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Zoom announced a series of new products and updates today to further its reach in the enterprise, most notably, Zoom Docs. The announcements coincided with the company’s sixth annual Zoomtopia conference, taking place today and tomorrow in San Jose, Calif.
It being 2023, the new capabilities all come with an underpinning of AI.
With the new releases, Zoom is aiming to become an “all-in-one intelligent collaboration platform.”
The $2.39 trillion and $1.697 trillion elephants in the room went unnamed, but it’s clear who Zoom is aiming to take on with these announcements: Microsoft and Google.
Introducing Zoom Docs
The simplicity of the Zoom Docs name belies a more robust solution. It adds a critical element to the Zoom portfolio which allows customers to create and collaborate on documents, build knowledge wikis, manage projects and more from within Zoom. The company is framing this as a key element of its "intelligent collaboration platform."
In a statement about the solution, chief product officer Smita Hashim said, "Zoom is helping our customers by bringing the definition of a ‘doc’ into 2023 — with powerful document authoring and collaboration capabilities, modern collaboration tools, and a next-gen workspace built from the ground up with AI at its heart; Zoom Docs is that solution.”
Integration with the recently rebranded AI Companion bakes the content generation capabilities we’ve now come to expect into Docs to help create outlines and drafts for new reports, as well as edit and summarize existing Docs. AI Companion can pull information from existing Zoom Docs or AI-generated meeting transcripts into the document to add further context and create more informed drafts. Users can then add the newly created assets to meeting agendas, incorporate them in projects or use them to pull in collaborators by mentioning them, assigning a task to them or adding the document to a group or individual chat.
The docs are modular, meaning blocks of text can be used and reused in customizable layouts, including tables, boards and timelines. They are accessible from anywhere in the Zoom platform, including Zoom Meetings, Chats, the desktop app, the web or the mobile app.
The company also promised "streamlined" integration with third-party apps. Although those apps were not named, the Zoom App Marketplace lists existing integrations with some of the biggest names in the productivity space. Time will tell if the Docs integration carries over to these brands.
Zoom Docs are expected to be generally available in 2024. The company didn’t provide more specific timing or information on pricing.
Zoom AI Companion
As expected, AI Companion received a fair amount of attention as well. The company announced a new Whiteboard capability that is immediately available, as well as future capabilities in the works. Healthcare and higher education customers will also now have access to the platform.
All of this came with some light jabs made at Microsoft Copilot.
During a pre-conference press briefing, Zoom head of marketing, Randy Maestre, touted how Zoom Companion would be free for paying Zoom customers, unlike “other solutions” which charged “$30 per user per month.” When pressed why the company would not charge additionally for AI Companion, Maestre continued, “We wanted to make AI accessible and affordable to our customers and their employees so that everyone can benefit from the power of AI in their day-to-day workflows.”
Maestre also addressed the concerns which recently surfaced around Zoom's handling of customer data in AI training, stating, "We do not use any customer audio, video, chat, screen sharing attachments or other communications-like content such as poll results, whiteboards or reactions to train Zoom’s AI or any third party AI model."
The forthcoming features will enhance AI Companion's existing functionality so it can surface information from across the Zoom platform as well as from third-party apps. The company was quick to note that this would only be done with the user's permission. Also on the way is real-time coaching on presentation skills in meetings, auto-fill chat suggestions, whiteboard template generation, the addition of meeting summaries in Zoom Notes and intent detection in Team Chat that will generate a meeting invite when needed.
Workvivo Integration
Today also marks the first time we see how Zoom plans to incorporate its Workvivo purchase into the platform. Zoom's acquisition of employee engagement and communications platform Workvivo was announced in April. Today the company announced Workvivo will be integrated directly into the Zoom platform, allowing customers to launch a meeting or team chat directly within Workvivo.
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Workvivo will remain a standalone application for its existing customers, but for those who use it across both platforms, it will now be present as a separate tab within the Zoom interface. As of November, customers will also have access to Employee Insights, an employee listening and survey capability within Workvivo, so admins can gather and act on feedback in one place.
Zoom Continues Its March Into the Enterprise
Every company dreams of having its brand name associated with the solution it provides. Think Band Aid, Xerox, Google and once upon a time, Twitter. Zoom achieved that status with its first product, Zoom Meetings, released in 2013. But Zoom's ambitions to move beyond the Meetings confines preceded the pandemic, and picked up momentum over the last few years. A brief look at the Zoom timeline shows how today's announcement — although significant — feeds into the broader narrative:
- February 2017 — Launches the Zoom Developer Platform
- October 2018 — Zoom App Marketplace launches
- January 2019 — Launch of Zoom Phone
- February 2022 — Zoom Contact Center solution debuts
- April 2022 — Zoom Whiteboard released into general availability
- November 2022 — Zoom mail and calendar introduced, as is Zoom One, a unified communications platform which brought together meetings, team chat, rooms
- April 2023 — Acquires Workvivo
- April 2023 — Introduces generative AI to the platform to compose chats and emails as well as provide meeting summaries
While the company's ambitions are clear, the question of whether it can take on two of the giants in the productivity and collaboration space remains to be seen.
