Zoom Video Communications, Inc. has unveiled new platform innovations underpinned by powerful AI capabilities to help streamline the workday through effective communication and collaboration tools. In a press release, the company said that these new innovations were introduced at Zoomtopia 2023, the company’s annual event which started today.
Zoom’s breakthrough product, Zoom Docs, is a next-gen way of collaborating, built from the ground up with AI at its core. Zoom Docs is a flexible, modular workspace that tightly integrates with Zoom and third-party apps, making it easy for teams and individuals to create, collaborate, manage projects, and stay organized. Zoom Docs includes traditional document capabilities, as well as wikis and drag-and-drop content blocks for tables, charts, and images. Zoom Docs users can also leverage its AI-powered functionality to populate docs with content from Zoom Meetings to inform and jumpstart creation, generate content with Zoom AI Companion, summarize content quickly, easily search documents, and more. Zoom Docs is scheduled to be generally available in 2024.
“As work continues to evolve and present new challenges, one thing will remain the same: effective collaboration and communication tools are crucial for businesses to succeed,” said Eric S. Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom.
“At Zoom, we’re grounded in doing what’s right and caring for our customers, and we understand that business leaders are faced with new obstacles every day — whether it’s navigating hybrid work, improving engagement and collaboration among customers and employees, deciding how to leverage generative AI to empower people, or reducing the complexity of their IT solutions. Our new innovations demonstrate Zoom’s commitment to evolving our platform in ways that empower limitless human connection and solve real business problems.”
Zoom AI Companion drives impact with intelligence
The recently announced Zoom AI Companion, the company’s generative AI digital assistant, debuted a new Whiteboard capability and is expanding to new industry customers with the introduction of Meeting and Team Chat summarization capabilities to Zoom higher education and healthcare customers. And, unlike other similar offerings that cost $30 or more per user per month, AI Companion is included at no additional cost for paid users on eligible accounts.
Zoom AI Companion helps users catch up on already-in-progress meeting discussions, summarize long chat threads, compose emails in Zoom Mail, and so much more. Now, AI Companion can also help generate ideas on a digital whiteboard and organize them into categories, so teams can get to work faster.
Enabling flexible collaboration on a modern platform
Zoom is purpose-built for hybrid, remote, and in-office work. Delivering an exceptional employee experience in the hybrid work era that supports employees across different work styles is critical for companies to succeed. Zoom unveiled the following platform innovations to enhance:
- Employee engagement: Workvivo, acquired by Zoom earlier this year, is an employee engagement and communications solution that provides new ways to keep employees informed, engaged, and connected in today’s hybrid work model. Having a strong ongoing employee engagement strategy is crucial for today’s distributed workforces, which is why Workvivo users will be able to access Workvivo right in the Zoom desktop client in the coming weeks.
- Hybrid work:
- In addition to suggesting where people can sit to be close to key collaborators, Workspace Reservation will be adding a Wayfinding feature next year that provides a map to the reserved seat and allows users to review their path on their mobile device when they’re in an unfamiliar office location, making it easier to find their desk.
- Huddles are virtual coworking spaces that bring employees together across in-office, hybrid, and remote teams. Now, Zoom has introduced presence indicators and location information with My Office View, so users know when the colleagues they collaborate closely with are in a virtual Huddle or in the physical office. My Office View in Huddles is scheduled to be available in 2024.
- Collaboration: Zoom has streamlined the pre-meeting process with products like Calendar, Mail, Team Chat, and, most recently, Zoom Scheduler. Now, with the latest features available in Zoom Scheduler, users can incorporate single-use booking links to maintain control of their calendar, add customized booking page logos to offer a consistent brand experience, and add multiple account support so that users can check availability across multiple accounts like their work and personal calendars. Coming soon, users will be able to incorporate unique schedules of availability per host so users do not have to block calendars for different teams or regions, delegate support so that executive assistants or other support members can book for others and integrate Salesforce with Scheduler to seamlessly link meeting records from Zoom Scheduler in Salesforce automatically.
Strengthening customer relationships
Zoom’s AI-powered customer experience (CX) solutions help ensure that customer-facing teams, no matter where they are located, have what they need in one place to support and engage customers.
Zoom’s latest innovations can help the following teams strengthen customer relationships:
- Customer support agents and supervisors:
- With AI Expert Assist, generative AI listens, adapts, and presents real-time outputs that help streamline contact center workflows. For agents, it leverages natural conversation language to provide contextual, real-time actions and auto-surface useful customer and knowledge base information. For supervisors, it provides actionable suggestions to help them reduce the cost of manual efforts and avoid missed improvement opportunities. The agent features will be available in late Q4 (end of year), and the supervisor features will be available in Q1.
- Brands strive to meet customers on the channels they already use to allow for personalized connections, speedier resolutions, and increased long-term loyalty. To help facilitate this, Zoom Virtual Agent and Zoom Contact Center will integrate with two popular Meta digital messaging apps, WhatsApp and Messenger, in the coming months.
- Event managers: Event managers will receive better support around event prep and live event execution with the help of generative AI in Zoom Events through AI-composed event email invitations and lobby chats (available in the coming months), and sessions (available next year).
To learn more about these and additional Zoom innovations built to enable better customer experiences, visit the Zoom newsroom.
Providing an open ecosystem that enables choice
Zoom is an open platform, supported by an ecosystem of key integrations, apps, and partners that offer customers the choice of third-party solutions that work seamlessly with Zoom to drive key business outcomes.
For more information on additional enhancements Zoom unveiled today to make it easier for people to develop and deploy seamless workflows through Zoom, visit the Zoom newsroom.