications and telephony. Today, we're exploring how integrated employee and customer engagement solutions are redefining business communications. The 3 amazing panelists we have here today will talk to how the accumulation, combination and integration of all of the RingCentral solutions are working for them in each of their industry verticals. Before we get started, we'll -- in the topics, we'll go through a brief introduction. So start at this end.

I'm Andrew Benson. I'm the Chief Innovation Officer for Envision Radiology. We own and operate 60 outpatient imaging centers across 6 different states.

My name is Liesl Leary-Perez. I am the Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer for Axis Integrated Mental Health. We are both Colorado Biz Magazine's Top Startup of the Year and also Denver Business Journal's top philanthropist or one of the top philanthropists.

I'm Paul Rapier. I oversee the IT department as VP of IT for the Detroit Pistons.

Thank you. So let's get started. We'll start by first looking at an IDC conceptual graphic that really sets the stage for what we'll discuss today on the panel. The headline here is that integrated employee and customer engagement solutions are defining and redefining the future of unified communications. What this means in reality for our businesses here today are that organizations are no longer treating employee collaboration, employee productivity as separate from their customer engagement activities. These aren't silos in the organizations here, and that's thanks to the solutions they have at play. IDC's research points out that this integration isn't just a technical evolution. It's a real tangible growth opportunity for all of the companies we have here and how they run their businesses and what their futures are. Businesses can create more seamless experiences as AI wraps around the employee communications solutions and the customer experience solutions and the newer, very exciting opportunity of the integrated unified communications and customer experience modules and solutions. With this, businesses have improved outcomes, positioned themselves for success in today's highly competitive market. This slide here is an IDC graphic from our research that really highlights the importance of thinking holistically about communications with AI, and AI is really included throughout. It's not just underneath or up above all of these solutions. It's really woven throughout. And that's a very great point for our conversation today. The last thing I wanted to share before we dive into the discussion topics, the market outlook that IDC sees is impressive. In 2024, the unified communications customer engagement market generated just $350 million, which is notable, but just $350 million. And it's projected to grow at a remarkable 41% CAGR by the end of the forecast period you see here, reaching $2 billion in 2029. And that's just one piece of this massive market opportunity. The rapid expansion that you see in the CAGR highlights the increasing demand for solutions that unify the communication channels, streamline the workflows that we'll hear more about today and deliver better experiences for both employees and customers. So as we dive into the discussion, I encourage our panelists here in the audience to consider not only the technological advancements, but also the strategic opportunities that each of our panelists have experienced and lived in their verticals.

So let's -- thank you for joining us. Let's get started. We'll start with our Detroit Pistons. You're using practically the entire RingCentral portfolio from EX to CX and to events and AI receptionists. Can you talk a bit about how bringing these products together has changed the way your teams work, how they serve customers?

Yes. I mean, originally, our journey with RingCentral started 6 or 7 years ago, 7, I believe. The goal there was to help us transition from our headquarters in Auburn Hills down to Detroit, closer to our new arena. It allowed us to take our on-premise phone system and communicate with our fans from anywhere, whether it be at the arena, at the headquarters, or around the road. It started there. And as we have grown with RingCentral, keep adding products and all of those products are integrated well together and allow us to just stay connect to all of our customers. So regardless where we are and just keep adding whether it be like an event or an AI-driven sales call, or just a meeting all from the same app.

Thank you. Thank you. What about the transforming customer experience, I think we're going to want to lean into what's the biggest difference that you've seen, Andrew, at your -- within your company, in your customer interactions since you've rolled out RingCX?

Yes. RingCX has been transformational. We really struggle from a call center standpoint. And then when we adopted a RingCX, we really solved a lot of problems right away. It's so easy. It's so simple. I think John highlighted a lot of things on the page, but it really is that easy. You don't need a big IT department that's managing it. You have the people that do it every day that are running that. So we've really been able to give a lot of autonomy to our leadership to run their teams. And so with RingCX, whether that's setting up special call queues, or routing, or the various different options, everything that we have done has resulted in lower abandoned rates, better agent handle times. We're seeing better agent utilization. And then all of that to say that our patients are happier. We have extremely high patient experience satisfaction scores. That starts with that first phone call because in healthcare, still a lot of phone calls. So we set the stage upfront with RingCX, teeing up the information to our agents. They have a good patient experience upfront, and that sets the stage for a great patient experience all through the life cycle of their journey with us.

What about the inbound and outbound and abandon rates and so forth? Can you tell us a little more about that? I know that's super important.

Yes. So we take about 12,000 total calls a day between inbound and outbound. Abandon rates are consistently under 1%. Handle times again are low on our outbound reach, most agents are achieving anywhere from 120 to 140 outbound calls a day. And then on the inbound, again, it's maybe a 4-minute average handle time, 3.5 minute average handle time, but our agents are on the phone, 65% to 70% of their day. So we're getting maximum performance from our agents with high patient satisfaction.

That's great news. Yes. That's good. And I guess lastly, we'll kind of spread the conversation around here and move to Liesl. But one last question for you. In terms of hiring and onboarding and training folks coming on to your organization, how are you finding that your RingCentral solution is helping you, Andrew? Yes. We'll move -- Liesl, please. Thank you.

I think the ease of use is actually one of the things that's the best part about RingCentral. And especially because for small business owners like myself, and especially in healthcare. Most of us didn't get into this business to run a call center. That's not our bread and butter. We're certainly not good at IT. That's not the point. And so one of the parts about RingCentral that's made it so easy that training the AI has not been the biggest challenge that I thought it would be. And in fact, it was so easy to use that our receptionist was the one who actually went and started training AIR. And I think you have that same type of experience. When you think about the technology companies that have scaled the most like Zoom or Canva. It's because it was that easy to use that anybody could do it, that it got wide adoption. And I was happy to see that our employees are happier because it's taken a lot of the tedious parts out of their workload out of the equation, they can actually focus more on training the AI and making it better and better.

And I think that goes to what Paul is saying, really, when it comes together, those employees in the back, right. Desks are able to work better because your front customer-facing employees can.

For sure.

Maybe one comment on AIR about how easy it is to set up AIR. Like we had an executive assistant and a receptionist setup AIR for the company. It's not IT personnel. It is who's your experts that's dealing with those phone calls every day and having them actually do the setup themselves, which I think is still empowering to give them that ability.

Yes. And to be able to have the self-confidence, right, build after all that, this technology is really usable, and it works well together and so forth. That's great. So can we talk a little bit more about RingSense and then in RingCX plus RingSense? Do you want to talk a little more about that?

Yes, I can take that. I think so RingCX and RingSense all, it's now ACE. You guys changed on this. So RingSense and RingCX is like this magical combination. I think RingCX has really empowered us to have high performance, like I shared with our agent performance. But then when you combine that with all of the insights that come out of the RingSense data, we now understand not only how are we performing from a number standpoint, we understand how we're performing from a satisfaction sentiment, all this analysis that we would never do without AI. And all of a sudden, these tools are available as like, oh, 100% of our calls are being analyzed. 100% of our calls are being scored. And then we've actually been able to create customized scorecards per call type to analyze those costs. So 100% QA. I mean, we were lucky to do 5 calls QA per person in a month with human staff. And so we just freed up all that human capital to go focus on other things, and have a tremendously better experience from an overall performance. I guess it's really just been a life-changing addition to our RingCX platform.

And that's clear, right? We all have experience with health care organizations in our daily lives. So it's clear we can see that value. And the Detroit Pistons, are you also seeing that in your industry with the Ring products?

Yes. We deployed RingSense. I think we're probably early adopters earlier this year. We had it integrated with our CRM. It was saving all of our sales agents' hours of time, capturing their notes, but more than that capturing the entire call transcript and then uploading that to our CRM. Right now, we are in the middle of -- still working on our CRM transition. So we haven't got that working the way it was, but we're looking forward to that continued benefit as soon as we get that deployed. But also the managers like Andrew mentioned, helping them identify sentiment analysis and he's helping them identify calls that need the most coaching, just better service our customers and our agents.

I know that for my study of the industry, it's a unique time right now with this suite of Ring products is that they can apply to each different industry without too much strain, right, on your IT and so forth, your office staff. So that's great. So let's shift gears a bit and Liesl, we'll start with you this time. I know you've been seeing some quite impressive outcomes with AIR. What kind of difference has AI receptionist made in your day-to-day operations?

It's made a huge impact. I think one of the things that we were most impressed with was the fact that there's two kinds of people who call into my clinic. There's your average patient who just wants to get their ADHD meds and needs to get their appointment with their providers so they can be monitored, and they really don't need to have a whole conversation. And then there's the desperate mom who just wants to see there's their kid, or their spouse or whoever smile again. And those people need time to talk to someone to help navigate that entire journey of mental health, insurance, how much is in costs, what are even the options. I have been with both of those people on the same day. Not -- a true story. And so when I start thinking about AIR, I start thinking, really, the biggest impact it's made is that it's allowed us to scale impact and empathy to people who really need to talk to somebody. And allow all of our other calls to just -- I can see how many text messages are sent every single day with the link to schedule because you can schedule online. The biggest aha moment for me having come from high tech for most of my career was that people don't schedule online for doctors' appointments. Even if they can, they still call in and want to talk to the front desk. So for me, being able to just see all of the checks that go out with the online scheduling link has been impactful and has made us far more efficient, which means we can take more new patients, and because they need that conversation and that reassurance that, yes, we can do something more than meds. Doesn't just have to be another pill. We can actually -- we're not just going to help you reduce your symptoms, we can actually help you go into remission. And that's a conversation that is not ever going to happen through AI. But what AI lets us do is prioritize those conversations quickly.

That's really great. And Liesl, you had something unique, right, where you've worked on other tools and then come back to the RingCentral tools. And I found that to be a really interesting twist.

Yes, I think -- well, I have an interesting background because I spent 9 years in generative AI, and I understood how to train AI. Most small business owners like me will not know how to do that. And so -- and because of that, I have AI in pretty much every part of my mental health business. I have AI charting. I have AI in our CRM, answering questions. So whenever I've had to train an AI, not the easiest. Not my favorite part of the job, a lot of other platforms you have to do the question and answer. Each FAQ at a time, it is painful. And you don't -- you have to really think about what is it that the patient is asking for. I mean that's where RingSense is actually really, really helpful. It gives you a great idea of what to do. But with AIR, it was -- it's like a great beginner AI, right? If you're going to start -- because I actually went out and bolted a bunch of other things onto it afterwards, but it was the -- it's the core platform that manages all the other communications that we -- and we have very specialized needs being in mental health, being in healthcare, EHRs are crazy. But because it was so easy to train, as I said, our receptionist did it essentially. And it's really helped our front desk team become the growth and innovation center for the company. I always say you don't want a crappy chess player like me, training your AI if you're trying to create an AI that can do chess. You want like a Kasparov, you want some Russian Grandmaster doing it. And -- but for us, the grandmasters are the front desk. They're the first point of contact for a patient. They're the person who's going to see that patient go through their transformation, they're the friendly face. They know what needs to happen to scale that impact. And so the fact that it was so easy to train and that the experts were the ones training AI receptionist, that's what really has sold it for me.

Yes. And Paul, I know you mentioned when we were chatting that you've had a similar experience setting up AIR and working with kind of that balance of non deep AI and AI and so forth. Yes.

When it comes to AIR. Right now, we AIR deployed to our help desk, or IT help desk which actually built out. We also built out AIR 4, our main ticket sales number. It has not been deployed yet. Still waiting on approvals on that, but I'm hoping to transition that to the people who actually answer the phone as well because I agree. I think I mean, it's amazingly easy to set up. But once we get that deployed, I look forward to them adding more insights based on the questions that they get that are most common and taking that lift off of the contact center.

That's really great. And Andrew, what are you experiencing with this?

So one of the interesting things about AIR is that when you try to sit down and to Liesl's point, put all the information into it to handle calls correctly, you very quickly realize where you have a lack of standardization or a lack of understanding of your process. And so adding that AI step into even setting it up, illuminates all these potential gaps and you start to realize, well, how are people actually answering the phone? What is going on here? And then for us, if you can go back to RingSense and you can say, okay, let's look at all of these calls that have happened and how they've been handled. And then how do I move that into the AI receptionist. There's a lot of aha moments like, oh, we're not consistent here. We're not standardized there. Look at these ways that we're doing this differently. And then it forces us as a business to say, okay, well, we really have to create consistency. And so we use that data to then go back to AIR and say, how are we going to have this call answered? How are we going to have this call triaged? How are we going to respond to this in a certain way? And so it's really highlighted process gaps and that forced us to convert those things to say how are we going to solve this and then that's how we do that with AIR.

That's great. I'm sure employees and customers appreciate improvements in processes, yes. Well, all the qualitative and process and operational benefits. So let's talk about [indiscernible]. Have you all been seeing in action with RingSense? Are there -- some examples each of you could share where you've experienced real results from the AI? Thinking time saved or better insights we've talked about, but time save, measurable ROIs, those tangible proof points that everyone here would love to learn about.

Yes. So I can get started because one of the challenges we had was trying to book appointments. Small business as many are and just answering the phone and getting people scheduled can take a long time. And again, the big aha moment from me was like, oh my God, people actually call to make appointments. They don't just book it on their phone, which I had never even really thought about. And so what I had figured out essentially is that by implementing AIR, we [indiscernible] about 40% more intakes every single week than we were when we were just answering the phone with people. And I take -- I think because people just didn't abandon the process, they were like, oh, they didn't answer the phones, so I'm not going to book, or I'll book with a competitor even worse. And so that actually helped us when I calculated out LTV at the low end, not even at the high end because you don't necessarily know what every customer is going to do. But we are generating about $1.6 million more in revenue because just simply because we are now able to book more intakes. It's probably more than that, in all honesty, but it's hard to know. And it's also helped us make the justification for doing our first acquisition. We actually bought a competitor because we have the confidence to say we can fill you up pretty quick. No problem. Don't even have a question about that anymore. And obviously, that extra money helps cover those expenses in buying a competitor. But those are real results that came from...

And your system actually broke, right? The processes because the amount of calls?

Yes, I did a burst test where I said, okay, let's see how many people we can get in? And we have a -- you can get in within a 7-day guarantee and we're past that now. So I had to turn off marketing. But in the experiment of doubling the number of calls we were getting per week, I did notice that AIR is taking about 30% of our calls. I mean -- so that's 14 hours that no person needed to touch the call and that person would serve -- or yes, about 70% of those calls are going directly to -- it's transferring it to the person that needs to transfer to. It could be billing. It could be prior authorization, it could be -- I just need to leave a message for my provider. But yes, that's a huge amount. It started off at 24%. So about 1/4 of our calls were being handled by AI. Now it's -- I'm seeing a steady rise over time. So as more people become used to it, and there's a bit of a learning curve for patients. Because they're -- again, they're used to like I just want to talk to my doctor and it's like, you can't do that.

Yes. That's good. It sounds like they keep coming back. So that's great news. Andrew, what about in your case, the API lookup and what kind of benefits changeable results has your organization experienced?

Yes. So we have RingCX is hooked up into our practice management system. So when a phone call comes in, we look up the phone number, and we pulled back any patients to potentially match to that so we can present that information to the end user. But not only that, but we route those calls to special cues. So for us, being in multiple states, multiple just from an types, different complexity, we can intelligently route calls to the right people. So not only do we have better efficiency in terms of our performance, but we're trying to get mostly patients to the best person to take care of them. So through that look up into our system, we can say, oh, this is a really complex case. Let me get this to my best scheduler. Or I look up and I say, this is my most simple case. Let me get to that to my new hire. And so it's kind of interesting we can actually protect our new hires to be successful faster by shielding them from these complex cases. And at the same time, if you give a complex case to a new person, they're probably going to screw it up, and then the person on the other end of the line is going to be unhappy. So I think it's exponential in terms of customer satisfaction, but also employee satisfaction.

And it's so hard to overstate the importance of consistency across all of that. And Paul, I wonder if you can talk to some of the benefits of that integrated solution on your end?

Yes. I mean from an AIR perspective, like I mentioned earlier, we don't have it fully deployed to our main contact center, but it is on our help desk. And it's answering a lot of basic questions that we get in our ticketing system, just to kind of take that off of my team. But yes, I mean we're continuing to build out AIR for our main contact center number, and I look forward to those kind of results because being able to move calls based on what they're looking to buy or -- and then filter that based on who it's going to, like whether it's a new hire or a senior person. I mean that's going to be amazing. But yes, in RingSense I mean that's what we've been running the longest, right? The time saved there is really just capturing the notes in that transcript of that call and making sure that it gets applied to the correct CRM record. That has just been huge for us.

Yes.

Maybe could I add a point on that. So there's lots of numbers flying around, but there's a lot of like just some objective human element of this, too. And employee satisfaction is high, but I would say our supervisor and leadership teams have seen the most impact from all these different solutions, especially with RingSense, now ACE. Having 100% scoring, we actually have some of our agents every week, they evaluate how they perform. So we've actually put some autonomy back into the frontline staff hands to say, go look at how you're performing. Go review performance, identify where you can have improvement. And so it shifted a lot of that burden off the leadership team. And so now the leadership team is focused on outcomes, accountability, expectations, performance, and they're not stuck dealing with all of these more menial mundane tasks, we freed them up to focus on things that are going to make an impact to the business. So I'm really excited about the insights thing, John, like can't wait to get like that's going to be huge. And so by having our leadership team spend their time focused on insights, rather than focus on all these other smaller ROI efforts, I think that, again, is going to be -- I've said the word before but transformational for our business.

Yes. And if I just want to add on that. We've got Paul here, who is in IT, and that's your background. And my background is in marketing. And I don't know for any marketers out there, but how many of you have been like, I'd love to do that, but I don't want to talk to IT. That sounds really hard. But the fact of the matter is we can collaborate more now because it's like, okay, I know this is what the customer needs, and now I know how to actually implement it because it's easy. It's easier to understand, and that makes -- and so then you can again shift more work on insights and executing it faster.

And I think everybody -- I mean, I know from my experience is everybody's validated more and where they want to grow as -- in their careers. So I think we've got those softer sides to it. We'll wrap up here because we'll be pulled off the stage soon. Looking ahead, the future of AI and CX. We're looking to hear from everyone about where you think your business is headed, your individual business or your industry sector, what do you see as the biggest opportunity to keep expanding AI and automation and how do you see RingCentral playing a role in that. Start with...

Well, I mean, RingCentral has already been helping us innovate in all communication spaces over the last 7 years. So I just look forward to all these new products that I learned about today even. But I think like every other organization out there, we want AI and like every department and every section of our business to help improve efficiencies and processes for both employees and the applications. So yes, I just look forward to everything growing.

Right, Liesl?

So I was actually texting my ops director when you were talking about the lightweight customer call center, and I said, guess what we're doing next week. So that's really exciting. I think there's a huge opportunity. I had worked at TTEC at one point. I had called all of our competitors when I was looking to enter -- to create a call center. The nature of mental health, however, prohibits really trying to outsource this to another country. And so for me, we're going to be using AI really to be there more for the individual and scale personalization to the moment, not just the demographic.

Great. Andrew?

Yes, I look forward to growing together. When I think about RingCentral, I think there's exceptional products that's paired with exceptional people. And I get really excited about growing together and taking healthcare forward. I think healthcare is always so far behind. And I think especially in customer experience, across patient experience, how can we drag the industry forward to say this is the future today that we can take advantage of? So I look forward to faster calls, faster resolution, faster schedule times, everything that's fast. In healthcare, you need answers now. And I think that starts and ends with communication, right, from the very first interaction to the results that you get. And I think the before, during, after, RingCentral hits all of those marks. And so I think it's us figuring out how do we align at every one of those touch points and make sure that we're maximizing the performance for our patients and for our employees.

That's great. Now I want to thank our panelists for joining us today. It's been a great discussion. I know that from my perspective at IDC, I've been studying this unified communications, employee engagement, customer engagement market for quite some time, well over a decade there, but in the industry well over a few decades, and it's moving fast. It really is a fast time, RingCentral is right in the sweet spot of where we see a lot of innovation and where our panelists are seeing real results. So thank you.

All right. Huge thanks to Denise, Liesl, Paul and Andrew. No greater validation for all this innovation, than from our customers themselves. Next up, I'll be welcoming on stage Zeus Kerravala, leading industry analyst along with 2 of our key channel partners, Joe Rittenhouse from Converged Technology Professionals, also known as CT Pros. And Mike Schoenholz from ARG. What's interesting in working very closely with Joe and Mike is, obviously, it's been a long relationship with them. They've been with us for several years. But I talked earlier about customers and partners evolving with our product portfolio set. And this is a great example because both of them are now adopting the full stack of RingCentral's products. Besides the business side of the relationship, and we love doing business with them because they do a lot of business with us. I think what really draws us to working so well with these two fine gentlemen, and some of our other channel partners as well, is just a great amount of customer empathy that they bring. They truly care when things are not right. I will get text and calls very, very quickly. And we together will get on it, and we will make sure that the customers are situated well. And I think that's what we really look for in a partnership. And the other thing that both of them bring is a great amount of candor and input into both our go-to-market models as well as our product road maps. The energy that they bring and the input that they bring makes us better as a company, and so very, very proud to be working with both these individuals. Please welcome Zeus, Michael and Joe.

Okay. Well, they made Denise stand, but I'm going to sit.

All right, you guys get up here.

While they're getting set, I'll just do a quick and run myself. I actually overlapped with Denise. We were both at Yankee Group at the same time. And so I'm a long-time industry analyst. I'm an independent one. I don't go as deep into the numbers and things as Denise does. But I tend to cover a lot of emerging technologies and trying to understand how it affects a lot of infrastructure and things that this is certainly part of it. This is a space I've looked at for a long time. And I'm excited to talk to you guys. And I don't know you as well, Michael, but I certainly know Joe, and it's funny to listen to Akshay introduce you how you've evolved your businesses. I first met Joe at a Mitel event, [indiscernible]. So that just shows how this industry has changed. And so just before we get into the questions, a quick intro on yourselves. Mike, why don't we start with you?

Yes. I'm Mike Schoenholz, I'm the CEO of ARG. ARG is an IT consulting company. We help customers make thoughtful business decisions and then we support those decisions. After the sale, we represent hundreds of technology companies like RingCentral. We'll do 2,000 RFPs, 8,000 engagements, resolve tens of thousands of tickets on behalf of our customers. I recently heard from my team that there was a new CIO at a longtime customer of ours. We came in and presented the relationship that we had and bottomed through some of the archives of decisions that they had made in the past that he goes. So you guys are kind of like my longest tenured employee. And we said, yes, kind of, yes.

Well, if you do the job right, you should be. And Joe?

Thanks for having me. Joe Rittenhouse, CEO of Converged Technology professionals. We focus primarily in UCaaS and CCaaS deployments and consulting, and that's now become Agentic-AI consulting as well. So it's a budding business. We're focused narrowly on what we do, and we only work with the Gartner Magic Quadrant leaders.

Yes. And I'm going to start this off talking about a little bit of Wall Street sentiment. I know I've talked to a number of you in the audience and just to complete my bio, I guess, I came out of Wall Street, was an IT pro at a Wall Street firm. So I kept a lot of those contacts. And I do interact with a lot of primarily buy-side firms but also some sell-side firms. So if you want to hit me on my LinkedIn and talk about the space after, let me know. Now it's interesting, the -- we came out of the pandemic. All these companies were riding high. The bear case thesis on this market right now is that AI is going to just tear the heart out of the market and kill all the seats. The bull thesis would be that it drives utilization up, right? And so even though we might see a net decline in the number of, say, contact centers, you should see an increase in utilization because of AI. And so I'm curious, from your own business today, what are you seeing? Where -- what's the truth there?

Yes. So we're certainly more on the bull side. It's consistently about 35% of the new projects that we get engaged in. We haven't seen a drop-off in that. If anything, we've seen an increase from our historical engagement on CX and contact center, where, again, those were 3, 4 years ago, really what you would define as an agent in a contact center. And today, we're seeing that definition change pretty drastically. Tell another story a few years ago, one of the members of my sales team came to me and said, they talked to the CIO, and we're in the middle of going through a renewal. And he said to the salesperson, he goes, what number did you call me on? And he goes, called you on yourself. He goes, right, what do I need these seats for anymore? And I'd actually argue that way of thinking is dead, not voice, just because all the capability that you heard here from this morning is not capable. You can't take advantage of it. And we heard from 3 panelists just a moment ago, increased C stat, increased revenue impact, better reporting, better analytics, better insights to drive the business. None of that's possible without the voice. So we're seeing a big uplift in leading indicators, and we're seeing consistent growth across the business.

And Joe, how is your business done?

It's crazy. It's a great business.

Dark here when I first met it.

But I think in general, there's a lot of appetite. And I think what we saw traditionally through the pandemic was we just have to get to the cloud. And we have to get to the cloud, and that was the destination, okay, we got to the cloud. You have your end user training effectively and everything is working properly. But now what we're seeing from this Agentic and all these AI tools and everything that's coming there is the C-suite is actively engaged and they're setting business strategy and understanding of like what's the pragmatic approach of how do we get there? How do we -- and where we're starting is kind of what they talked about at the pistons, like start small, like start small and go fast, fail fast. But you can do -- you can solve for areas that you weren't traditionally solving for before. So password resets within IT or FAQ questions for HR, like getting that sentiment, getting your organization comfortable with these bots and then slowly figuring out what that maturity path is as you deploy it, but the innovation that's coming behind it, it's wild. And you do -- and the voice component of it is like not just sentiment analysis, but SMS and just being a critical transport. It's like water, and it's a precious transport that you need to really understand what it does.

Yes. And actually, you brought up C-suite, and so I have that question later, but I'll bring it up now. When I -- between an IT Pro and doing this, I was actually at a VAR. And historically, this stuff has been sold to communications professionals, contact center buyers like that. I know in the prep call, we all talked about how the buying center for this is changing, right? It's not just your traditional telecom sale anymore, CEOs and CIOs and Chief Experience Officers and Chief AI Officer, they're all interested in this now. And when I think about the early days of Ring, the value prop, Vlad and I talked about this, right? It's a lot of like-for-like replacements, right? Just let's get off-prem and go to the cloud. You talked about that. But today, it seems like this is a much more strategic area of purchase than it has been before. Any thoughts on that, Joe?

Yes. I think it's really understanding with the different businesses that almost everybody has a sense of fear of missing out, right? And so there's a couple of acronyms there of like FOMO, but it's moving fast. We have budget. We got to go, go, go, go. You dump it to IT and IT is like, well, I don't want to screw it up. And I'm not sure really how to execute this. And so just seeing kind of that evolution of like we are pulling in different departments and being kind of a liaison to the IT team to say like, we need to go have some discovery with this unit, this leader. We need to go have some discovery with this business unit and really just kind of compartmentalize of like how can these different tools work. It's not a broad application that you just pull off the shelf. It's uniquely built to fulfill the needs of those individuals. And so the C-suite engagement for us has expanded tenfold, but the execution on it is the most important piece, and that's what RingCentral is doing a great job of.

How about you, Mike? And what's the C-suite looking for today, which makes that buying so it was even just a few years ago?