Zoom Introduces AI-Powered Collaboration Platform: Zoom Workplace

Zoom Video Communications, Inc. unveiled Zoom Workplace, its AI-driven collaborative platform, and additional AI Companion expansions aimed at transforming teamwork dynamics. The latest offerings from Zoom encompass enhanced features, such as AI Companion functionalities for Zoom Phone and expanded capabilities through Ask AI Companion. These updates, alongside a new interface within the Zoom application, are designed to assist customers with an AI-enabled solution tailored for contemporary work environments. Additionally, Zoom announced enhancements to the customer experience in Zoom Contact Center, empowering businesses to fortify customer relationships and harness real-time AI insights to enhance interactions with live agents.

“We have seen the positive impact that Zoom AI Companion has had on our business and our customers, transforming how we work by freeing up precious time for collaborative teamwork,” said Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom. “Zoom Workplace with AI Companion will help solve real customer problems by bringing the core collaboration solutions into a single AI-powered platform to help improve productivity, efficiency, and the overall workday, all within the Zoom experience users trust and love.”

Drive Impact with Zoom AI Companion

Zoom further integrates AI into its platform to boost productivity within users' workflows, improve employee skills, and enable teams to prioritize their tasks effectively. The latest AI Companion updates, including Ask AI Companion, will assist users in planning their workday within Zoom Workplace. Additionally, enhancements for Zoom Phone, Team Chat, and Whiteboard functionalities will be introduced. These AI Companion features remain accessible for users with eligible paid Zoom accounts at no extra charge. 

Ask AI Companion introduces a fresh approach to interacting with AI across the Zoom platform. Users can boost productivity and streamline their workday preparation by leveraging Ask AI Companion, which consolidates information from various sources such as Zoom Meetings, Mail, Team Chat, Notes, and Docs. This feature assists users in prepping for and recapping meetings, presenting pertinent action items, outlining agendas, and summarizing chat, email threads, and documents. In a subsequent release following the initial launch, Ask AI Companion will have the capability to retrieve relevant content from selected third-party applications (if enabled by the customer), further enhancing its utility.

Zoom Phone now integrates AI Companion features to enhance call efficiency and follow-up procedures. With AI Companion in Zoom Phone, users can request post-call summaries and outline the next steps, allowing them to concentrate on the conversation without the need for note-taking. Additionally, if users miss important calls, voicemail prioritization ensures urgent messages are promptly brought to their attention by moving them to the top of the queue. Furthermore, voicemail task extraction streamlines the process by extracting tasks from voicemails, enabling users to grasp the necessary next steps without listening to each message. Moreover, the Team SMS thread summary in PowerPack offers a concise overview of Team SMS threads, facilitating quick catch-up sessions for users returning to their conversations.

Additional AI Companion advancements across the platform will introduce enhanced Team Chat and Whiteboard functionalities. Within Team Chat, AI Companion streamlines scheduling by automatically identifying meeting intents in chat and suggesting appropriate meeting times. In the future, it will expand to offer sentence completion and support 38 languages (currently in preview) for chat composition and thread summary features. For Zoom Whiteboard users, a new capability enables the generation and refinement of flowcharts and mind maps through a simple prompt, facilitating ideation and creativity.

Reimagine Teamwork with Zoom Workplace

Zoom Workplace, the AI-driven collaboration platform, brings fresh innovations to redefine teamwork, foster connections, boost productivity, and optimize flexible work setups. With Zoom AI Companion, it enhances the overall Zoom experience, empowering all employees to maximize productivity, improve collaboration, and refine their skills. 

Zoom Workplace remains committed to being an open platform, offering customers freedom of choice. With Zoom's APIs, SDKs, and an extensive selection of over 2,500 integrations available in the Zoom App Marketplace, customers can seamlessly incorporate Zoom into their existing tech infrastructure or integrate their preferred apps directly into the Zoom platform. 

With the launch of Zoom Workplace, Zoom is introducing an updated user interface offering greater flexibility. Users now have the option to select from four distinct color themes within the Zoom app, allowing them to personalize their experience. Additionally, hosts can customize virtual meeting backgrounds to align with the mood or purpose of the meeting.

 “With Zoom, there aren’t any challenges with implementing complex tools, so we can focus on engaging our employees and collaborating on the work that matters,” said Diofanto Rosales, vice president of digital workplace and IT infrastructure at Flex. “Zoom Workplace will bring all our essential work tools together in a single app, making it easier than ever to get work done.”

In Zoom Meetings, users will now find a dedicated Meetings tab within the Zoom app, facilitating collaboration before, during, and after meetings. This tab offers traditional calendar views and serves as a centralized hub for agendas, recordings, shared assets like documents, AI Companion smart recordings, and meeting summaries. Building on last year's introduction of continuous meeting chat, which enables ongoing collaboration outside of meetings, users can now access these chats directly from the Meeting card before and after the meeting, ensuring seamless communication throughout project timelines.

In meetings, the new multi-speaker view will dynamically adjust the video layout to emphasize active speakers, aiding attendees in tracking the discussion effortlessly. AI-powered portrait lighting will enhance visibility by illuminating users' faces in dimly lit environments, while generative AI virtual backgrounds offer the option to personalize backgrounds to suit individual preferences. 

Further enhancements for Meetings will encompass a customizable toolbar, enabling users to pin their frequently accessed features for easy access. The introduction of multi-share functionality will enable multiple participants to share their screens, documents, whiteboards, and notes concurrently. Additionally, document collaboration capabilities will enable users to select documents, streamline access permissions, and collaborate directly within meetings, including co-editing documents from third-party applications. 

In Zoom Team Chat, asynchronous communication gets a boost with the introduction of Team Chat tabs. These tabs aid in organization by consolidating channel-related assets such as links, whiteboards, and resources into a single view. Additionally, shared spaces offer a grouped arrangement of channels, enhancing conversation organization and making it easier to discover relevant project or team-based topics. Furthermore, workflow automation introduces a no-code engine that can be easily configured to automate business tasks within Team Chat. 

Hybrid and onsite organizations will find navigating the office effortless with the new Workspaces tab introduced in the Zoom Workplace app. This feature offers convenient access to Workspace Reservation, complete with wayfinding and Visitor Management functionalities. In a bid to enhance meeting inclusivity, Zoom Rooms will now feature smart name tags, providing the option to automatically apply name tags to individuals in a Zoom Room during meetings. 

Users can now extend the capabilities of Zoom Rooms by adding a companion device for an extra screen, facilitating seamless audio and video collaboration when one screen isn't sufficient. Additionally, for Workvivo customers, a fresh integration with Zoom Rooms allows instant broadcasting of critical updates, news, and events to employees via Workvivo TV, utilizing certified devices specifically designed for Zoom Rooms. 

“Businesses are looking for AI-powered solutions that will help them move the dial by boosting employee productivity and team collaboration,” said Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research. “Zoom’s newest innovations, including its release of Zoom Workplace and Ask AI Companion, demonstrate its commitment to deploying AI that is intuitive and effective across one platform to improve productivity and collaboration.”

Upon launch, Zoom One bundles will undergo rebranding as Zoom Workplace bundles, streamlining pricing for both new and existing customers across our diverse offerings. For further details regarding Zoom Workplace, please refer to the Zoom blog. 

Strengthen Customer Relationships with Zoom Business Services

Zoom offers AI-powered solutions tailored for marketing, customer care, and sales. Seamlessly integrated with Zoom Workplace, these business services enable customer-facing employees to deliver exceptional experiences across the entire customer lifecycle. 

Zoom Contact Center comes equipped with AI Companion for Contact Center, included at no extra charge. With enhanced real-time capabilities through AI Expert Assist, it intelligently retrieves and recommends optimal responses from curated knowledge bases, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and other record systems. Additionally, supervisors now benefit from expanded AI Companion for Contact Center features. They gain visibility into agents' live interactions, including real-time customer sentiment analysis, live transcriptions, and conversation summaries, all conveniently accessible from a unified dashboard. These tools empower supervisors to effectively manage agents and intervene when assistance is needed. 

Within Zoom Contact Center, businesses can broaden their digital communication channels to encompass WhatsApp and inbound email. This expansion provides customers with increased flexibility and choice while facilitating agent engagement and responsiveness to customer inquiries. 

Agents will gain advantages from custom app integration within Zoom's adaptable framework, enabling teams to develop apps from proprietary or third-party data sources. This facilitates the direct presentation of relevant customer information within the agent desktop, reducing the need to toggle between multiple applications. This integration allows for personalization and expedites issue resolutions. Furthermore, agents will benefit from deep integration with Zoom Workplace, enabling seamless transfer of customers, along with AI-generated engagement summaries, to back-office experts using Zoom Phone Power Pack. This facilitates smooth escalations and helps to decrease handling time. 

Zoom Contact Center and Zoom Phone will provide integration with PCI Pal, enabling the secure capture of payment data, along with PCI attestation of compliance (AOC). Additionally, Zoom Contact Center customers now have the option to store specific data locally in Zoom's EU data center, catering to the data storage requirements of EU-based customers. 

Revenue organizations utilizing Zoom Revenue Accelerator can now enrich customer conversations with deal memos, offering concise summaries of discussions and analyses of their impact on deal success probabilities. In the pipeline, a forthcoming built-in automated scorecard will further enhance sales outcomes by generating scorecards that assess customer interactions and offer actionable insights.

For marketing professionals, Zoom Events enhancements will elevate hybrid events to enhance engagement levels. Through new AI Companion image generation, hosts can effortlessly create custom images based on simple text prompts for event registration pages, virtual backgrounds, and marketing emails. To bridge the gap between hybrid and in-person events, the Swoogo integration for Zoom Events empowers event professionals to reach wider audiences.