Agentic Voice AI For Business

The fastest way to understand agentic AI is to stop thinking about chatbots and start thinking about outcomes. From Enterprise Connect, we sit down with RingCentral’s John Finch to talk about agentic voice AI that can handle real customer work end to end: answering the call, connecting to back-end systems, completing a transaction, confirming the result, and closing the loop without bouncing the customer between departments.

We also get specific about what makes this hard and why it matters. Voice is still the most demanding channel in the contact center, and RingCentral’s view is that a strong communications layer unlocks everything else: omnichannel customer engagement, smoother handoffs, and higher containment where it actually helps the customer. From there, the CX revolution becomes orchestration. We talk about scheduling AI agents alongside human agents, tracking performance across both, and using signals like CSAT and NPS to continuously improve. The goal is not “AI replaces people,” but “AI removes the repetitive parts so humans can do higher-value work.”

Healthcare raises the bar even further, so we dig into how agentic AI can validate patients, schedule appointments like imaging, and operate with strict guardrails that prevent unsafe medical advice. With templates and deep integrations, teams can deploy faster in complex environments while keeping compliance and safety in view. If you’re evaluating agentic AI, voice AI platforms, or contact center automation, you’ll walk away with a clearer picture of what’s real today and what’s coming next.

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Transcript

What RingCentral Is Now

SPEAKER_01 0:01

And I'm here at Enterprise Connect with John from Ring Central. John Finch, how are you? I'm great. Thanks for having me, Evan. Ring Central has an amazing showing, not just here at uh Enterprise Connect, but down the street at HIMS. Lots to talk about before that. Introduce yourself. How do you describe Ring Central these days?

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Ring Central is an agentic voice AI platform that encompasses everything from contact center or customer service and customer engagement all the way through to basic phone systems and AI meetings, as well as an agentic platform that includes what we call Air Avenace, which are agents that handle conversations both with the human and with customers before, during, and after a conversation.

Why Enterprises Need Agentic AI

SPEAKER_01 0:43

Fantastic. Well, a blockbuster news around agentic AI. I'm using five, six different agents myself. I may need a seventh. Why uh do enterprises need agentic now? What's the imperative?

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Well, the imperative is actually agentic is autonomous, and fully autonomous means that it can transact fully. And so from a customer engagement perspective, it really allows organizations to accept a call at the beginning of a conversation and ensure that they can contain that conversation by integrating with systems on the back end as well as handling other any sort of transactional end-to-end result for an outcome that is necessary, right? So think of this as customer service agents, being able to handle the call, check on the status of a ship shipment, you know, make an adjustment and a return, and then confirm that information and then end the call without ever having to pass it to a human.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

Ring Central is a company that of many firsts. I I I go back in this industry 35 years and you've had many firsts. How do you see yourself uniquely positioned on the market map, as it were, of agentic AI and AI solutions in general in our space and beyond because of so much convergence? Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

Yeah, you know, look, it's our 25-year history, right? We have had business communications in the cloud since that time, and that evolution has not stopped, right? So the continuation of innovation across the board into that full portfolio that I that I mentioned at the beginning continues to evolve. So the core differentiator for us really is that communications layer. It's voice communications, which is hard to do. And of course, omnichannel is a part of that, but we've built around that center core of voice. And so omnichannel allowing customers to meet anyone, you know, any of their customers where they're at, right, across those channels, and being able to switch communications based on their needs. That's kind of the core center of what this is about. The agentic component then allows for organizations now to handle those interactions at the front to sort of automate with the human involved if necessary, but automate all those transactions as everything's coming in the front door, and you're able to actually triage that and if you can solve that information and then continue to learn and grow with the information and the data that's structured within the organization to better the containment or efficacy of those AI agents.

Orchestrating AI Agents With Humans

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Fantastic. And of course, uh, there's much more on your plate than just AI and Agentic. I mean, you're across the spectrum, voice, video, and now CX is top of mind. What what what uh what are you most excited about about the CX revolution that's happening?

SPEAKER_00 3:20

I think it's it's bring in that agentic AI, right? That AI agent in as an agent with the other human agents, right? Bringing it all together. And so being able to schedule those agents on top of human agents and ensure that that whole system works, right? The orchestration across the information, the orchestration across scheduling the right amount of individuals that are going to do certain things within the org. And then figuring out if there's not a need for human agents where those agents might go within your organization to start doing other meaningful jobs outside of what they were doing with answering calls. Because if you think about it, a lot of customer service agents have the most information about your business. And if you can plug those into other areas of your organization to help that organization grow further, then you're offloading some of those mundane things that are happening through this AI agent and bringing that forward. So AirPro really adds to the functionality of what we have with Ring CX from end to end. So you have the beginning, which is automate with AirPro, and then scheduling that with all the human agents, looking at the track record of everything across the human agent performance and the AI agent performance, CSAT scores, MPS scores, how everybody's performing across the board, so that you can improve agents during the conversation with an agent we call Ava, and she's able to guide agents in real time throughout the conversation with the same data and information that an AI agent at the AirPro level at the front door is able to have access to. And then at the end of a call, being able to take and listen to that conversation, analyze it, coach those agents on what they did right, what they could improve upon, and then update the systems of record which have to do with the knowledge base. So the whole organization has this flywheel effect of the most current information in the knowledge base, and it happens moment by moment by moment. So every interaction, everybody gets better, everybody performs better from digital agent, AI agent to human agent and beyond.

Healthcare Templates And Guardrails

SPEAKER_01 5:20

Wow, that was a mouthful. You've really tripled down on your CX strategy over the years. Um you're also deep into many industry verticals. We have the healthcare IT show of the of the year here at HIMS. And there, there's a great need for not just customer experience, patient experience. Yes. And improving workflows of doctors and nurses and so much more. Tell us about your work in healthcare.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

Yeah, it's a good lead-in, and I appreciate that. So what we did also is we announced a healthcare template which helps organizations, healthcare organizations of all sorts, accelerate their ability to offer a full agentic AI solution in the market quickly. So we have 100 plus integrations to ERP systems that allow this simple simple and easy, excuse me, simple and easy deployment of AI agents into what could be a complex environment, right? So as we know with healthcare, there's just a lot of things that are going on. There's a lot of need for integration if this agent's going to be fully autonomous to back-end systems. So if you look at it, it's coming in, it's being able to validate the patient as they come in, schedule an x-ray appointment, also the parameters around guardrails and more specifics around what it can and can't answer. So if during a conversation the patient asks, hey, great, we're scheduled at this location at this time for my x-ray, everything's confirmed. Now the patient asks the question, what can I use? Because I rolled my ankle and it really hurts. The agent shouldn't be giving health advice, it should be redirecting to some other credible source that allows that patient to gather that information. And so building in the guardrails, building in the integrations, and simplifying the build process so that the customer, the healthcare facility, can easily build, design, deploy, and then optimize that solution throughout its life cycle.

The Next Year Of Voice AI

SPEAKER_01 7:11

Fantastic work. We're all patients, we're all rooting for you in this regard. Um despite being around 25 years, Ring Central, it it feels like we're only getting started on this journey, you know, given the new AI era we're in. What is most exciting for you and the team as you look at the next months and a year or two?

SPEAKER_00 7:31

It's a really hard answer, a really hard question to answer. Um, because everything is moving so quickly, right? And I was on a panel earlier this morning with a couple of other folks and a couple of different companies in this organization or in this area, and we also did the same thing simultaneously. It's hard for us now to build roadmaps of what's coming because it's moving so fast. I think the complexity of what AI, agentic AI is today, we're still fortifying all these things that I've articulated in the conversation earlier. And I think if you can get people to set this up real easily from a simple the most simplistic standpoint as possible, and then guide them into setting that agent up with the integrations that they need, setting up the proper guardrails and hitting the go button, the better off you're gonna be in terms of doing that. And I think as we look forward, I think there's so much coming at us so fast. You look at where we've come so quickly from generative AI to currently uh agentic AI, I mean, it's light speed, right? So we have an idea, but I I can't really predict. I think the biggest thing that I can say is that the whole organization is going to get more intelligent. And what I mean by that is it's always putting humans in the middle. So if it's an agent that's answering phone calls or the humans that are working inside the organization in any sort of department, it's the knowledge that gets centralized that allows each of these individuals to gain access to that knowledge. So that same knowledge will help in a customer support situation, in a sales situation, and maybe even in a product design situation. That you gain access to all of this and throughout the journey, whatever these AI agents are working alongside the humans, it's gonna increase productivity. It's gonna better customer satisfaction, it's really gonna focus on outcomes for the entire organization.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

Wow. Well, that's a mic drop moment, uh, but don't drop the mic. Uh thank you so much for giving us a peek uh behind the curtain and a peek into the vision you have of the future. Really exciting. It's gonna be really fun to watch. Thanks so much. Thank you.