Why Your AI Still Sounds Like a ROBOT 🤖 SPECIAL GUEST! RingCentral's Kristen Koenig | Ep. 516

0:01Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for Do This Not That, and we have an amazing guest. She's a big deal. She's a great friend. I'm glad she still talks to me because she's now really important. So she's a returning guest, which is a very rare thing. That means we really like her. So who's here? Kristen Koenig from RingCentral. Now she is the GM of AI and collaboration go to market there, which is a lot.

0:41What really it means is all this wild AI stuff that's going on, she's kind of leading the charge on it. And RingCentral is a beast. There were 600 ,000 customers, millions of users worldwide, and Kristen has been doing this. She hasn't only been at RingCentral. She's been at Hopin and Seaven. She's been named top 25 influential women in meetings and events. She's a big deal. But the reason I have her here, we're going to talk about all things AI, AI for marketers. She's right at the center of it all. I'm so excited. Kristen, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much, Jay. What an intro. It's lovely to be here.

1:18Well, you know, when I think about RingCentral, okay, and if anybody has a minute, you go to your site and you look at all the different products and services you have. I want to know what it's like being in meetings at RingCentral right now because everything you guys have, all the different product lines, all different stuff is like AI this and AI that. And you're using AI in ways I can't even fathom. Is every meeting you have like, how should we use AI to change our business? Is it just the wildest thing? It is the wildest thing. And honestly, I couldn't be more excited for our industry, for marketers, for communications.

1:53And, you know, I was a communications major in college and it just all circles back to now I'm at an AI communications company. It is wild because the industry is changing. And, you know, RingCentral was a voice, you know, voice AI and voice communications leader for many years. We've been that for decades. However, it's going through a renaissance right now. And I think every marketer is listening to this or just anyone's listening to this. It's a really rare time for us to really enhance and perfect our craft and ensure that we're really paying attention to what's going on in the industry to help our jobs, help our customers, and help our industry become more productive and more prescriptive in how we're doing things day to day.

2:38Okay. So before we get into like AI for marketers and stuff and all of that, one of my things when it comes to AI and communication, you know, I'm dealing with an AI chat bot, not from RingCentral, but in general, an AI voice assistant, an AI whatever, when I'm communicating is I'm like, oh, I'm talking to a robot. This is not going well. How do we embrace AI tools and functionality into our businesses and not have the person feel like this is a robot thing and this thing sucks. Yeah. So there's definitely, there's a huge, like thousands of customers now tackling AI. I would say the first thing is to really pay attention and do free trials before you buy any product within the market.

3:24Because like you said, people voice and items and emails sound very robotic. What I like to tell a lot of people is ground yourself in the real customer conversations. And when you train the AI on your actual calls and emails and interactions, it starts to sound like you and not a template. So for my team, I actually have a leaderboard of all the AI products we use, including our own. So RingCentral, on RingCentral is a big thing. So we use our own tool sets, but then we also augment that with Gemini and Claude and many others. And when I feed those systems, including our own with my voice, my emails, my messages, then we start to talk and position to our customers like not a robot.

4:12So don't just take, I think the biggest lesson and takeaway and tip is don't just take the first readout from AI as this is what I should send to my clients. You need to constantly perfect it and let it learn from you. And then it will start to talk like you, whatever modal or medium of communication that you have. I love that. It's like, you really do need to feed the beast when it comes to anything AI related. If you take the generic version, it's going to be garbage. So along those lines, wearing the marketing hat, because you are actually a marketer marketing all of this stuff to the planet, what are most marketers getting wrong about AI?

4:56Yeah, that's a great question. So again, And we use RingCentral on RingCentral. So my job right now as a go-to-market leader for our own communications products, it's kind of like I do the thing for exactly what I'm trying to sell it for, which is great because I'm giving feedback to our product team. But what the biggest thing that they're getting wrong is using AI just for outbound content. Like I see tons of things online and on LinkedIn. Oh, I created this post or email or ad. and while they ignore what happens when the customers respond. And that is something really crucial. So you can't AI your way to better campaigns if your inbound experience is still analog.

5:40And I think what marketers can take away is measuring AI and output that has content produced, email sent instead of outcomes, leads captured, conversations converted, and insights generated. it's focusing more on the communication modal of what's coming inside. And so you treat the voice. And when I think of voice, you know, I think of phone messaging, which is text or, or written, depending on what solution you use. And then you have video and treating those as different channels. And marketers drive billions in phone traffic through ads, landing pages, free trials, use that data to then feed it and not just say, oh, I'm going to write a campaign and spring up an email on Claude or Gemini or whatever you use or ChatGPT.

6:32That's my biggest, biggest tip. So I think most marketers are using AI to shout louder. So the smarter play is using it to listen better and make sure every customer who responds is actually getting the right message served you know i think that's a super important message and then the other piece that i think marketers are sleeping on i'm just curious about your opinion is ai just like can produce more stuff to put out for you whatever but it's like i feel like everybody's putting out more stuff but the stuff has been downgraded it's like not as good as the singular thing they were going to do on their own is our marketers you do you find like markers are using ai just to produce volume and And it's like this quantity over quality thing is taking place?

7:21Yes, I definitely see it. I even see it with our own business. And that's why I've tried to make sure that when we're doing campaigns or anything, we're doing it in a much more precise manner. We're trying new things. Don't get me wrong. Because, you know, I'd rather try things and not have it work and fail than not try them at all. So I'm someone as like, I try a lot of things and then I see which one sticks. But I agree with you. I think AI is really collapsing the gap between when a customer reaches out, when they get a meaningful response from hours to seconds across every channel. So the biggest shift is it isn't necessarily speed.

8:01So to your point, yes, it is, you know, getting a lot out there, but it's actually I think the opportunity is it's closing the last mile. So while marketers invest heavily in campaigns to drive inbound, but when those leads actually respond, the experience falls apart in some way. But AI can fix that. So now you can think of when they respond, how can I automate the next interaction? How can I think about what are the modals of every interaction that feeds to the next one in conversation? So what we're thinking about right now at Blank Central is like, what is that loop? So they could call, they could chat with a bot on our website, they could get targeted, and then they can email respond.

8:50So agents like voice agents or SMS agents can qualify, pre-qualify without having it be robotic on answer, qualify and capture. So it's just AI isn't just making communication faster. It's making it more complete. So no touch point falls through the cracks and it should make us have more quality versus the quantity I see right now. And, you know, along the lines, you talk about channel. Um, do you think that, uh, marketers are really thinking about a channel strategy or are they just kind of like, okay, AI really the easiest place for me to shove that in is, you know, email campaigns or something like that.

9:31Are they looking at, you know, uh, the different channels and how to bring AI into it? Or do you find that that's really not taking place yet? I think we're at the point in time where more marketers are thinking that way. even in my current role, I feel most marketers just resort to email. Believe me, I love email. You are the king of email. But most marketers I'm talking to now as peers, as compadres, they're thinking about SMS. They're thinking about phone. They're thinking about all these modals. And I call it more of an omni-channel communication and how you're interacting with your customers in these feedback loops.

10:15So the question isn't really like which channel, but how does that channel feed into the next one? Because one person might respond to your email, but then there's other things that customer does throughout the wheelhouse that we kind of lose track on as marketers. So what I'm thinking about as in my new role is like, you know, how does that channel strategy. It used to be about picking winners. And now in an AI-driven world, it's about building a system where every channel makes every other channel smarter. Does that? It does. And I'm glad that you're seeing more marketers lean into SMS and the other channels and kind of taking one knowledge base from one and bleeding into another.

11:01And another thing that, and this is not a commercial for RingCentral, but I think you guys are doing something good, which I'll tell you what it is. I think with all this AI stuff, we kind of are forgetting kind of our core businesses a little bit and improving on our products in a core business. What I mean, the reason I say not commercial for RingCentral is, so I saw, and candidly, my company uses RingCentral for all of our events. We love it. We've run it for years. And again, I can tell you right now that it's amazing. But one of the things when I go and I have a meeting on RingCentral now, it used to be like if you were on other platforms and you would share your screen you could say can you can you still see me can you still see my screen you know that's what we would always say but you guys came out with a feature now where it's like you actually you don't have to ask that question like you could see the screen you could see the person and it's like a core function there's nothing really to do with ai and i think so many companies have forgotten like their primary product or service that they're selling that they have to improve that and they're just so focused on the AI stuff.

12:01Do you have to be intentional internally about your products? Like, uh, we can't forget the mothership here. Yes. Oh my gosh. It's like, you're reading my mind. Um, we think about that daily. Like our core business is, is the communication channels that I message and, and voice, uh, video and phone, um, or, or, you know, we call it our MVP, but our message video and phone product is our core business, our ringy X product. And we want to make sure that that platform is really best in class. That's where most of our business is. But when you think about the other channels and AI sitting on top of it, it's how do you invest in, you know, in our earnings call, we talked about this, but invest hundreds of millions of dollars into innovation, which is AI, but make those products still better and finesse the experience.

12:50Because I'm all about, which some people might disagree listening to this, but I'm all about less features and more items that create more value. So you can have every feature on the Sun. And I know a lot of products out there do amazing things, but think about the user experience and think about what it's doing to your customers. And I don't think what a lot of product, and I had a great experience over this last year leading one of our product teams, and it's taught me a lot. And I think through that time when I've led that is we don't think about as companies looking at features and sunsetting them when they're not used.

13:29And maybe it's 1 % of your customers or 5%, but we're making sure that our core products are really, really great in user experience while still innovating the A on top of it. I think that's the way to do it. I agree with that 100%. All right. I got a crystal ball question for you. When I started my career, I had a phone on my desk and I would call people, I would have their phone numbers and they would pick up. Everything wasn't a scheduled call. I have no phone on my desk anymore. Everything is, you know, done on Ring Central or Teams or this or Zooms or whatever, right? So give me the crystal ball.

14:05Years from now, the next three years, what are communication channels going to look like in the next three years? Am I going to be using a banana to call somebody? What's going to happen? So this is a really big question. I can answer this. Probably it'll take me a couple of minutes. But I would say, you know, I said in the beginning of the call that voice and communications is going through the renaissance. And I truly believe that. To go in deeper into the next three years, I think it's the most transformed channel on the horizon and the most underestimated right now. And coming from someone who's been in video and events for so long, that's still a massive channel.

14:47But think of all the discussions that we have with people that is so invaluable. Like those conversations are incredibly invaluable. And so in the next three years, those calls, like think of generic voicemail or IVR, will feel more archaic, kind of like how faxes. And then video meetings are going to be reimagined. So think of, you know, idea of manually taking notes, chasing down action items, which many of us probably still do and losing contacts in between sessions will really be gone and every meeting will be self-documented and actionable and some are right now but the actions after the meeting is usually not done for you so we did a study here at ring central it's our gentic ai study um that video and chat are the two fastest growing modalities for customer interaction so So with them both powered forward, I believe that voice and video will look unrecognizable in the next three years.

15:52And it's not because people will stop using them, but because AI makes them so much better, we'll forget what they used to feel like because it's just in our productivity. It's in our day-to-day naturally. That's where I see it going in a few years. It will really look unrecognizable. All right. I got two completely 180 degree ridiculous questions. One is AI related and then one's totally stupid. So in your real life, put aside all the ring central doodads, whatever. Is there AI stuff that you use in your real life that like is like, I love, like for me, I love Gamma, the app that makes like slide decks and stuff.

16:34Are there any, or I love, you know, Chachi PT for travel planning. Like how does Kristen use AI in her real life? That's such a great question. My gosh, I use so much AI. I would say like a lot of people, I know this is what you just said, but my girlfriends and I always plan our trips on chat GBT and then share it with each other. Like, oh, the coolest things to check out, or here's our itinerary. We're going to Costa Rica next week. And my friend sent me a whole packing list through chat GBT. So I will say like, we can't live without that. There's other little things that I'm trying out in my day to day, whether it's voice, like having recorders like in meetings when it's not like a video meeting.

17:17So I am trying things like that, even like personal, personal things that I do on the side. And yeah, I think mostly like chat GBT now, but I, my phone is like a collectiveness of AI apps. Oh, same. By the way, I didn't know that until this week that um i could use chachi pt to search airbnbs which was very save me a lot of time so all right you are somebody this is my other question for you are somebody that travels a lot every time i'm like texting or messaging with kristen she is somewhere traveling whatever and so i want to know what are the the kristen koenig must travel with things that you like like you have to bring with you you bring a sleep mask for the plane what are the things you must travel with because i know it's good stuff this is actually the best question i think i've ever had in a podcast interview or any conversation.

18:05Number one, I am big into the hydration packets because I travel so much. I do not want to get sick. So I always have the hydration packets. Like what is that? Like liquid IV? It's like liquid IV, but I'm very specific of what I want in the packet, like no sugar and electrolytes. So I have these Ultima packets, which is no, no, no, uh, you know, commercial for Ultima, but I love it. They're going to start sending you stuff for free now. I know. So Ultima, um, send me stuff for free. So I get them from CVS and they're phenomenal. So that's number one. Um, number two is I always, I'm really big into health and wellness and competitive person, but I love health and wellness.

18:51I always bring my sneakers. I always bring my sneakers everywhere I go. It doesn't matter what I'm doing. If I'm going to New York for one day, I'm bringing my sneakers. I'm walking around, I'm doing something and being healthy. So Ultima sneakers. And then the third, are you Hoka or Nike or what are we? I'm Nike, but I will say it depends on the activity because I have like my lifting shoes and then my running shoes. So I'm that person in a closet. I'll take a picture later. And then probably the third is, um, going into health and wellness theme. I feel like this is all health the wellness name, but my athletic greens.

19:30Oh, there you go. I like it. I have my athletic green travel packet. So knock on wood, I rarely get sick through travel and it's because I'm really set up to ensure I'm staying healthy. I love this. All right. When you see Kristen, do not sneeze on her while you're on the airplane. We're not looking for that. But first of all, she's an incredible person to connect with and follow on LinkedIn and all socials. You find a Kristen, That's K-R-I-S-T-E-N and then Koenig, K-O-E-N-I-G. Okay. And then go to ringcentral.com. I'm a big fan of them. I've been a client and customer of theirs for five years now.

20:07Incredible stuff. Kristen, you're incredible. Thanks for being here. We're going to have to have you back for another episode. Talk about all health and wellness stuff. We'll love to. Appreciate you. You're the best. Thank you so much, Jay. And thanks to the team. I love being here. It was such a great discussion. Yay! Wait, the party is not over. Go to jayschwedelson.com because I want to do stuff with you. I want to partner with you. When you click on the button partner with Jay, you let me know what you got going on. Work with my agency, work with me directly, get access to all of my free resources at jayschwedelson.com.

20:41And I got a book coming out this April. It's called Stupider People Have Done It. And all of the net proceeds are going to the V Foundation for Cancer Research. Go on Amazon, buy stupider people have done it. That way you can help kick cancer's butt with me. And if this podcast wasn't the worst podcast you've ever listened to, it might've been, leave it a review, follow the show. You are awesome. Go out there and crush it.