For decades, businesses have treated customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) as separate, parallel priorities. While the CX side typically has focused on call centers and customer satisfaction metrics, EX has focused on engagement, productivity, and retention.

They are two sides of the same coin, though, and AI serves as a bridge that can unite the two arenas and their formerly-distinct data sets toward optimized outcomes for all involved.

Why modern AI must enite CX and EX

In today’s market, customers expect real-time responsiveness, personalized service, and frictionless interactions. Employees want the same intuitive, AI-assisted tools that they benefit from as consumers, including automation, intelligent workflows, and systems that remove busywork and increase productivity. To that end, advances in AI are no longer about automation alone; those advances center around the delivery of more intelligence.

An agentic voice AI architecture for the full conversation lifecycle

Recent innovations from RingCentral show this shift in motion. Our agentic voice AI suite–AIR, AVA, and ACE–is designed to power every phase of a conversation—before, during, and after a call, generating valuable data businesses can tap to improve the customer and employee experiences.

More specifically, before the conversation, AIR ensures that businesses never miss a call or opportunity. To facilitate this, AIR includes features like answering routine business questions, enhanced appointment setting and contextual handover to a human agent.

During the conversation, AVA provides real-time assistance across interactions and turns every live conversation into action through context-aware guidance, automation, and insights.

Then after the conversation, ACE unlocks value from every customer interaction, it provides cross organizational business intelligence—surfacing insights and recommending actions that improve outcomes across voice, video, and messaging. Along with our new customer engagement-specific products, RingWEM and Customer Engagement Bundle, our significant AI advances make entire organizations smarter and more efficient while delivering improved customer experiences and tangible ROI.

How RingWEM turns engagement into proactive intelligence

With RingWEM, workforce engagement shifts from reactive to proactive. By combining AI-driven forecasting, scheduling, coaching, quality management, and omnichannel analytics, RingWEM turns every customer interaction into actionable intelligence. This serves two purposes: cost reduction and talent enablement.

Agents are coached automatically based on real behaviors, and supervisors are freed to mentor more than audit. Leaders can see metrics ranging from the primary drivers of satisfaction to escalations and churn. For example, customers cite reduced after-call work by 43% and increased productivity by 20%—all while personalizing customer service even more.

The expansion of customer engagement beyond the contact center

Equally transformative is the Customer Engagement Bundle for RingEX™. In a world where millions of knowledge workers already respond to customers without being part of a formal contact center, the definitions of roles have blurred. Everyone from retail associates to franchise owners or office staff could end up being a “first responder” to a customer moment.

By adding intelligent call queue management, shared SMS inboxes with AI-assisted replies, and real-time reporting, the CE Bundle gives non-contact-center employees the tools of one. They can respond faster, collaborate on customer conversations, and never miss critical messages. The potential strategic outcomes can be profound: customer engagement can become a capability distributed across the enterprise rather than just a single department.

This is the convergence that high tech analysts have been predicting: UCaaS, CCaaS, CPaaS, and CRM dissolving into a single experience layer.

Executive visibility from conversation intelligence at scale

While RingWEM manages front line personnel performance, and the CE Bundle powers non-formal contact centers, ACE offers the leadership of organizations increased clarity. Specifically, for years, leaders have been rich in data while, at times, lacking in actionable insights. In many cases, thousands of calls, messages, and meetings have been recorded, logged, and archived with strategic patterns remaining hard to decipher, interpret, or realize.

ACE changes and improves upon these dynamics with executive-level insights, including factors such as why customers reach out and how that’s shifting, where issues are emerging before they become escalations, which customers are identified as “at risk,” which competitors are gaining ground, which campaigns are working–or not, and how employee performance links to revenue outcomes.

Thus, ACE synthesizes data, reports it, interprets it, explains it, and recommends appropriate actions. ACE is AI beyond its use as a tool of efficiency; ACE is AI as a strategic partner.

Conclusion: Building a competitive advantage with a anified action layer

Now, RingCentral’s agentic voice AI suite elevates voice from a communication channel into an action layer, using real-time transcription, contextual reasoning, and autonomous workflows to convert spoken intent directly into outcomes. Through these advancements, the bridge RingCentral has built between CX and EX allows businesses that implement our tools to gain significant competitive advantage.

In unifying communication, engagement, and intelligence, these businesses will respond faster, resolve smarter, personalize at scale, retain customers and talent more effectively, and course-correct before problems surface. With RingCentral organizations learn and improve in real time—and that is the height of competitive advantage in an AI-driven world.

Originally published Jan 26, 2026