RINGCENTRAL, INC. Oppenheimer 29th Annual Technology, Internet & Communications Conference

Yeah. Thank you, first of all, for giving me the opportunity to join the fireside today, and thanks for the kind words. I'm finishing up on my 10-year anniversary here at RingCentral in July, actually, as we speak.

Yeah, absolutely. Look, business lines have always been mission critical in our strongest verticals like healthcare, financial services, retail, and others. If you look at our daily lives, whether it's a healthcare provider, whether it's a financial advisor, whether you're calling your gym or a furniture store, generally those interactions are still happening either through a call or a text message on a daily basis. I think AI, what we are seeing is that AI will make business communications more useful, not less, because it turns a business line from a simple voice endpoint into an intelligent customer engagement channel. Essentially that's what we've been doing over the last 12 to 18 months is to transform from a pure communications company into a complete customer engagement platform so we can handle, or our customers can handle all form of interactions.

Now, interactions today are very different than they were several years ago. Today, they are person to person, could be person to a non-dedicated contact center agent, could be with a dedicated contact center agent, and increasingly, we are talking more to AI agents. I think AI will frankly be a tailwind. It's a generational shift, and I think Vlad talked about this extensively at our prior earnings. AI is just making business interactions more and more kind of efficient, more intelligent. This handoff between humans and agents is kind of incredible. I think Vlad coined this term, humans in the loop, and we are seeing that in practice on a day-to-day basis. Essentially net, AI will just increase the value of a business line because it'll become tied into productivity. It leads into better customer experience and better outcomes rather than just being a business line.

I think that's where we fit in well with our broader strategy of bringing voice messaging, contact center, and AI together into one platform.

Yeah. I think when you look at the genesis of RingCentral was to bring communications in the cloud. And what that meant was those communications or interactions were device agnostic, they were location agnostic. And obviously we went through the generational shift of internet, of mobility, and AI is this basically next shift. Here is what we are seeing. I think there are three trends, or maybe four trends that are very evident to us. Number one, voice continues to be a primary mode of communication in B2C settings. Like as consumers, when you want to reach your businesses, voice and SMS is the primary mode, and we are seeing voice traffic on our platform continue to grow. That is one trend, and we are acknowledged leaders in voice, so essentially we are Voice is going strong, and we are strong in voice, if you will.

That is one trend. Number two is, there is also this buying behavior wherein we are seeing customers wanting a bundled solution with a single provider, wherein they can manage all forms of communications and can seamlessly transfer between humans and AI. Because with the humans in the loop, it is not either/or, it is both. AI is making calls more efficient, more intelligent. But for more complex, and judgmental type situations, you need a human. So customers want a singular platform versus, I think there is this fatigue that is setting in, wherein you could have a lot of applications from different vendors, and then it becomes eventually more expensive and difficult to manage. So customers are looking for one solution, which we are offering through our Customer Engagement Bundle.

And again, to my earlier point, customers will be able to manage all forms of communications, whether it is with humans or with AI agents. That is the second trend. The third trend is, for AI to be successful, you need a strong infrastructure layer. We have built a telephony infrastructure layer over the years that is now trusted by over 600,000 customers. There is a lot of traffic that is flowing through the platform, so there are 40 billion-plus calls that are happening on an annualized basis, billions of, sorry, minutes and billions of calls and SMS messages that are going through the platform. So for AI to be successful, you need data, and that data on the system, as consumers, you are able to utilize AI from the get-go, and you are able to train your models on your own data. So that is the third thing.

And the fourth trend is, customers need to see measurable ROI. So what we are seeing through our AI product portfolio, which we coined as three A's, AIR, AVA, and ACE, customers are seeing measurable ROI. Customers are using AIR to capture more demand. They are automating more repetitive work, like note-taking with our AVA product, and improving the quality of interactions through our ACE product. These products are all working in tandem with each other and improving on a daily basis. So I think those are some of the trends, Tim, that we are seeing, and those trends are getting reflected in the traction that we are seeing in our AI product portfolio.