RingCentral: Conversation Intelligence Big Focus of ConnectCentral

(Pictured above: Gong.io’s Udi Ledergor, vice president of marketing, at RingCentral ConnectCentral in San Francisco, Nov. 14.)

RINGCENTRAL CONNECTCENTRAL — With RingCentral‘s ConnectCentral 2018 conference wrapping up Wednesday, a big theme was innovation, including conversation intelligence via artificial intelligence (AI).

RingCentral announced new voice analytics AI partnerships with Gong.io, Theta Lake and Velvetech to deliver real-time and post-call voice analytics services to global customers. The conference in San Francisco drew more than 1,000 attendees, including partners and customers.

David Lee, RingCentral’s vice president of platform products, said his company is collaborating with innovative companies by providing the data and metadata from its communications service to feed into their AI and machine learning engines, “so they can help our joint customers do interesting things.”

AI is going to lead to more RingCentral partner opportunities, he said.

“It seems like every quarter we’re getting a handful of new AI partners come to us,” he said. “There [have] been some that just joined during the past few weeks. An older partner of ours, Box, is also playing in AI, so we built an archival service will send all of the recordings to Box, and then Box has all of these AI workflows that will send your recordings to Google, Amazon, Watson, whatever, to bring back the AI analysis results. There [are] a lot of different pathways for this and we’re working with many different companies, and we’re just as interested as them to really drive the adoption of AI.”

Gong.io helps sales teams have better sales conversations, said Udi Ledergor, its vice president of marketing.

“We do that by recording, transcribing and analyzing all of their sales calls, whether they’re placed through phone system, video conference or even email, and we’ll figure out what the top reps on every team are saying and doing during their calls and demos that’s selling more,” he said. “That allows the individual reps and their managers to replicate those behaviors that are leading to more closed wins. It allows sales managers to better coach their teams on the specific areas where they need attention, and it allows sales teams to slash the on-boarding time of new hires by as much as half.”

Gong.io has several partnerships in communications and collaboration, Ledergor said. It is targeting two types of partnerships: communication and collaboration platforms, including phone, video conferencing, mobile call and texting systems; and training and consulting firms, Ledergor said.

“We have north of 20,000 paid users using Gong.io at any given moment, some of them using RingCentral and others using other collaborating and conferencing platforms,” he said. “Our customers range from SMB all the way to enterprise, from LinkedIn, GE and Nasdaq and many other household names. They’re all using Gong.io across their sales teams to really see what their best sales reps are doing and really try and replicate that behavior across the team. We’ve seen some amazing growth over the last two years. We are now north of 300 customers and 20,000 paid users, and growing very, very rapidly.”

Theta Lake is a platform that uses …

… AI and machine learning to detect regulatory corporate compliance, and conduct risk inside of audio and video content. It’s focused on highly regulated industries such as financial services and health care.

“The things we’re looking for are promissory statements, implied performance risk, just misleading statements in general that would end up being at risk for the organization,” said Anthony Cresci, Theta Lake’s vice president of business development and operations. “The other things you can look at are … account numbers or credit card numbers, or even conduct risk. A trader, for example, who is required to be on a recorded line trying to take a conversation offline … whatever might be indicative of some sort of malicious behavior. So basically things that an organization would be super concerned about and want to take remediation steps.”

Theta Lake is “very much” a partner-led organization, Cresci said. Theta Lake is built in the cloud, so good partnership candidates would be organizations that have cloud-collaboration solutions, he said.

“We’re actually very early on, only about a year old, so a lot of the very beginning was developing a platform where we can plug things in,” he said. “We’re actually starting to get a lot of traction with our partner ecosystem. We’ve been on RingCentral for about a month or two, and we’ve added other partners around content manager systems, so we have paying customers right now. We focus on the very large organizations.”