RingCentral’s Positive Quarter Underpinned By ‘Strong Traction’ in AI Products
RingCentral posted a positive Q3 2023 quarter this week, powered by what it described as “strong traction” in its AI-driven products and services.
RingCentral outlined that its new AI-driven solutions, RingCX and RingSense, have increased in popularity with customers this past quarter, helping boost total revenue and subscription revenue to grow 10 percent year over year to $558 million and $531 million, respectively.
Tarek Robbiati, CEO at RingCentral, commented:
Combined with our UCaaS leadership built over the past 20 years, we are now transforming into an AI-first, multi-product company with proprietary offerings in UCaaS, CCaaS, Conversation Intelligence, Sales Analytics and Events, Webinars and Meetings(…) the R&D team have been busy over the last few years building out an AI platform that we are now leveraging to infuse AI across our entire portfolio.”
RingCentral’s ambition to integrate AI across its portfolio — including its UCaaS products, such as its Cloud PBX MVP product — was highlighted in the earnings call, which could potentially see conversational intelligence features introduced to UCaaS products.
The acquisition of hybrid events company Hopin earlier this year also contributes to RingCentral’s plan to develop into a multiproduct business, with Hopin being renamed “RingCentral Events”.
Slack Set to Announce New CEO Next Week
Slack is set to announce its new Chief Executive Officer next week after the news broke on Monday that outgoing CEO Lidiane Jones has taken the corresponding role at dating platform business Bumble.
According to a message on Slack’s internal channels, as reported by Insider, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, Slack’s parent company, promised that a new Slack CEO would be appointed by next Monday and thanked Jones for all she’d done and wished her well.
Jones will end her tenure at Slack at the turn of the year, beginning at Bumble on January 2. Jones has only been in post since January 2023, having succeeded Slack Cofounder Steward Butterfield, who had announced he was leaving the collaboration business less than two years after its acquisition by Salesforce.
Jones was previously an executive vice president and general manager at Salesforce, joining the company four years ago. With an impressive CV across the tech world, she spent a decade in software development and product management positions at Microsoft. She led software product management at the wireless speaker business Sonos.
OpenAI Reveals No-Code ChatGPT Builder for Enterprise
OpenAI launched a no-code ChatGPT Builder platform for businesses.
Announced at this week’s DevDay, OpenAI’s inaugural developer conference in San Francisco, the platform will be capable of generating customised versions of ChatGPT for specific use cases without requiring any coding. These AI agents, named simply GPTs by OpenAI, will become available on the GPT Store over the coming weeks.
One potential use case is for businesses to develop internal-only GPTs for their workers.
An OpenAI blog wrote:
We’re rolling out custom versions of ChatGPT that you can create for a specific purpose—called GPTs. GPTs are a new way for anyone to create a tailored version of ChatGPT to be more helpful in their daily life, at specific tasks, at work, or home—and then share that creation with others.”
OpenAI suggests that the ChatGPT Store will eventually introduce monetisation functionality, paying creators for the use of their GPT depending on how frequently those bots are used — as well as unconfirmed (for now) secondary factors. Both the creator and OpenAI will get a cut of the revenue produced by the GPT’s deployment, while OpenAI is responsible for the online housing of the user’s GPT and the processes of collecting the money.
Microsoft Teams Introduces ‘Meet’ for Better Organised Calls
Microsoft Teams has introduced a ‘Meet’ tab for centralised calling and streamlined meeting catchup.
Meet provides users with a unified place to view upcoming meetings and assess recent past meetings. It enables the rapid discovery of meeting content, such as chats, files, agendas, shared documents, and meeting recaps. The decision to produce a Meet tab was prompted by professionals’ increasingly busy meeting calendars, the challenges of prioritising those meetings, and the extra tasks of preparing for meetings, compiling relevant content, and catching up on past discussions.
“Meet is an app available in the new Microsoft Teams experience that centralises all your common meeting preparation and catchup activities, helping to enhance meeting efficiency by simplifying the prep work and reducing time spent reviewing missed meetings,” wrote Meera Ajam, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft.
To access Meet, users must have installed the new Teams client, which can be toggled on in the top left corner of the Teams window. Then, users must select the “view more apps” option in the Teams navigation bar and search for Meet. Users can also right-click and select “Pin” to pin the app to the bar for easy future access.
