Ribbon Communications: AI means voice has ‘never been more important’

Ribbon Communications seeks to expand its portfolio to make it more cost-effective for customers to operate their networks.

Greg Zweig, vice president, solutions marketing at Ribbon Communications, said the company is focusing on how it’s applying AI to its IP routing and optical networking portfolio, in addition to its communications software portfolio.

“I would say our focus is on how we make it more cost-effective for our customers to operate their networks,” he told Capacity at MWC Barcelona 2026.

Developing ‘modernised’ cloud-native solutions with AWS

Just under two weeks ago, Ribbon Communications announced an expanded partnership with the technology giant. As part of the plans, Ribbon Communications will build a cloud-native, secure voice communications solution on AWS.

Eager to reinforce its commitment to helping organisations worldwide modernise and secure their networks and services, the company said AWS would help supercharge transformation and enable Ribbon Communications customers to innovate faster and operate more efficiently.

“This strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) is just another step forward … around making sure that products interoperate,” Zweig explained. “No matter what, each cloud platform has its own capabilities and unique value proposition, requiring us to develop solutions to fully benefit from that.”

Ribbon Communications first signed AWS as a partner in 2018, Zweig said, to support with security software for its solutions. Now, the company hopes to combine its expertise in telecom automation with AWS’s purpose-built services to deliver global reach, enhanced agility and cloud economics.

“It’s an important addition for us from a portfolio perspective,” Zweig added. “Our customers were the ones who initially pushed us on this, so we made the relationship deeper.”

He added: “AWS for Telecom is arguably the most mature of all the cloud providers.”

Is AI ‘rehabilitating’ voice in telecoms?

A conversation currently ongoing in the telecoms industry is over whether voice is being re-enabled, given the AI boom. As generative AI (Gen AI) becomes more involved in customer engagement, businesses are starting to shift towards business models driven more by AI agents.

Sinch’s Robert Gerstmann told Capacity last week that voice bots are helping to support lower costs and better customer experiences. We asked Zweig if voice is really making a resurgence, or if it can now be considered a legacy part of telecoms.

“When I started my career, it was only about voice. As we move into AI, people could decide they prefer not to constantly type and instead opt to talk to these toolsets,” he said. “If people are going to use voice recognition technology, the quality of the voice has never been more important.”

He explained that – when customers start to use tools that are in the cloud – for the voice quality to be good, it must be delivered with high quality.

“I’d argue in some regard that voice will never have been more important than it is now – it might not so much be person-to-person as it is person-to-machine,” he said.

At MWC this year, Ribbon Communications demoed its natural language tool designed to help troubleshoot telecoms issues. Referred to as Acumen, the AI supports a range of business use cases, including telecom infrastructure, IP routing and RAN.

Zweig explained the tool means more engineers can communicate, troubleshoot and manage issues without necessarily having deep expertise.

“The number of people available who necessarily have deep expertise is inherently always limited – even more so if there’s a problem at two o’clock in the morning,” he said. “I expect this to be how we work much more in the future.

“Natural language engagement through voice is something I think everyone would ultimately prefer.”

Turbocharging industry growth with technology

Looking ahead, Zweig explained that Ribbon Communications is prioritising how to leverage AI to help its customers “change the way they manage and develop their networks”.

He added: “It’s not just talking to AI, it’s also about automation.”

According to him, most of Ribbon Communications’ customers say it takes too long or is too difficult to deploy their networks and make them operational.

“That’s because there are so many steps,” he said. “AI offers a way to streamline and automate that – it’s very good at taking large amounts of information and making it easier for people to understand.”

It also means making things faster, he added, saying telcos “desperately” need that agility because their competitors in other parts of the technology ecosystem are moving faster.

“We need to accelerate how they operate,” he said.

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