Over the past year, there has been significant discourse surrounding the ways in which AI is poised to enhance human productivity. More than 1 billion people today use some form of collaboration platform to communicate with their peers. My personal belief is that #CollabAI for humans must be democratized rather than available to a select few.
Zoom has been leading this effort to put AI in the hands of the entire workforce. I have used Zoom's meeting summaries, chat summarization, and prompt-generated flowcharts on whiteboards and found that it has high accuracy as also reported by GigaOm study commissioned by Zoom (published March 26, 2024).
Sending minutes after every important meeting was a dreadful task for me which has been taken care of now with Zoom's #AICompanion
Zoom has recently made some big announcements at Enterprise Connect 2024. In this blog, we will look at some of these announcements and how they will help Zoom's customers.
Need for the name change: Zoom Workplace
Since the inception of Zoom, it has been perceived as a meeting platform though it provides various other features such as calling, whiteboarding, clips, scheduler, etc.
I believe the renaming is more to change that notion and tell the world that Zoom is just not a meeting platform however has grown way bigger to a complete productivity platform where all the needs of users are met.
With that said, it will not be just the name change, the entire look and feel of the platform will be changed to connect better and synchronize with the new-age workforce.
So what is Zoom Workplace?
Zoom Workplace is an AI-powered platform where AI is at the forefront helping users to be more productive by reducing monotonous and tedious tasks such as preparing an agenda for a meeting or summarization of the meeting with relevant context and list of actionable items etc. This helps users to focus their productive time where it matters the most. All of this is included at no extra cost.
Zoom Workplace is also bringing Ask AI Companion which is coined as the digital assistant for the users.
To start, Ask AI Companion will help users to better prepare themselves for the workday. Upon the user's request, Ask AIC can gather the data from different Zoom resources such as meetings, chats, recordings, notes, mail, etc.; synthesize and share the data in the form of notes, agenda, or action items.
Currently, the data can be extracted and summarized only from the Zoom platform however the roadmap is to pull relevant content from a few selected third-party applications. It would be worth a wait to see how Zoom Ask AI Companion can extract the data from the Microsoft platform (Word, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneDrive, etc.) if made available in future releases.
Along with the features mentioned, it will be worthwhile to see if Ask AIC can also send user requests to 3rd party applications.
For example- users can Ask AIC to check why the meeting quality is bad and Ask AIC can check 3rd party monitoring platform to share the call quality insights. Ask AIC can then educate the user that the meeting quality is bad due to low Wi-Fi strength or high CPU utilization by other apps. With a click of a button, the user can raise an incident with ServiceNow.
Let's now understand what changed with different modalities:
Meetings: The new release will bring some customization capability to the Zoom UI where users can select from four different color themes. Hosts will now have the option to customize the virtual meeting background to better suit the theme of the meeting.
The new meeting tab will bring more clarity into meetings:
Before the meeting: Users can search the agenda, find relevant recordings or action items discussed in the last meeting, or simply request Ask AI Companion to help them prepare for the meeting.
During the meeting: Collaborate on the attached documents or bring new documents from Microsoft OneDrive and co-edit with other participants. Users will also be able to share multiple tabs in the meeting and go back and forth.
Also, multiple users can share at the same time. No more "Can I share my screen" talks in the meeting.
The multi-speaker view will adapt automatically to show the active participants on the screen. A few other features to increase user experience are AI-powered portrait lighting which will illuminate user faces and AI image generator for virtual backgrounds.
After the meeting: Users can continue the conversation in the continuous meeting chats
Chat: The new release is bringing chat tabs to keep chats, resources, whiteboards, etc. in one place. This enhances the collaboration experience as users in the channel can now work together on the resources for example a whiteboard and can chat at the same time.
With the concept of shared spaces, users can now also group different channels to better organize conversations and resources. This reduces the time wasted in finding the right chats and resources in different channels.
The channels in the shared space could be private or public and access can only be shared with required members.
Phone: Zoom phone coupled with AI Companion will now provide post-call summaries and action items so users can focus on the call instead of taking notes. In case the phone call is missed and a voicemail is left, the users can quickly get the context of the call, and a task is extracted from the voicemail for action. All of this without listening to all the voicemails or reading texts.
Workspace Reservation: A workspaces tab has been introduced to help users when they are in the office. Earlier the workspace reservation app was accessed through the Apps section. Users can now easily find their desks or meeting rooms using a wayfinding feature.
The new Workspaces tab can be used for visitor management as well.
Zoom Rooms: Zoom Rooms will include an option to tag a name to participants available in the room. This helps far-end participants to identify the speaker and connect better.
Zoom Rooms also brings a new companion mode feature that allows additional Zoom Room-certified hardware to be paired with the existing room setup. The audio and video capabilities of the companion device can now also be leveraged in the meeting.
Workvivo: The new release will also bring Workvivo inside the Zoom Workplace app, making it easier for teams to engage with each other, read company information, and give shout-outs, all without switching to a browser or another app.
Workvivo has also been integrated with Zoom Rooms, so using Workvivo TV any critical information can be passed on instantly to employees on Zoom Rooms
Contact Center: Zoom announced two new engagement channels with their contact center platform. Customers can now engage in a two-way conversation with the agents via WhatsApp. Agents will now be able to respond to inbound email engagements from within their desktops.
For those who are unaware, the Zoom contact center already has an AI Companion to assist agents in their work and integration with CRM platforms like ServiceNow so agents can work within the ServiceNow platform.
Zoom Contact Center will now also provide custom app integration so the agents can have quick and easy access to information within the same window. This will improve the agent's productivity by eliminating the need to toggle between applications.
Supervisors are enabled with real-time monitoring dashboards of customer engagements where they can see AI-enriched live sentiment, transcription, and conversation summaries. Supervisors can listen or barge into agent's conversations to enrich the customer experience with a positive resolution.
With the same platform used for internal(EX) and external(CX) collaboration, the calls can be transferred from contact center agents to back-office experts with AI-generated engagement summaries and variables including customer sentiment and other information. The last thing to ask a frustrated customer is to repeat the issues they already mentioned to the first agent.
With PCI Pal integration, the Zoom contact center enables secure capture of credit card numbers and other payment data.
A detailed blog to follow soon to display the capabilities of Zoom Contact Center.
Stay tuned.
Zoom Events: AI Image generation is available within the Events platform along with the email compose and chat summarization feature. For the hybrid events, Zoom has integration with Swoogo
How is Zoom Capturing the market?
Zoom is innovating at a fast pace and it is difficult for other leading platforms to innovate or bring niche features into the end user's hand at minimal cost.
Zoom has a few differences from its competitors:
It brought the basic requirements of AI like meeting summaries & chat composition in different languages etc. to the entire workforce. Limiting the AI capabilities to a select few due to the cost of the AI bundles is limiting the productivity in the workforce. #AIEquity is the requirement today.
Zoom brought its AI capabilities not only with its platform but also with Microsoft and Google as well. For example - Zoom's AI Companion will be able to draft an email even if you are using email service from Microsoft 365 as well.
Bringing AI included at no extra cost not just to basic meetings or chats but also to other modalities like phone, and voicemail. whiteboards, contact center, etc.
Though Zoom has all the key ingredients of a full productivity platform, it can still co-exist with Microsoft and Google. Mix and match the feature sets if an enterprise already has investments made in Microsoft or Google licenses.
Zoom meetings, phone, contact center, events, rooms, and Workvivo are available as ala-carte too, hence an enterprise can always try with a fewer license and scale as per their needs.
Summary:
Zoom with its Ask AI Companion and other capabilities will surely elevate teamwork. This is also well aligned with the company's mission to provide one platform for all collaboration needs to its customers.
The new branding looks promising with the well-thought-out features as simple as putting a Workspace tab on the main page versus under the Apps section earlier. Kudos to the Product Managers at Zoom.
One feature that can quickly be the user's favorite after the meeting summary feature would be to prep the user for the next meeting. It would be nice to see how Zoom's Ask AI Companion will work together with Microsoft resources.
Zoom Workplace branding and features will be rolled out in April and May.
Are you equally excited to try the new UI and AI features and be part of this new ERA of Teamwork?
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