Every Employee Becomes an "AI Builder"! RingCentral's Company-Wide AI-Native Overhaul

Hey, it's Shiichan! Today I've got a story from OpenAI News about a company going all-in on being AI-native.

OpenAI News openai.com

What was announced?

OpenAI News published a story about telecom company RingCentral. With nearly three decades in business communications, RingCentral generates more than $2.6 billion in annual revenue and employs thousands of people worldwide. Regardless of engineering background, every employee now has access to ChatGPT Work and Codex as the company moves toward AI-native ways of working.

Kira Makagon, President and COO of RingCentral, put it this way:

"When you put real AI tools in everyone's hands, the whole company becomes a product organization. Every one of our products—including but not limited to our Agentic Voice AI portfolio of AIR, AVA, ACE—gets sharper as we compress the distance between an idea and a shipped feature, and that's exactly what AI-native development lets us do."

Why it matters

To raise AI fluency across its whole engineering organization, RingCentral's Office of the CEO sponsored an "AI-Native Challenge." Every participant got ChatGPT Work and Codex, with no mandated workflow, and worked through a full-cycle project: planning, implementation, testing, documentation, CI/CD, and iteration.

Nearly every participant ended up with a working repository, and thousands of employees, including non-technical staff and even executives, delivered functioning projects. The engineering leader who ran the challenge reflected on it like this:

"The clearest lesson from the challenge was that AI-native development isn't about replacing engineers—it's about amplifying them. AI accelerates the entire development cycle, while humans remain in the loop, guiding product requirements, providing business context, making architectural decisions, and ensuring every outcome is tested and verified."

What changes

RingCentral applies the same lesson to its own AI product portfolio, AI Receptionist (AIR), AI Virtual Assistant (AVA), and AI Conversation Expert (ACE), shortening the distance between an idea and a feature that reaches customers.

The shift isn't limited to engineering, either. The Program Management Office (PMO) has used ChatGPT Work to turn what used to run on scattered notes and chat history into what amounts to an operating system for program management, covering status tracking, reporting, release governance, and knowledge transfer.

Vaneet Seth, Senior Manager of R&D Efficiency in the PMO, said:

"ChatGPT brings my project context together. With ChatGPT Work, I can turn that context into actions and execution."

Dive Deep

One concrete example is automated status reporting: the PMO team built workflows that generate notifications from issues tracked across Jira, Google Sheets, CRM systems, and other sources. Instead of walking into a meeting wondering what changed, teams now walk in with blockers, owners, and actions already laid out.

With less manual coordination needed, the PMO can now handle more projects with greater accuracy.

Wrap-up

• RingCentral gave every employee ChatGPT Work and Codex and ran an "AI-Native Challenge" (a customer story via OpenAI News)
• Nearly every participant shipped a working repo; thousands, including non-engineers and executives, completed real projects
• The lessons carry over into RingCentral's own AI products (AIR, AVA, ACE)
• The PMO now runs ChatGPT Work as an operating system for status tracking, reporting, and release governance
• Automated notifications spanning Jira, spreadsheets, and CRM systems cut down meeting-prep busywork

A great read for engineering managers and PMO leads who want to take AI-native adoption seriously at company scale!