Curtis Hartmann is a growth-focused technology executive with a deep background in cloud communications, AI/ML, and customer experience platforms. What sets him apart is the combination of leadership roles he’s held across product management and engineering, which have required deep, hands-on customer engagement—from early pre-sales discovery through implementation and long-term delivery.

You’ve had a remarkable career in building category-defining B2B SaaS solutions using AI/ML, big data, cloud at AWS, Genesys, Cisco, BroadSoft, and your own startup. What led you to join RingCentral?

My recent startup experience taught me that agentic AI isn’t just another technological advancement; it’s profoundly reshaping the communications landscape. RingCentral stands out as the one company genuinely making agentic AI a reality in the communications space, not just talking about.

I recognized a unique opportunity to join an organization that shares my obsession with using AI to deliver business value. At RingCentral, I can continue to do what I love most: identifying growth opportunities , collaborating with diverse teams to engineer elegant solutions, and empowering customers to thrive through groundbreaking communications technology.

From your perspective, what are the most significant partnership opportunities for Service Providers with RingCentral?

For service providers navigating today’s rapidly evolving communications landscape, the core platform they choose is absolutely critical for staying competitive and keeping customers happy. If you’re a service provider looking to migrate away from legacy solutions like BroadSoft, this isn’t just a technical upgrade; it’s a massive strategic opportunity to modernize your entire communications offering and reposition your business for substantial long-term growth driven by agentic AI.

Platforms with uncertain roadmaps or those stuck in rigid capital expenditure models simply can’t keep pace with the continuous innovation, operational simplicity, and modern consumption models that agentic AI demands.

Choosing a mature, full-stack, cloud-native communication platform like RingCentral empowers you to deliver a complete, agentic AI-powered solution. This means moving beyond basic automation to intelligent, autonomous agents that can truly transform business communications. We offer robust APIs, global infrastructure, and native support for voice, video, messaging, and advanced AI capabilities.

Unlike less scalable or narrowly focused alternatives, our platform provides the tools and flexibility to serve everyone from small businesses to global enterprises across every vertical. Our native mobile and desktop apps, advanced analytics, and strong partner enablement truly set us apart.

Besides the opportunity around UCaaS, what excites you most about bringing CCaaS and AI solutions to Global Service Providers?

When it comes to bringing CCaaS and AI solutions to Global Service Providers, what truly excites me is the transformative business outcomes that agentic AI can deliver. We’re talking about revolutionizing communications and customer engagement on a massive scale, all delivered through the trusted relationships customers already have with their service providers.

Agentic AI in RingCentral’s CCaaS isn’t just about making things faster; it’s about fundamentally transforming how businesses interact with customers and operate their contact centers, leading to significant, measurable outcomes with NLP, reasoning, memory, and SLAs required for the fastest response times.

Imagine a world where your contact center isn’t just reacting to problems, but proactively solving them before customers even know there’s an issue. That’s the power of agentic AI. Instead of a basic chatbot waiting for a “What’s my order status?” question, an agentic AI system constantly monitors various signals, like shipping delays or unusual product behavior.

If it detects a potential problem—say, a delayed delivery for a specific customer, or a smart device showing an error—it can autonomously initiate communication. Picture a customer receiving an SMS: “We’ve noticed your delivery might be delayed by 2 hours. Would you like to reschedule or receive a compensatory discount?” The business outcome is clear: drastically improved customer satisfaction, fewer inbound calls for routine issues, and a significant boost in loyalty as you shift from reactive to proactive service with complex tasks completed by goal oriented agents.

Now, consider the leap in efficiency when a virtual agent can handle more than just simple FAQs. With agentic AI, a virtual agent can autonomously navigate multi-step, complex customer journeys and react to emotions, and customers behaviors from start to finish. Take a customer calling to dispute a bill.

An agentic AI can not only authenticate the customer but also access billing systems, analyze historical data to understand the dispute’s root cause, determine eligibility for a refund, execute the refund directly, send a confirmation, and update the CRM—all without human intervention. This capability dramatically reduces the workload for human agents, lowers the cost per interaction, and provides consistent, lightning-fast resolution times.

It’s about empowering your human team to focus on the truly complex and empathetic interactions, while the agentic AI handles the intricate but automatable processes with precision.

These examples illustrate how agentic AI moves beyond simply assisting to intelligently acting and reasoning across complex workflows, driving tangible improvements in efficiency, customer satisfaction, resulting in revenue generation for service providers.

RingCentral has built an incredible business serving SMBs and enterprises directly; by extending our reach through Global Service Providers, we unlock a powerful new distribution model. These providers have enormous customer bases, established billing relationships, and a strong local presence, making them ideal partners for deploying agentic AI solutions that are scalable, secure, and perfectly tailored to their needs.

Finally, as the Global VP of GSP Solutions Engineering, what are your top priorities?

I’m focused on three main areas:

Driving customer success and revenue impact: Expand and accelerate deal closures by diving deep on customer requirements, demonstrating RingCentral’s value in transforming their business, and removing technical barriers in the sales process.

Building technical expertise and credibility: Continuously improve our product and industry thought leadership across unified communications, contact center, AI to establish credibility with GSP technical buyers. This means staying current with RingCentral’s platform updates, understanding our competitive landscape, and ensuring we can speak authentically about the complex communication and customer experience challenges our prospects face.

Fostering cross-functional collaboration: Build strong partnerships and co-innovation roadmaps between my team and sales, product, engineering, and customer success. Since solutions engineers often serve as the technical bridge between these groups, I will prioritize clear communication channels and shared goals around RingCentral’s capabilities and roadmap.

My goal is to balance the technical depth my team needs in RingCentral’s platform with the business acumen to drive measurable impact on revenue and customer satisfaction in the competitive communications market.

As I step into this new role, I’m energized by the opportunity to partner with our incredible teams, customers, and Global Service Providers to push the boundaries of what’s possible in cloud communications. The intersection of AI, CCaaS, and UCaaS offers endless potential to create transformative outcomes for businesses worldwide. Together, we’ll focus on delivering innovative, customer-centric solutions that drive real impact: laying the foundation for the next era of growth and transformation at RingCentral.

Originally published Jul 28, 2025