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BCStrategies

Expert analysis, insights, and opinions

RingCentral Analyst Summit 2025

Updated: Apr 9

Held in the beautiful world-famous Napa Valley, RingCentral’s 2025 Analyst Summit provided insights on the company’s vision and priorities, product innovations, go to market, and more. No longer primarily a UCaaS vendor, RingCentral offers a multi-product portfolio, with AI embedded throughout. 


In her new role as President & COO, Kira Makagon kicked off the event with a look back at RingCentral’s 25-year journey. From its roots as an early cloud PBX vendor, RingCentral’s “Intelligent, Connected, Effortless” Platform now supports four key product areas, with AI injected throughout the portfolio:

  • RingEX – cloud business phone system with SMS and fax (yes, fax is still alive), team messaging, and the new AI Receptionist (AIR) and AI Assistant

  • RingCX – an omnichannel CCaaS solution with AI Quality Management, Agent Assist/Supervisor Assist, Intelligent Virtual Agent, and Workforce Engagement Management 

  • RingSense AI platform 

  • Events and Video – Events, webinars, video meetings, and video/meeting rooms


Makagon described the company’s 2025 strategic priorities:

  1. Build upon its leadership in business communications with AI across the entire portfolio

  2. Expand TAM through its multi-product portfolio, led by RingCX and AI 

  3. Drive profitable growth and improve customer engagement across the entire business. 


Key to everything is the RingSense AI platform, which is infused throughout the company’s portfolio. 


I had a chance to speak with Makagon about the key messages from the event. She noted that RingCentral’s AI differentiation is based on a “system of experiences” and that its AI is trusted, fit to purpose, orchestrated, and open and extensible via APIs. She discussed the company’s vision of providing an intelligent, connected, and effortless AI-powered platform to drive meaningful customer and employee experience. 



AI and Systems of Experiences

Not to be left behind the Agentic AI bandwagon, RingCentral introduced its first AI Agent for a specific workflow –AI Receptionist (AIR). AIR is a digital employee that acts as an always-reliable front desk receptionist. The virtual receptionist can answer questions about company hours, locations, services, etc. and direct callers to the right department or person. RingCentral’s goal is to make AIR very easy to adopt and set up with human-like conversation. I was totally impressed when watching a demonstration of how easy it is to set up the virtual receptionist. In this video, Solutions Engineer Matt LaHatt walks through creating an AI receptionist in just a few steps, including:

  • Selecting the tone and personality of the receptionist from one of the eight prebuilt personas

  • Providing a company description

  • Entering the company location and business hours

  • Creating a welcome greeting

  • Enabling the AI receptionist to transfer calls to a live agent 






Drilling down a bit more into RingCentral’s AI strategy, I spoke with the new Chief AI Officer, Antonio Nucci. In his presentation to the analysts, he explained that RingCentral will harness the power of AI with a specialized digital workforce of AI agents to:

  • Personalize engagement with human-like interaction

  • Unlock new levels of human productivity

  • Drive automation and self-service for employees (EX), customers (CX), and service agents (CCX)


Nucci discussed how “Systes of experiences,” powered by conversational and specialized AI agents are the new frontier. 


Drilling down a bit more into RingCentral’s AI strategy, I spoke with Nucci about RingCentral’s AI approach, including the ability to build customizable AI agents.



CX Becomes More Prominent

As expected, we heard a lot about RingCX, which now supports over 700 customers. RingCentral tries to differentiate by making RingCX easy to deploy and simple to use, while providing rich omnichannel (20+ channels), with disruptive pricing ($65/seat). RingCentral emphasizes that it still sells RingCentral Contact Center and supports its partnership with NICE, offering additional capabilities and integrations than RingCX for more sophisticated contact center needs.


In this video interview, John Finch, Global VP Product Marketing, discusses RingCX and RingCentral’s contact center offerings.



Vertical Approach

One of the things that most impressed me was RingCentral’s vertical focus. While most vendors target certain verticals, RingCentral goes a step further, working with subverticals within the various verticals, including financial services, healthcare, retail, and public sector. For example, rather than simply focusing on the healthcare vertical, RingCentral looks at the different needs of large hospitals, large clinics and practices, small medical clinics, dental service organizations, etc. 


RingCentral’s approach is to offer a full communication platform for these verticals’ communication needs built on a flexible and extendable integration layer. Beyond offering hundreds of APIs, connectors, and integrations, RingCentral experts can speak in the language of customers in verticals, rather than simply providing generic solutions.


Final Thoughts

RingCentral and other business communication vendors are facing many challenges, including an uncertain economic future, the continued dominance of Microsoft Teams, the quickly evolving and changing AI landscape, and more. 


RingCentral is trying to stand out in a very crowded business communications space in several ways: 

  • Focusing on its multi-product portfolio approach (EX, CX, events, and AI). This becomes increasingly important as more and more customers look for a single vendor.

  • Key to this is RingCX, which continues to gain customers across customer segments.

  • Recognizing that voice (and the phone) is still essential, leveraging its strength with the RingEX business phone system to quickly expand to other areas, while infusing AI across its product offerings.

  • Continued innovation in AI, building on its RingSense AI offerings. The company recently introduced AI Quality Management, and at the event previewed AI Interaction Analytics to capture true AI CSAT in real time.

  • While everyone is talking about AI agents or agentic AI, RingCentral introduced AI Receptionist, with other AI agent offerings to come. 

  • A vertical approach that goes beyond simply having customers in certain segments.

  • A new go-to-market model that engages with customers through the customer lifecycle.

  • Expanding its distribution through its Global Service Provider partners. The company now has 10 GSP partners, with the goal to reach 100. In addition to adding new partners, many of the partners are expanding their offerings, such as adding RingCX to their portfolios.


During a Q&A with the executives, I asked when and if the company expects to lead with its CX offerings rather than its Employee Experience (EX) offerings. Makagon responded, "We have the strongest EX product in the market. We lead from our strengths and see a lot of opportunity in RingCX. We’d like to be viewed as a company that has both – not leading with one or the other. Customers want to buy both."


Staying innovative and flexible, while being customer focused is key to success in this market. RingCentral continues to build on its strengths while expanding its portfolio and go-to-market to take on today’s new challenges. 

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