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7 minute read
Summary
On this episode of Direct from the Expo, the Collab Collective’s Craig Durr speaks with Joe Fahrner, GM of AI Receptionist at RingCentral. Recorded live at Enterprise Connect 2026, the conversation centers on RingCentral’s recent AI momentum, highlighting strong customer adoption, a growing product portfolio, and the company’s continued investment in delivering accessible, scalable AI capabilities across business communications.
Their discussion covers:
- AI Portfolio in Action: How AIR (AI Receptionist), AVA (AI Virtual Assistant), and ACE (AI Conversation Expert) combine to deliver end-to-end call automation, assistance, and insights
- AIR Pro Introduction: A new AI Representative platform that enables businesses to build and orchestrate customized workflows across systems and APIs
- Vertical Use Cases in Healthcare: AIR Pro Healthcare and its integrations with EHR systems to streamline patient engagement and workflows
- AIR Everywhere Flexibility: A standalone AI receptionist that works across any telephony environment, including legacy on-prem systems
- Ease of Deployment: Rapid setup using website ingestion, enabling businesses to deploy AI agents in under a minute with minimal configuration
- Multilingual Capabilities: Real-time language switching that supports dynamic, multilingual customer interactions
- Customer Engagement Bundle (CEB): A lightweight solution that brings call center capabilities to smaller businesses without added complexity
- Channel Opportunities: How partners can bring AI-driven solutions to customers regardless of their current UCaaS environment
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Transcript
Craig Durr: Hey, everyone, this is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder of the Collab Collective. I want to welcome you to this edition of Direct from the Expo at Enterprise Connect 2026. I have a very special guest, fresh off of the keynotes here. I have one of the executives, Joe Fahrner, GM of RingCentral AI Receptionist.
How are you doing, Jeff?
Joe Fahrner: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me here.
Craig Durr: I appreciate you being here. Now, I want to get some details from you. It was a fantastic keynote. There's a lot of great stuff talked about right there. But before we go into that, I want to recap the year that you guys have had as a company. And there's a lot of proof in the numbers, right? We can talk about, for example, AIR and some other ones. Why don't you share with me some of these numbers?
Joe Fahrner: Yeah, absolutely. We've been execution-focused this year and very focused on the scale of our AI products. So we set a pretty audacious goal of 100 million dollars from our incremental new product, and we achieved that, announced in our last earnings call. That came on the back of multiple different products, but particularly proud of AIR.
We’re up over 8,300 customers as of our last earnings call. That's in less than a year… Only about six months since the GA. So we're learning a lot there as we grow that product. ACE, our conversational intelligence product is now up over 4,500 customers and seeing growth across the board in the rest of our portfolio there.
Craig Durr: So the proof is in the numbers there. There's a lot of great data coming out there saying that people are really finding value in these AI solutions from RingCentral, right?
Joe Fahrner: Absolutely, we're seeing attach rates grow very consistently as we bring new products to market and as we're learning about the use cases further across our base of core UCaaS customers.
Craig Durr: Well, I want to learn more about the portfolio, and I want to help break it down for our audience because you have these really great acronyms. I love them, but let's explain what these products are. You have AIR, AVA, and ACE. Why don’t you tell us what these mean?
Joe Fahrner: Yeah, so the three A's, we love to call them: AIR is the AI Receptionist, AVA is the AI Virtual Assistant, and ACE is the AI Conversation Expert. These come together in a system that basically automates, assesses, and analyzes throughout the entire call.
Craig Durr: That's the second level of these three A's here. I like that. I saw that on the keynote in the main stage. Tell me more about what this means. What does a workflow look like going from AIR to AVA to ACE?
Joe Fahrner: That's a great question. Basically, as the call comes in AIR, is there to handle the call and field the most common questions that callers and businesses have during the call. Then, AVA is taking notes and really working as a personal assistant. And then, following the call, ACE analyzes the call, gives action items and tips to follow for agents. So it's an entire ecosystem where these three come together to give compounding value to our customers that are using these integrated products together across the lifecycle of the call.
Craig Durr: And this is a great analogy. It is a platform because it leads into what you announced today. You guys were able to bring to market a new product, a new variation that sits on top of this platform, you call it AIR Pro. Help me understand what this is.
Joe Fahrner: AIR Pro, another A, is an AI Representative Pro. Really think of AIR Pro as a new form of agent that is both an agent builder and an orchestration layer. So a studio and orchestration. So if AIR is an agent that answers your calls and does basic call handling, AIR Pro allows you to build entire workflows that can be handled end to end by our agentic AIR Pro platform.
Craig Durr: That's fantastic. So, AIR takes the initial phone call, turns it over to an AIR Pro agent, and then it gets to be customized and personalized for that business needs or those outcomes desired.
Joe Fahrner: That's exactly right. So it can connect to existing workflows, APIs, really own things end to end and drive specific outcomes.
Craig Durr: You know, I'm gonna lean into something that probably might be an area we didn't really prep for. But you talked about certain integrations, APIs. This allows for really nice verticalized solutions in the same way. Tell me more about that.
Joe Fahrner: Early on in AIR, the first year of AIR, we've seen healthcare be far away, like shiny star vertical adoption. We've really started there with AIR Pro; we're going to launch AIR Pro Healthcare with over 100 integrations with the EHR systems, for example. So you can think about medical practices of all sizes with AIR Pro being able to directly integrate with their existing workflows in these EHR systems. And go from the initial, you know, first ring of the call into workflows integrated with those systems.
Craig Durr: That's fantastic. You're talking about health medical records, you're talking about integration with that. Now, this data that's captured in these communication platforms is part of the workflow platforms as well.
So one of the really nice things I like about the RingCentral platform is you don't have to necessarily be part of the RingCentral platform to start taking advantage of some of these products. You have a great variation of AIR called AIR Everywhere.
Joe Fahrner: That's absolutely right. AIR Everywhere is a standalone product and works with any phone system. So, while we do have a wonderful native integration of AIR into the RingCentral RingEX UCaaS system, you absolutely can use AIR even if you're on another UCaaS, an on-prem system. We think it's a great product, particularly in the legacy on-prem space where these are customers that are sort of starved for AI innovation, and we see great pull there for that product specifically. So it's something we're really leaning into in 2026 and driving adoption there.
Craig Durr: And Joe, you know what I love about this product? When you walked me through the demo, the setup, the ease of pulling information into this receptionist model… Talk to me about that real quick. So again, I'm not on RingCentral. I don't have this integrated database or knowledge base right now, but I can still have this personalized for my own business.
Joe Fahrner: AIR is all about simplicity. It's all about creating an agent in a minute or less. So we've built this end to end to be able to take a website, crawl it, and have an agent up and running literally in less than a minute. Of course, you can customize it infinitely from there, but we want to be very, very simple for customers to be able to get started. And again, even if you're not a RingCentral customer, it starts with just that website URL and a few basic inputs. We think that's something you can scale kind of infinitely to all types of businesses.
Craig Durr: So all of a sudden that agent knows my hours of business, my locations…
Joe Fahrner: It can answer any type of questions about your business. It can, ultimately, be capturing leads. It can be scheduling appointments on your calendar. It’s very effective and very simple.
Craig Durr: I also love the translation feature that you brought in as well.
Joe Fahrner: Absolutely. We now can handle language on the fly. AIR natively handles languages. You know, I live in San Diego, so I love this feature because I live in a multicultural, multi-language community. You can start in Spanish, move to English, and back to Spanish, and AIR can fall directly to that conversation no problem.
Craig Durr: Well, your innovation office around AI is Italian. He had a great demonstration that showed how you went from Italian to English back to Italian again.
Joe Fahrner: One of the things I'm very jealous about with Antonio is his wonderful Italian accent. And there's nothing better than watching your demo where he was in and out of English and Italian and AIR follows like it doesn't lose a step. It's amazing.
Craig Durr: That's fantastic. All right, so AIR Everywhere's a fantastic channel opportunity. You also have something that you have two called CEB. Tell me what that is.
Joe Fahrner: Yes, another great acronym: the Customer Engagement Bundle. Think about this as enabling an informal call center.
This is a product that can be purchased as a RingEX UCaaS customer, and it really enables all kinds of capabilities to scale in a call center-like manner… call queues and other optimizations. We see really fast adoption of this product in smaller businesses in particular, who need the capabilities of a traditional call center type environment, but not the overhead. And so it's a wonderful product, very tightly integrated with there as well.
So we see the two of those coming together as this combined solution where if you have a high volume of calls, AIR can be the first line of engagement with the customers. And then, CEB is really about agent automation and efficiency.
Craig Durr: You know, this sounds like this is even a great channel opportunity, right? Because we're talking about products that are standalone, they can bring to customers that may have legacy systems, and still experience not only RingCentral but AI well implemented.
Joe Fahrner: Absolutely, the channel has been and continues to be a massive focus for RingCentral. I spend a lot of time getting to know our channel partners and engaging with channel opportunities. It's something we're heavily invested in and continue to lean into, in the days, weeks, months, and years to come.
It's a fabulous opportunity, particularly with products like AIR Everywhere, which allow our channel partners to bring these AI solutions directly to market whether or not their customers are ready to jump into a new UCaaS system.
Craig Durr: There's a lot of A’s here. We've got AIR, AVA, ACE, AIR Pro… You have a very rich portfolio here that can help enable your customers.
Joe Fahrner: I mean, there's a whole alphabet left, so we’re gonna keep going *laughs*
Craig Durr: *laughs* Well, hey, Joe, I want to thank you for this update. You’ve really taken the keynote information that RingCentral brought out, and you've really kind of brought it down and explained what we're seeing, where the value is, where the partner opportunities are as well. This is fantastic.
Hey, everyone. I want to thank you for joining us for this edition of Direct from the Expo at Enterprise Connect 2026. Stay here on this channel for more updates from Enterprise Connect. Take care.
