News
Today at Enterprise Connect in Orlando, Fla., Zoom unveiled Zoom Workplace, its all-in-one collaboration platform. Zoom Workplace effectively brings together all of the communication elements Zoom is best known for, namely video meetings, team chat and phone, and folds in the capabilities introduced in the more recent years, including whiteboards, workspace management, docs, notes, clips, Workvivo — all underpinned by the company’s AI Companion. With the release, the company also launched a new way to interact with AI Companion, Ask AI Companion.
The announcement is the latest move by the company to dig into a market dominated by Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Today's announcements follow the release of its AI Companion last September and the announcement of Zoom Docs last October. While not naming either of its competitors directly, the company repeatedly hammered on its differentiation from the two on price point. Zoom’s AI Companion comes at no extra charge for eligible paid plans, as opposed to Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Gemini, both of which come at an extra $30 per person per month on top of normal licensing fees.
Zoom's One-Stop AI-Driven Collaboration Shop
Today’s news puts Zoom’s generative AI capabilities, AI Companion, at the core of all of its offerings. Since its launch last fall, the company states AI Companion has been used by over half a million customers and offers an array of the features we’ve come to expect from AI assistants, including meeting summaries and auto-language detection and translation for 36 languages
As part of today’s announcement, AI Companion will now be available in Zoom Phone. In this context it can provide post-call summaries and suggest next steps, automatically prioritize voicemails, provide SMS thread summaries and extract tasks from voicemails.
Additionally on the AI front, Zoom’s newest feature, Ask AI Companion, will be incorporated across the Zoom Workplace. The digital assistant can gather, synthesize and share critical information from multiple sources within the Zoom ecosystem, with plans to integrate with third-party applications promised for a future release. Ask AI Companion will be able to:
- Scan and summarize notes, chats, documents and meeting summaries.
- Highlight important action items from within scanned content.
- Automate routine tasks.
- Offer meeting preparation, including drafting meeting agendas as well as generate post-meeting summaries and follow up items.
Zoom Workplace customers will still have access to Zoom’s API, SDKs and over 2500 integrations in the Zoom app marketplace, to use their preferred third party apps from within the Zoom platform or to use Zoom capabilities externally.
User Experience Improvements and Other New Zoom Features
Among the over 40 new features introduced today include some smaller ones aimed at improving the user experience on the platform as well as further centralizing and streamlining collaboration. One such feature is the addition of a new meetings tab in the workplace app. This new feature will allow users to:
- Schedule, prepare and follow-up on meetings in a central hub.
- Respond to or initiate chats with participants directly from the tab.
- Search for meeting materials like summaries or shared files using Ask AI companion or the global search bar.
And to the users who find that they want to spice up their meetings, Zoom meetings is now able to be personalized with color themes and wallpapers for meeting galleries. This increasingly immersive video experience allows users to use pre-populated options or upload personal images, along with an option to adjust background transparency. Additional premier features include:
- Multi-share and document co-editing capabilities, including documents from third-party apps, within the meeting.
- Customizable toolbars for users to pin frequently used features.
- An adaptive, multi-speaker view that adapts the meeting layout to highlight all active participants, not just one.
- AI-powered portrait lighting to illuminate user’s faces in poor lighting conditions.
Further enhancements include:
- Dedicated tabs within Zoom chat that can easily share links, resources, whiteboards, and soon, docs; capabilities will also allow for collaboration on the assets while simultaneously on chats.
- Workflow automations within team chats that will automate complex and redundant tasks, leverage templates to welcome new users to a channel, schedule a recurring message, move through the approval flow and more.
- Auto-applied name tags for users in the Zoom room to identify users on call and meeting summaries that will list who is speaking.
- Zoom room expansion for the use of additional screens for audio and visual collaboration.
- A workspace reservation tab with visitor management features and wayfinding, an aid for employees to navigate more easily when in an unfamiliar business location.
Zoom Business Solutions Directed at Customer Lifecycle
Zoom has been steadily upgrading its contact center solution since its introduction in 2022. Today sees the company adding to the existing AI Companion capabilities for contact center employees to now give supervisors a single dashboard to monitor live customer interactions, including live sentiment analysis and conversation summaries, so they better know when to intercede directly to help guide agents to positive resolutions.
An integration with Zoom Workplace will allow customer service agents to blindly transfer customers to back-office experts with AI-generated engagement summarization. This will eliminate hassle and redundancy, reduce engagement time and help ensure seamless escalations. “True customer satisfaction demands seamless personalized interactions from the very first contact to the final resolution. And that’s what zoom does,” said Michelle Couture, Zoom’s global lead and customer experience product marketer on an advance call.
Additional features benefitting revenue organizations:
- Revenue accelerator for sales executives and managers that provides deal memos, and summary and impact analysis for possible deal acquisitions.
- Automated scoring that auto-scores customer interactions and provides actionable feedback.
- Event set-up for market teams to amplify hybrid events for increased engagement.
- Newly offered AI-powered image generation to allow custom images based on text prompts for event registration pages, virtual backgrounds and marketing emails.
What Was Once a Small Company ...
Zoom has come a long way since Eric Yuan founded the video conferencing company in 2011 in San Jose, Calif. The platform saw steady growth starting with the public release of Zoom Meetings in 2013, soon followed by Zoom Chat, Zoom Webinars and Zoom Rooms. But the company entered a new level of growth during the pandemic, when its name became all but synonymous with the online meetings most of us joined for work, school and socializing. By 2021, Zoom had grown exponentially, reaching over 1 million licenses and available in over 40 countries.
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The company is clearly striving for even higher goals now as it sets its sites on Microsoft and Google. Time will tell if it will chip away at the two tech giants' substantial leads.
