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9 minute read
Summary
On this episode of Catching Up with, the Collab Collective’s Craig Durr speaks with Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research. Recorded live at the RingCentral Analyst Event 2026 in Scottsdale, the discussion explores RingCentral’s evolving AI strategy, its growing enterprise momentum, and how voice is re-emerging as a core interface in the age of agentic AI. Zeus shares insights into product adoption, vertical expansion, and how RingCentral’s platform approach positions it ahead of competitors.
Their discussion covers:
- AI Adoption & Revenue Growth: How RingCentral’s AI portfolio (AIR, AVA, ACE) is gaining traction, now contributing a notable share of revenue and driving measurable customer outcomes
- Voice as a Strategic Moat: Why high-quality voice infrastructure is becoming a key differentiator in delivering low-latency, conversational AI experiences
- AI Receptionist Use Cases: Real-world examples of how automation is improving responsiveness and even generating new revenue, particularly in hybrid work environments
- OpenAI Partnership & Model Strategy: How RingCentral is combining frontier models with fine-tuned, vertical-specific AI to enhance enterprise-grade performance
- Vertical Market Expansion: The role of industry-specific workflows, integrations, and use cases across healthcare, financial services, retail, and more
- CX vs EX Convergence: How contact center and employee experience tools are blending into a unified communications stack
- Go-To-Market Evolution: The rise of self-service onboarding and product-led growth within the RingCentral ecosystem
- Market Momentum & Industry Outlook: Why strong earnings and AI-driven growth across vendors signal renewed investor confidence in the collaboration space
Transcript
Craig Durr: Everyone, this is Craig Durr of the Collab Collective. I am here with Zeus Kerravala from ZK Research. So we are at the RingCentral Analyst Event 2026. It's a beautiful place we are at.
Zeus Kerravala: It is. We’re at the Hotel Andaz here in Scottsdale. Scottsdale is always nice to come to, especially this time of the year.
Craig Durr: You always get some great golfing. But let's talk about what we're hearing about RingCentral. And like you said, the analogy we have in front of us is they might be playing chess while the people are playing checkers.
Zeus Kerravala: That's right, but checkers can be tough.
Craig Durr: It could be, yeah. We'll see what happens in this game. But let's go through this, so we saw some or heard some things, saw some sides of stuff under NDA. We’re a few weeks out from Enterprise Connect. This is where we're going to probably have some of this stuff become public. Do you think they have a good story coming forward?
Zeus Kerravala: Well, they do. And if we just take a step back and look at where they are now with the three A products, ACE, AVA, and AIR, those have all seemed to have done pretty well. I think this is in the last earnings call. AI is now 10% of their revenue.
Craig Durr: Yeah, 10% of their customer base is utilizing AI products, contributing to the revenue?
Zeus Kerravala: Yeah, no. I think it's more than 10% of the customer base using AI, right?
Craig Durr: This was confusing…
Zeus Kerravala: Well, they're getting some good adoption, and I've talked to some of the customers that have used the AIR product. To me, the AI Receptionist is the biggest no brainer out there for almost every company. If you think of companies that have gone to a hybrid workforce, you don't need a receptionist for five days a week when you're gonna get people in the office three days a week.
I talked to one of their customers at their sales kick off, Liza Perez, for access integrated healthcare… mental health, from Denver, and she said they were having problems answering the phones. And with mental health, you kind of want to answer the phones. And she said that's created an up. They're pretty small, 1.7 million in extra revenue for them. That's a good payoff there.
Craig Durr: Wow, I mean, this is where I like what they're saying from a strategic point of view. They're leaning into, which they've done for the last couple of years, that voice is their moat. This is how they differentiate there from the other competitors out there. If you had a long lineage in history…
Zeus Kerravala: It's arguable nobody does voice better than RingCentral.
Craig Durr: No, Exactly. And now leaning into this because there's other AI receptionists out there, too. But I think what these guys are doing really nice is they're leveraging their experience in voice, they're using models that put them in these really low latency positions within that voice stream, and getting really great conversational AI results.
Zeus Kerravala: It's an interesting industry shift, too, Craig, because historically, when you think about voice, you think of that as legacy in the old thing. Remember Gartner said phones are going away, things like that, but more and more with agentic AI, I think voice becomes the preferred interface, right? It's the one we're all born with.
Historically, we haven't used voice as the interface, because, frankly, it wasn't that good, right, right? So when you called into an IVR, it just wasn't a good interface. But now with the agentic AI, you saw the demos, it's literally like talking to somebody that understands the pivots. It translates faster. And I think if all things are equal, people would prefer to talk to the agent than text, and the industry has kind of come back around for them, right?
Craig Durr: I think so. Now, here's something we didn't talk about much here, but I want to bring up a point of I'm really intrigued about the recent announcement with OpenAI, and the partnership that they're doing with them. Now, to me, this is actually taking a frontier model and again, taking advantage of this voice mode, putting it in this low latency idea, and I think it's really almost a symbiotic relationship.
I think OpenAI winds up getting some feedback from this because they can start saying their enterprise grade in terms of their reactiveness to a voice prompting scenario. And hopefully RingCentral gets the same benefit out of this, too, as they improve their conversational AI in return.
Zeus Kerravala: Yeah, I would think it's a good bilateral relationship. And they were pretty clear at the end, too, that they do augment with their own models, right? I think it will be the standard going forward, you use the frontier models, the large language models, to kind of coarse train, and then use fine-tuned small models, or small models to fine tune later than that. And that's what you have to do for a lot of the verticals, and I think they've done a nice job of that.
Craig Durr: That's the other thing, I think, is one of my key takeaways. It's becoming more and more clear how they're leaning into verticals. They've always talked about that right now, and I have to remember which ones are NDA or not NDA. But you know, they have experience right now, where they're taking those workflows specific to that industry, they have over 500 integrations they’re talking about, which allow them to bring in healthcare. What else did they say? Financial Services, professional services…
Zeus Kerravala: Yeah, retail is another one. They've done a good job of that, and I think what's going to be interesting to watch is as RingCX becomes more mature, how they manage the relationship with NiCE and Ring CC.
Craig Durr: Yeah, that's another thing. That's another chess move.
Zeus Kerravala: And I think, in some ways, you know, that big install base they have, they can't disrupt. But I do believe, from a go-to market perspective right now, they're leaning with RingCX, more often than not.
Craig Durr: They seem to talk about that now. It seems to be that a lot more of their customer transactions are in that mid to small size customer base, right? So they still have some of these very large, multiple thousand seats that they sold in partnership with NiCE, but it was kind of hedging on the answer about as a feature set parity going away, or what's happening…
Zeus Kerravala: Well, clearly they will get the future parody over time, but for them, it's more beneficial to sell the full stack because they can address a lot of the customer service use cases, where you don't need a full agent desktop, but you still need CC Lite, if you want to call it that, right? They call that the…
Craig Durr: Customer Engagement Bundle, the CEB, which is another great one I wanted to bring up. Again, I'm not sure what was NDA or not, but they were showing some really great uptake in that bundle. And this is kind of what they were saying, is a little bit of their EX strategy,
Zeus Kerravala: Which they didn’t really talk about a lot, though.
Craig Durr: No, we didn't have a chance to… I think it was because we're running over… Someone was asking too many questions.
Zeus Kerravala: Yeah, well, I don't know who that was… *laughs*
Craig Durr: *laughs* But you're right, the CEB bundle that they're doing seems to be pretty important to what they're doing in terms of bringing contact center-like experiences and features into an everyday business.
Zeus Kerravala: And there's a lot of value for frontline workers. That’s been a good competitive differentiator for a long time, right? We didn't see a lot about meetings, though. You know, both you and I were talking with Kristin Koenig about that, and it seems long term, they're just going to wind up embedding meeting functionality.
I think that's maybe the industry direction as we stop thinking about EX and CX as separate things, we just need the tools to communicate internally and externally. It winds up being one stack with which we do that with. Because really, when you think about a contact center agent and a knowledge worker, what's the difference in what they use, right? I mean, the application of transcriptions and things might be a little bit different for those types of workers, but it's essentially the same tools.
Craig Durr: She was showing me some slides… She was still leveraging what they called their 3A model. So it wasn't specifically AIR, AVA, and ACE. What it was was Analyze... I forgot what the other two As were, but she's showing how they're doing those same workflows in the meeting experience.
Zeus Kerravala: One of the things they addressed, which I was surprised at the answer, was the adoption of this technology. Like, do you need a pro service team, or do you need your partner to go in? And they said, “No, we just give it to them, and they use it.” And I was a little skeptical of that answer. But then both customers, The Cubs, Steve Inman, shout out to you… and the person from Televero Healthcare, they both said the same thing, that the workers just started using it. And Steve was, in fact, talking about how they thought it was cool that the calls are now being transcribed, and they're being uploaded into Salesforce. Maybe I have over thought the difficulty in rolling out more AI features,
Craig Durr: There's one other element of that, their go-to market model. I was really intrigued because they were talking about how it's almost like a self-service, self-enablement model for customers like they are in the RingCentral ecosystem. They're using the phones, and somewhere along that way, within their self use, they're doing self onboarding. They're getting exposed to AIR as an option and onloading it, and then going through the website GUI to set it up, point to the website, which just seems great information to scrape down, set up your persona, build out your AIR, and then that's there to take those calls.
Zeus Kerravala: Yeah, we see that last like, frankly, I don't know half the features in my new iPhone.
Craig Durr: Well, so this seems pretty promising for me. I'm looking forward to seeing how this all is received publicly. They talk about this in two weeks at Enterprise Connect.
Zeus Kerravala: And what's been really good, I think, just from an overall industry perspective, is this quarter we saw NiCE, Five9, 8x8, and Ring Central all announced earnings. They all had good earnings. They all announced good AI revenue, and all their stocks were up. And this is an industry, the sector, which has been out of favor with Wall Street for a while, since the pandemic ran through, right? I think there was a lot of fear that AI would get rid of all the seats. And I think that sentiment started to change. And so the more proof points companies like RingCentral can put up, the better that is.
Craig Durr: I think, key to that is that transition to usage based models versus sheet based models. These guys are well positioned for that right now. It's interesting you said that because the RingCentral stock, within that first day or two, spiked 34%, like $10 it went up. It came back down, but it's still above where it was before calls.
Zeus Kerravala: And like I said, its investors are finally willing to talk about it now.
Craig Durr: That's good, so it's a positive AI story. It's not fear and doom of it taking jobs.
Zeus Kerravala: No, and for the most part, for most of their customers, like you listen to the stories, I do think AI is going to take some jobs, but for a lot of companies like healthcare, they typically can't hire enough people to staff up properly. So if AI can help with that, I mean, that's outstanding.
Craig Durr: Okay, here we are. Let's wrap it up. What's your final move on this chess board for RingCentral? What are you thinking?
Zeus Kerravala: Oh, well, a double jump. What do you call it? Crowned, or King? And then you go backwards, right? So they can run that playbook through with the new products.
Craig Durr: I like it. I like what they're doing here. It seems to be very CX-led, understandably, it's a very strong suit. It's favorable right now, and the market has shown us great things. I'm waiting to see what's going to take place in the second half of the year, how they pull this into their employee experience as well.
Zeus Kerravala: Yeah, but look for the new announcement and Enterprise Connect.
Craig Durr: Sounds like a plan.
All right, this is Craig Durr with the Collab Collective
Zeus Kerravala: And Zeus Kerravala from ZK Research
Craig Durr: We'll check in with you later. Take care.
