RingCentral Raises Revenue Outlook as Enterprises Adopt AI-Powered Customer Support
RingCentral raised its 2026 revenue guidance after customer adoption of its AI products accelerated, signaling that enterprises will pay for AI tools that produce measurable results and integrate with human agents rather than replace them entirely.
The communications platform reported that customers using at least one paid AI product now represent more than 10 percent of its customer base, more than doubling year over year. Those customers spend more, adopt additional products, and stay longer than those without AI, the company said.
Chief Executive Officer Vlad Shmunis positioned RingCentral's strategy around what he called a "hybrid" model, where automation and human agents work together on the same platform across voice, messaging, and video channels.
Why Customers Are Willing to Pay
Shmunis rejected concerns that AI services will become commoditized or erode profit margins. "Customers are willing to pay for AI if it's good AI," he said, adding that the company has maintained roughly similar gross margins on its AI offerings while seeing stronger customer retention and higher average revenue per user.
RingCentral uses subscription-based pricing tied to usage allocations-such as minutes consumed-rather than purely outcome-based models. Shmunis said this approach provides transparency for both customers and the company, and customers prefer the predictability.
"You can price per seat, per minute, per enterprise. Everybody knows what they're consuming. We know our costs. They understand their spend," Shmunis said.
Hybrid Models Work in Regulated Industries
Regulated industries like healthcare reinforce the case for human oversight. Shmunis noted that AI is not positioned to provide medical advice on behalf of licensed providers, but it can handle appointment scheduling, billing inquiries, and information gathering before escalating sensitive interactions to human agents.
"The world is going to be neither all AI nor all human, but a bit of both," Shmunis said.
Automotive broker Cartelligent deployed RingCentral's AI products-the AI Receptionist (AIR), AI Virtual Assistant (AVA), and AI Conversation Expert (ACE)-to reduce abandoned leads and improve customer satisfaction. The deployment achieved a 9.85 out of 10 customer satisfaction score.
Platform Expansion and Product Growth
RingCentral ended the first quarter with more than 11,800 paying AIR customers, up more than 40 percent from the previous quarter. ACE, which automates interaction reviews and connects conversation intelligence into CRM systems, has more than 5,200 customers, up 85 percent year over year.
The company recently expanded the AIR platform to support SMS, WhatsApp, e-commerce integrations, and intelligent call queues. New integrations with Shopify, Calendly, and WhatsApp extend automation into scheduling and messaging workflows. The platform now supports automatic language detection and switching across 10 languages.
RingCentral also introduced AIR Pro, which allows customers to build configurable AI agents using more than 100 pre-built integrations for EHR systems, CRM platforms, scheduling tools, e-commerce, and billing.
Financial Performance and Investment
Total revenue for the first quarter was approximately $644 million, up 5.3 percent year over year. The company raised its full-year subscription revenue guidance to $2.54 billion to $2.56 billion and total revenue guidance to $2.62 billion to $2.64 billion.
RingCentral invests over $250 million annually in product development, with an increasing portion allocated to its AI products. President and Chief Operating Officer Kira Makagon pointed to customer deployments as evidence that enterprises are moving beyond AI pilots into operational use cases.
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