RingCentral’s AI Stopped Answering Calls and Started Closing Deals

RingCentral’s AI Receptionist handles roughly 11,800 businesses across healthcare, financial services, construction, and legal. Until last week, it answered calls. Now it books appointments, processes orders and responds to messages without looping in a human.

The company added Shopify, Calendly and WhatsApp to its AI Receptionist product, known as AIR, moving the system from call-handling into transaction execution, per a Thursday (May 7) press release.

One System, No Handoff

Traditional customer service ran in layers. A bot handled the first exchange. A human took the handoff. A back-end system processed the transaction. AIR now covers all three from a single system, RingCentral said.

The Shopify connection lets AIR handle order status inquiries and customer support questions over the phone without routing to a separate system, per the release. The Calendly integration schedules appointments end to end, working inside the calendars, CRMs, reminders and payment tools businesses already run through the app. A customer calling after hours to book a service gets a confirmed slot without reaching a person. WhatsApp extends the same automation to inbound messages, using the same AI that runs the phone channel.

AIR also now steps into call queues during peak hours or when agents are unavailable. A healthcare group fielding a surge of calls at lunch, for instance, can have AIR greet callers, answer questions about office hours or accepted insurance and schedule appointments while staff are occupied, RingCentral noted.

Keller Interiors, an installation partner for Lowe’s Home Improvement, used AIR across 33 locations. Wait times dropped from 12 minutes to 90 seconds and customer satisfaction scores rose 3 points in four months without adding headcount, the company said.

“RingCentral AIR solved a problem we didn’t have a good human answer for,” said Beth Owens, chief of staff at Keller Interiors. “How do you route every inbound call correctly, 24/7, across 33 locations, without building a call center?”

Task Is the Product

Earlier, the company introduced Enterprise Branded Calling, international SMS expansion and a Customer Engagement Bundle for Microsoft Teams. call-answering tool into a cross-channel customer engagement layer sitting across voice, SMS, WhatsApp and Teams.

Maple Federal Credit Union deployed AIR across branches running on disconnected systems. Hold times fell 90% and staff recovered 1.5 hours of daily capacity per employee.

RingCentral also added automatic language detection, with AIR identifying a caller’s language from the first word and continuing in that language across 10 options including Spanish, French, and Portuguese, the company said.

Gartner last August predicted 40% of enterprise applications will carry task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% today. The Shopify and Calendly integrations put AIR inside that category. The system completes the transaction. It doesn’t route to one.

“The AI vendors winning right now are the ones solving real problems businesses face every day,” said Michelle Morgan, IDC research manager for AI-enabled sales, customer service, and contact center strategies. “Every feature tied to a clear pain point.”

AIR now has more than 11,800 business customers, up from 8,300 at the end of Q4 2025, PYMNTS reported. RingCentral’s Q1 2026 subscriptions revenue rose approximately 6% year over year to $623 million. The company reports Q2 results in August.