Summary Bullets:
• RingSense marks the latest addition to RingCentral’s AI portfolio and arrives after a noticeable hiatus.
• RingSense closes a competitive gap with rivals who have recently responded to the emergence of ChatGPT with their own generative AI offers.
RingCentral recently launched an open beta of RingSense, a generative AI platform that leverages voice and natural language processing (NLP) to analyze business conversation data. The first iteration is RingSense for Sales, which dissects interactions between sales reps and customers or prospects across calls, emails, and video meetings. Users can assess rep and team performance, discover customer wants and needs, and more. Along with RingSense for Sales, RingCentral plans to release four additional, related offers: RingSense for Revenue Leaders, RingSense for Sales Enablement, RingSense for Customer Success, and RingSense for Marketing.
RingSense marks the latest addition to RingCentral’s AI portfolio. Over the last few years, among other features, RingCentral implemented contact center chatbots as well as AI models that provide conversational speech analysis and sentiment recognition. Last year, numerous AI-driven meeting capabilities were launched such as noise cancellation, live transcription, and summaries. So, it has been a while since RingCentral unveiled AI features; the arrival of ChatGPT has awoken it from a bit of a slumber.
RingCentral could not have chosen a better time to resume AI rollouts and to kick things off with generative AI capabilities. ChatGPT arrived on the scene rapidly and with much thunder. Since that time AI has been much heralded, especially for its ability to generate responses to inquiries, draft prose, and glean patterns and themes from data.
At the same time, AI has been much maligned. The capabilities for which it has been celebrated have also instilled widespread fear among the public, regardless of technical acumen, that AI will soon substitute hard-earned skills. Which is why RingSense is positioned wisely – RingSense does not automate sales functions which, if it were the case, would provide fodder for replacing agents. Instead, emphasis is focused on building skills by supplying insight into customer interactions and providing guidance that will help agents and team leaders to better meet customer expectations going forward. For example, interaction summaries and scoring, keywords and phrases tracking, and CRM integrations.
With the introduction of RingSense, RingCentral closes a competitive gap with rivals who have recently responded to the emergence of ChatGPT with their own generative AI offers (e.g., Duet AI for Google Workspace, Slack GPT, and several Zoom IQ features). RingSense is also noteworthy for being bespoke. AI offers have tended to be one size fits all featuring capabilities that can be leveraged across various verticals, industries, or use cases. RingSense counteracts that trend by tightly focusing on the sales function and associated personnel.
In the near future, RingCentral should produce RingSense offers targeted at frontline and contact center workers. Both groups parallel sales in that workers operate dispersed outside the corporate hub and interact directly with customers (a contact center offer would be especially relevant, given the already heavy use of AI). RingSense’s capabilities would be completely transferable to such offers making them a natural progression.
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