Does RingCentral Offer AI Agents? Inside AIR, AVA, and ACE
The short answer is yes — and the product has moved considerably beyond early announcements. RingCentral now offers a full suite of AI agents operating across every phase of a business conversation: before calls happen, during them, and after they end. The three products are AI Receptionist (AIR), AI Virtual Assistant (AVA), and AI Conversation Expert (ACE).
This isn't a future roadmap. AIR is generally available in the US, UK, and Canada. ACE is available to all RingCentral customers. AVA is in a controlled early-access program in the US as of mid-2026, with broader rollout ongoing.
Here's what each one actually does, what it costs, where it fits, and — importantly — where its limits are.
The Logic Behind RingCentral's AI Architecture
Before breaking down each product individually, it helps to understand the design philosophy. RingCentral built AIR, AVA, and ACE to cover every stage of the conversation journey: AIR handles what happens before the conversation, AVA drives the interaction during it, and ACE connects the dots afterward.
As RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis put it: "Every customer interaction generates valuable data across our global platform, and we're empowering businesses to unlock their data and harness the full potential of voice."
The practical implication of this architecture: the three products share context. A caller handled by AIR can be transferred to a human agent with a full conversation summary. That interaction then feeds into ACE's analytics. The AI layer is designed to be continuous, not siloed — which is the meaningful difference from bolting a standalone chatbot onto an existing phone system.
AI Receptionist (AIR): The 24/7 Front Desk That Actually Understands Callers
What AIR Does
AIR is RingCentral's inbound call AI. It answers phone calls around the clock, handles routine questions, routes callers, books appointments, captures leads, and sends SMS follow-ups — all through natural conversation rather than rigid IVR menus.
Unlike standalone AI tools that require third-party integrations, additional software, and manual setup, AIR is built directly into RingCentral's business phone system, making deployment straightforward. You can deploy multiple AI receptionists for different teams — from billing to customer support — without hiring additional staff.
The routing intelligence is worth emphasizing: when a caller says something like "I'd like to speak to someone about a billing issue," AIR processes the request using natural language understanding and matches it against your uploaded knowledge base, then routes appropriately — including sharing a live context summary, transcript, and key call details so agents can continue the conversation without the caller needing to repeat themselves.
AIR's Key Capabilities
AIR's core feature set includes answering calls with natural language, routing callers to team members based on name or department, booking appointments via Google Calendar and Outlook integration with auto-generated video call links, capturing leads to Salesforce, HubSpot, or Zoho CRM, sending SMS follow-ups after calls, and handling basic FAQs pulled from your website and uploaded documents.
On language support: AIR supports English (US, UK, and Australian variants), French (Canadian and European), Spanish, Latin American Spanish, Italian, German, and Portuguese. It can switch languages automatically during a call if it detects the caller is speaking differently — useful for businesses serving multilingual markets.
AIR Everywhere: For Non-RingCentral Phone Systems
RingCentral also released "AIR Everywhere" — a standalone version that works with any phone system, not just RingCentral. This matters because it opens the product to organizations running Cisco, Avaya, or other legacy PBX infrastructure who want AI call handling without migrating their entire phone system.
Setup: Genuinely Simple
RingCentral simplified the AIR setup process in January 2026. You add your website URL, and the AI auto-generates a receptionist by scraping your site for business hours, services, and common questions. Basic setup takes about 5 minutes. No IT required.
AIR Pricing
AI Receptionist for existing RingCentral customers starts at $39/month — includes 100 minutes, with additional 100-minute bundles available. AIR Everywhere (standalone, for non-RingCentral customers) starts at $59/month for 100 minutes. Regional pricing: EU customers pay €38/month; UK customers pay £32/month; Australian customers pay AU$62/month.
One important budget note: RingCentral bills AIR in half-minute chunks, which means usage can add up faster than expected if average call duration is short and volume is high. Model your expected monthly minute usage carefully before selecting a tier.
Real-World Results
Televero Health, one of the fastest-growing behavioral healthcare providers in the US, saw monthly appointments increase 14% in the first four months of using AIR — an increase in monthly revenue of over $200,000.
Other documented outcomes include a security company automating 50% of its inbound calls, freeing staff for revenue-generating tasks; a home tech service company using AIR as an AI-powered sales rep to capture leads that would otherwise have been lost; and a healthcare provider reducing call response time from 12 seconds to zero.
A particularly instructive case: Medical Data Systems (MDS) now handles 100% of inbound calls with only a 30% transfer rate to humans, scaling effortlessly and collecting approximately $280,000 per month without sacrificing patient trust.
Where AIR Falls Short
Being honest about limitations matters. AIR works best for straightforward questions. More complex situations — pricing negotiations, detailed technical issues, or sensitive complaints — usually need to be passed to a human agent. It's a front-desk tool, not a full resolution engine for complex queries.
AI Virtual Assistant (AVA): Real-Time Intelligence During Live Conversations
What AVA Does
AVA is RingCentral's in-conversation AI assistant — designed to help the humans on the call, not to replace them. It operates across phone calls, video meetings, team chat, and messaging, surfacing relevant information and automating note-taking so employees can stay focused on the actual conversation.
AVA provides real-time call and meeting summaries by automatically capturing key points, open questions, and action items during calls and meetings, then generating polished AI summaries and highlight reels so teams can stay focused on the conversation rather than typing notes.
AVA's AI Writer functionality helps draft, refine, and translate communications across multiple languages, ensuring clarity and professionalism across every interaction. The translation capability covers 15+ languages. I
Dynamic Workflow Assistance
AVA's "Dynamic Assistance" adapts to the user's context — whether in Phone, Text, Meetings, or Chat — surfacing dynamic prompts and relevant actions that evolve with each interaction. In practice, this means AVA might suggest scheduling a follow-up meeting, logging a note to a CRM record, or pulling up a relevant document — without the user needing to search for it.
Think of it less as a passive transcription tool and more as a contextual assistant that's tracking what's being discussed and connecting it to what needs to happen next.
AVA Availability and Pricing
AVA is currently available in the US through a controlled availability early access program. RingEX customers can request to join the waitlist. Expanded capabilities, including new data connectors and deeper role-based features, are rolling out through 2026.
AVA is included at no extra cost on RingCentral Advanced and Ultra plans. It's not available on Core. Usage is capped at 500 minutes per user per month for AI notes.
This pricing structure is a notable advantage: unlike ACE and AIR, which are add-on charges, AVA comes with the Advanced plan subscription — making it effectively free for organizations already on that tier.
A Realistic Assessment
AVA is the newest and least fully deployed of the three products. Early-access users have reported genuine productivity gains from real-time meeting summaries, but the 500-minute monthly cap matters for heavy users — a team running five hours of video calls daily will hit that ceiling within two weeks. Watch for updates on whether that cap increases as the product moves to general availability.
AI Conversation Expert (ACE): Turning Call Data Into Business Intelligence
What ACE Does
ACE — leveraging and expanding on technology previously marketed as RingSense — unlocks business insights from voice conversations and unifies customer and employee conversations into a single analytics and insights layer across the business. The Insights module gives leaders real-time visibility into customer sentiment, revenue trends, and team performance, helping them understand the "why" behind performance metrics and take data-driven action faster.
ACE automatically transcribes calls, analyzes sentiment, identifies topics and trends, flags coaching opportunities, and integrates with CRM systems to auto-update records after calls complete.
The "Ask ACE" feature deserves specific attention: it lets managers query their entire call database in natural language. Instead of building custom reports, a sales director can type "which call topics correlate with deals closing in under 30 days?" and get an answer drawn from actual conversation data.
ACE Capabilities in Practice
- Automatic transcription and sentiment scoring across voice and video calls
- Topic trend identification — which issues are customers raising most frequently this week vs. last month
- Coaching workflows — automatically flagging calls for manager review based on pre-set criteria
- CRM sync — pushing call summaries and action items to Salesforce and other connected platforms without manual data entry
- Executive Insights module — one-click summaries converting complex call data into plain-language takeaways
ACE Pricing and Availability
ACE starts at $60/user/month as an add-on to any RingCentral plan. It's best suited to sales teams and contact centers needing deep conversation analytics and coaching workflows.
ACE is currently available for all RingCentral customers. The Insights module is available for select customers, with expected general availability in early 2026.
Documented Results
The ROI case for ACE is strong when call volume justifies the per-user cost. Organizations using ACE have reported a 166x increase in monthly call audits — moving from manually reviewing hundreds of calls per month to automatically analyzing tens of thousands. One compliance VP described going from auditing 300 calls per month to 75,000, with the same team, using ACE's automation.
The honest math: at $60/user/month, a 10-person sales team adds $7,200/year for ACE. That's worth running against your current call coaching spend to assess ROI before buying.
The Latest Development: AIR Pro and Native AI Agents in RingCX
The product suite announced in late 2025 has already evolved. In June 2026, RingCentral announced AIR Pro — an expanded version of AIR integrated directly into the RingCX contact center platform.
AIR Pro's expansion includes native AI agents embedded directly into RingCX workflows, helping businesses with end-to-end customer resolution, automated outreach, and intelligent handoffs. When a conversation transfers to a live agent, that agent has a more complete picture — including prior interactions, data from connected systems via APIs, and relevant recordings — without asking the customer to repeat themselves. The context layer continuously informs itself, getting smarter with every interaction.
New native AI agents for RingCX and Automated Outreach will be available on a consumption basis, aligned with AIR Pro pricing. New RingCX capabilities are currently in beta with general availability expected in the second half of 2026.
This is significant because it moves RingCentral's AI from call handling into full multi-step workflow automation — confirm an appointment, handle verification, and update a CRM record, all within a single call, without human intervention at any stage.
How the Three Products Work Together: A Complete Scenario
Here's what an AI-assisted call flow looks like in practice with all three products active:
- A customer calls at 8 PM. AIR answers instantly, understands they're asking about a billing discrepancy, logs the key details, and — since the billing team is offline — schedules a callback for 9 AM and sends an SMS confirmation.
- The next morning, a billing agent takes the scheduled call. AVA pulls up the AIR summary automatically so the agent knows the issue before picking up. During the call, AVA takes notes and flags a potential upsell opportunity based on the conversation.
- After the call ends, ACE transcribes and scores it, logs the resolution to Salesforce, flags the upsell conversation for the agent's manager, and adds it to the weekly topic trends dashboard.
The customer never repeated themselves. The agent arrived prepared. The manager got coaching data automatically. That's the integrated value proposition the individual product specs don't fully convey.
Overage: Both AIR and AIR Everywhere charge for additional minutes beyond the included 100. AIR starts at $59/month for 100 minutes with $0.50/minute overage charges. Plan your expected monthly minute volume carefully.
Is RingCentral AI Right for Your Business?
Choose AIR if: You're missing calls outside business hours, losing leads to voicemail, or spending staff time on repetitive FAQ calls. The ROI case is clearest for healthcare, professional services, and any business where a missed call equals a missed appointment or lead.
Choose AVA if: Your team runs significant meeting volume and manual note-taking is a productivity drain. At no extra cost on Advanced plans, the barrier to trying it is low.
Choose ACE if: You have a sales or customer service team making enough calls to justify $60/user/month in analytics value. The break-even point is roughly when manual call review or coaching is consuming more than a few hours of manager time per week.
Don't buy all three without modeling cost: A 30-person team on Advanced ($25/user) with 10 ACE licenses ($60/user) and one AIR license with 500 minutes runs roughly $1,400+ per month before overages. That's the all-in number worth calculating against your current spend on receptionist staff, coaching time, and missed-call costs.
Conclusion: RingCentral's AI Suite Is Real — and Still Maturing
RingCentral's AI agents are not vaporware or beta experiments. AIR is in general availability and delivering documented revenue results for customers across healthcare, professional services, and field services. ACE is available to all customers and producing meaningful efficiency gains in call coaching workflows. AVA is rolling out with genuine real-time productivity value on qualifying plans.
The honest picture: AIR is the most mature of the three and the easiest to evaluate ROI on. ACE is proven but carries a meaningful per-user cost that requires volume to justify. AVA is promising but still in early access with usage caps that limit deployment at scale.
The product direction — particularly the June 2026 AIR Pro expansion into RingCX — suggests RingCentral is committing seriously to AI as a core platform capability, not an add-on feature. For businesses evaluating UCaaS platforms with AI on the roadmap, that trajectory matters as much as the current feature set.
