Summary Bullets:
• With these latest announcements, Zoom continues the rapid build out of its GenAI portfolio.
• The advent of GenAI has leveled the playing field between Zoom and rivals such as Microsoft, Cisco, and Google.
Zoom continues to aggressively expand its portfolio of AI capabilities with a new round of features targeted at admins, contact center agents, and meeting participants. The features are part of ‘Zoom AI Companion,’ a generative AI (GenAI) assistant launched in September 2023. Zoom AI Companion is available at no additional cost for customers with paid services assigned to their Zoom user accounts.
Company admins can now gain a better understanding of how Zoom AI Companion is being used across their organization. A new analytics dashboard provides metrics such as the volume of meeting summaries generated over time or the number of employees composing chats or summarizing chat threads. Such insight is useful for identifying where time and resources are needed for spurring adoption of Zoom AI Companion. However, it comes at a cost – organizations risk making employees feel their work is being monitored for questionable purposes. It is therefore imperative that organizations clearly communicate what the data gathered is being used for – and what it is not being used for.
Contact center agents can take advantage of real-time conversation summaries before or during a customer interaction, live sentiment and speech analytics, and auto-generated post-call action items. These tools are valuable as they facilitate agent productivity and allow more meaningful customer relationships to be developed. In that respect, they dovetail with a GlobalData prediction for 2024: that the concept of a ‘contact center’ will continue to yield to the broader concept of the ‘customer experience’ (for more, please see Cloud-Based Collaboration in 2024: Change Will Come on Multiple Fronts, January 24, 2024). Whereas contact centers tend to be reactive, transactional, and generic, the customer experience is proactive, relationship-oriented, deeply personalized, and executed in real-time, largely thanks to AI. Zoom AI Companion can help businesses graduate from providing a ‘contact center’ to providing a ‘customer experience.’
Like agents in a contact center, meeting attendees will see valuable productivity enhancements as well. When using Zoom Team Chat, Zoom AI Companion will detect intent to schedule a meeting and open a calendar invite pre-populated with attendee, date, and time information. Zoom AI Companion will also allow Zoom Whiteboard users to visually organize and structure thoughts stemming from a central idea based on user prompts, thus creating ‘mind maps.’ A third enhancement for meetings is the ability of Zoom AI Companion to use attendees’ gender pronouns from their Zoom profile when generating meeting summaries; this amounts to a novelty and nothing more.
Although the announcements cover a hodgepodge of functionality, they mark the latest milestone in what has been a rapid build out of Zoom’s GenAI arsenal. That fact has intriguing implications. Before GenAI arrived, Zoom was viewed as an ‘also-ran’ to the likes of Cisco, Microsoft, and Google, whose technological heritage gave them a huge leg up in the collaboration space to anyone who dared oppose them. Since coming on the scene, GenAI has quickly become an equalizer, with rivals tapping roughly the same AI ‘treasure trove’ and sprinkling its contents platform-wide. From an AI perspective, Zoom has joined a prestigious club.
IT Connection 