Why Vertical Software Must Own the Whole Phone
AI touches only about a quarter of 1% of global calls. Dial Stack's Mike Sharp says vertical software that adds voice AI on top of RingCentral is creating pipeline for RingCentral.
· 7 min read
Mike Sharp, founder and CEO of Dial Stack, interviewed by Luke Sophinos and Nic Poulos (Verticals: A Weekly Biz Show On Vertical AI)
Mike Sharp is the founder and CEO of Dial Stack, which lets vertical software and vertical AI companies embed a full phone system, including hardware, calling and 911, in their own products. He has worked in phones for about 20 years: he started Jive Communications in the mid-2000s, grew it to about $100 million in revenue, sold it to LogMeIn (GoTo), and later led a healthcare IT rollup with about 17 brands and a couple of hundred million dollars in revenue, where every practice wanted to own the phone. Dial Stack came out of those two jobs.
Summary
Mike Sharp says a vertical software company that only adds voice AI on top of a customer's existing phone system is half pregnant: it sees some calls, leaves its customer with a fragmented setup, and within a year competes with a phone provider that sells voice AI too. He argues that platforms should own the whole phone surface, both for the data and for the revenue they otherwise hand to a carrier. The voice use cases that work today are voicemail replacement, call routing and ambient augmentation, and he says voice AI is only good when it serves the caller. Dial Stack takes the regulation, hardware and corner cases so that the platform gets a clean surface. These signals are from an interview that Luke Sophinos and Nic Poulos did with Mike Sharp on Verticals.
