The Voice-First Approach to Agentic AI

How is voice technology becoming the cornerstone of next-generation AI systems in the enterprise?

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Find out with Kira Makagon, President & Chief Operating Officer at RingCentral, as she dives into the evolving landscape of enterprise AI with host Melody Brue as part of the Six Five Summit.

Key takeaways:

🔹Voice at the Core of Enterprise AI: Discover the pivotal and increasingly critical role of voice technology in shaping the future of AI solutions across the enterprise.

🔹RingCentral's Strategic AI Approach: Explore RingCentral's innovative strategy for harnessing AI to enhance the future of work and communication, beyond traditional boundaries.

🔹Real-World AI Impact for Customers & Internally: Learn about the tangible benefits and real-world impacts of RingCentral's AI solutions, both as experienced by their customers and through their own internal adoption.

🔹The Future of Agentic AI in Collaboration: Get a glimpse at RingCentral's envisioned future in the realm of Agentic AI, promising unprecedented innovation and enhanced efficiency in collaboration platforms.

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Learn more at RingCentral.

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Watch the full video at Six Five Media, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.

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Or listen to the audio here:

IMPORTANT: Note to Uploader: Libsyn AUDIO EMBED - added by uploader.

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Melody Brue: Hi everyone and welcome to the six five Summit. AI unleashed. I'm Melody Brue with Moor Insights & Strategy. Today I'm joined by Kira Makagon, President and Chief Operating Officer at RingCentral for a spotlight on collaboration. How are you Kira?

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Kira Makagon: Good, how are you?

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Melody Brue: Good. I'm so glad for you to join us today.

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Kira Makagon: Let's get into this.

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Melody Brue: As AI continues to transform enterprise communications, we're seeing a shift from basic automation to more advanced agentic AI that can understand context, intent and even emotion, especially with voice interactions. With this evolution, how do you see the role of AI further developing within enterprise communications over I guess the next few years? And where do you think the biggest opportunities, or challenges lie?

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Kira Makagon: This is a great question as we're sort of at this huge inflection point in enterprise or AI. I think everyone is seeing that and we're moving fast. We're moving faster than we've ever moved from basic automation to agentic AI which takes action on your behalf, which really is your right hand, left hand and all of the helpers that you've ever needed. So think of agentic AI as your trusted digital employee able to understand reason and act across every phase of business interaction. And it's never been done before. So the question is, what really makes it agentic and why is it effective? It's effective because it lives at the heart of interpreting the intelligence and especially when it comes to voice. Here at Central we believe that voice intelligence is the richest and most nuanced form of communication data and is the foundational element in the future of agentic AI platforms. Voice is where emotion, urgency and intent live. And just to quote some research data from Stanford University which found that voice conveys over 38% more emotional information than text based communication alone. Additional data point to support this is from IDC that says 85% of enterprise communications involve voice at some point in their customer journey. So doubling down on voice and what it holds, it holds multidimensional data that you just cannot get from any other form of interaction. That includes emotion, intent, urgency, confidence and countless subtle cues that drive understanding that no other single channel can really bring it together. So for example, detecting customer hesitation in their voice can change how a sales conversation is handled. Something a chat transcript cannot hold, cannot pick up really just from the, from the actual text. And this is why we believe voice intelligence is the foundation for the next generation of agentic AI platforms. And that is why we're going all in on voice first approach to AI.

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Melody Brue: Well that's certainly good for RingCentral. You have a long standing reputation for innovation in voice technology and you recently launched RingCentral AIR and as you said, you're really doubling down on voice intelligence. As you see kind of the modern workplace reshaping and people thinking like how they're kind of operating and communicating. What's your strategy for the AI powered future of work?

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Kira Makagon: So AI powered future of work is about, we think of work in terms of what happens during, pre, during and post interactions. Think about it that way. We talked about leadership and voice, which we've had for more than two decades no we apply in the same fashion to all other channels. Whether this is our knowledge to do with how we do voice first and how we interpret signals, we apply to what works across voice also works across media to some extent very well messaging and digital channels. So we extract value from all forms of communication and our approach spends the entire customer interaction life cycle and that is really the secret sauce here in terms of understanding what, what happens before the customer interaction, what happens during and then interpreting the post interaction signals so that we can provide the best possible insights and intelligence at every step for both customers and agents and equally also between conversations, employee to employee. So any form of interaction has these stages and this is really how we think Central is, is uniquely positioned to take advantage of that stream of rich data signals that can enhance and improve and really ultimately drive much stronger outcomes which we're already seeing with our customers.

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Melody Brue: Yeah, and really that's key. Right. Like every organization is just so eager to move beyond the hype and see that tangible business value. So can you share some examples of how RingCentral's customers are experiencing that real world impact?

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Kira Makagon: Of course. So, let me start with like we, you know, you just mentioned AIR, this was the latest product that we announced a couple of months ago that's having a really good, seeing really good customer traction. And it, and it does that when the products do well in the market when you just announced them usually because it has very obvious ROI, you sort of, you know, you find what's called the product market fit. So a good example of AIR, which is a product that essentially is called A stands for AI receptionist. And it's in that form of pre, during and post interruption. It's the pre interaction phase. It takes calls on your behalf, it can provide simple guidelines as to if you're a small business, how to get to your office, it can help answer basic inquiries and it does, it all was very simplistic or simple, easy to use setup. So that basically instead of having a human being answer these questions that are just, you know, there are many of them are routines such as, you know, what services do you offer, what business hours are you open during? And you can have your digital employee do that. An example of that is for example a company called Oven Security, which is a property and life safety solutions company, which is using AIR and seeing massive efficiency gains with AIR saving each agent something like two to four hours per day. I mean that's huge. That's like, like a 50% decrease in time spent on inbound calls. And so what it does is it allows them to focus more on outbound calls and follow ups without having to add headcount. 

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Another example would be Integral recruiting, used to handle hundreds of calls monthly, many of them just being spam or irrelevant, where a human being would have to handle it. Now with air they filter out irrelevant calls and focus on the 10% that actually matters. And it brings customer value and creates real opportunities, real leads. At the end of the day all of this is really about either better lead creation or better customer service. And another good example would be NHS Hertfordshire, it's actually a fairly well known healthcare organization in UK which services over a million residents. What they did was our AI powered contact center which is, I'm jumping now into sort of a different realm is they've cut 30% of call wait times just because agents were better trained on how to handle customer inquiries. So even though the call gets to an agent in this instance, in this example is this customer, which of course we do want many of the calls to go through because these are more complex inquiries and require human touch points. We want them to be handled efficiently, we want them to be handled in a way that ultimately leads to better outcomes and happier customers. And here's a good example of how better training for agents, that better AI enablement with AI for agents actually produces or uses those results.

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Melody Brue: So with producing results, I mean I, I follow you on social media, I see a lot of the things that you talk about with, with AI and adopting AI internally and your of your own technology and also just AI in general is sort of a strong indicator of a company's confidence in its own technology and the promise of AI efficiencies. So what are you and your teams using internally and what outcomes are you seeing just with the general use of AI and some of your own products as well?

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Kira Makagon: Okay, I couldn't agree with you more. And if you were here in Central at internal meetings, which operational meetings you would hear me kind of get on my soapbox. And I've been, I've been on the soapbox for a while but now I'm really on it because also because the tools have matured, right? And our old technology has matured. There's no function in Central and I believe any other company should be the same way that is not using AI to improve the way that they work and take out redundant manual tasks or tasks that require a lot of redundant work and replace that with technology that does it actually a lot better. And for example, I talked about the previous customer that has improved call wait times with Link CX in our all own customer support center. Using our Link CX which is our contact center product, we're seeing something like 10 to 12, I'm sorry, 10 to 20% reduction in average handle times using our AI agent assist and AI supervisor assist technologies which basically enable us to do the following. It enables us to provide agents with help during the call so that they can answer questions more effectively, can understand how to handle even more complex inquiries that might have previously had to be turned over to specialists because they get help right there online when they're talking to the customer proactively because the machine is listening to the conversation. And in the same fashion the Supervisor Assist module helps supervisors monitor agents and proactively manage those customer interactions. And that's huge because it also reduces for example things like agent fatigue and, and ultimately improves overall productivity in the contact center. And we all know that happier employees make happier customers. 

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Yeah, exactly. Sales and marketing. Well look, marketing has been transformed I believe as AI and even though we're not necessarily ourselves building marketing products where we're certainly consuming a lot of AI to create much better marketing content. And we're seeing something like 10x productivity improvement in content creation, more effective campaigns, improved lead quality, generating more qualified leads for fewer dollars. And these are all like real examples of what we're living through. And it's, it's just amazing to see the success of technology and also the satisfaction that people get from using this technology because you know, it simplifies a lot of sort of this, you know, redundant work of just, you know, oh my God, I've created one piece of content, now I've got to create, you know, 10 other pieces of content that look just the same, was a little bit differently nuanced. And then to give you one more example of where AI plays a significant role is in R and D in development of actual building products and, and both for engineering and product management. So for engineering, and we're still, I believe early in the journey we're seeing something like 20% productivity improvement from just using AI tools to accelerate development cycles and improve code quality. And those are just a few examples of how we implement AI throughout Central.

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Melody Brue: Well then I think you are rightfully so on your soapbox. Those are all great examples. And I think, you know, you talked so much about the power of voice, you know all of these things. In so many cases it's the voice that comes out, you know, when you can detect fatigue and all of that. So as all of these sorts of systems and they're capable of reasoning and action, these industry leaders are reimagining what's possible for unified communications. What do you see as kind of the future state for RingCentral in an agentic AI world?

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Kira Makagon: We're certainly charging that the next evolution for RingCentral was a human centered, meaningful AI approach that reflects how work actually gets done. And organizations today can expect that voiceover support agents that understand customer sentiment and tone, delivering significantly faster issue resolution with higher CSAT scores, for example, will do much better. And so part of our journey in reimagining what happens next is that more of this increased AI supported human conversations or AI augmenting humans is how we really think the future holds for us. We're going to change the way we work, we're going to change the way sales conversations take place. We're going to change the way we understand customer hesitations, intent, enthusiasm. We're going to be able to predict customer needs and potential issues before they even get escalated. And for us, that agentic AI will become the underpinning of our strategy. And it has already become that for addressing voice first, but not only voice, all channels omnichannel across a number of vertical industries and role based use cases such as for sale, service, billing, etc. And it's very important that focus of paying both the vertical industries and the roles is very important because with AI you get so much contextual information now that you can act on to improve the interactions that the more you understand the industry and the role, the better it will become in terms of the outcome that it can produce. 

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And really we think of our journey as really helping humans make decisions, sometimes having decisions be made on their behalf, using these tools to reflect on actually what happened, learn and again help humans get better and then really turning agentic AI into something that's far closer to a teammate than a tool and being very comfortable with it is key. And so our job is to make our tools, our technology, our platform, such that we enable people the way they want to work in this evolving future which we're all sort of living through. And we've said that years ago, by the way, Mel, you know, when we started in Central, we, we used to say, or this, when I joined for example, we used to say we enable people to work the way they want to work. I'm going to say the same thing, that we're going to enable people to work the way that they want to work, except that new way is going to be highly AI assisted.

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Melody Brue: Yeah. Well, it's definitely an exciting time to see changes and really be a part of that. And like I said, you know, I follow you on social. I see all of the things that you put out there and I can see that this is something that you're extremely passionate about. Well, thank you so much for joining us and for everybody who has tuned in, thanks for joining us for this collaboration spotlight at the Six Five Summit. Be sure to follow us on social and check out what's next at sixfivemedia.com/summit. We'll be back with more insights shortly.

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