Zoom unveils AI-powered collaboration platform, Zoom Workplace, to reimagine teamwork

• 26 Mar 2024
• TM Team
• 0 Comments

Zoom Video Communications, Inc. announced Zoom Workplace, its AI-powered, open collaboration platform, and introduced new AI Companion expansions to help reimagine teamwork. Zoom’s latest products and features, including new AI Companion features for Zoom Phone and extended capabilities with Ask AI Companion, a refreshed look within the Zoom app, and more, will provide its customers with the all-in-one AI-powered platform they need to power modern work. Zoom also announced customer experience enhancements to Zoom Contact Center, so businesses can strengthen customer relationships and leverage real-time AI-powered insights to improve live agent engagements.

“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 AI Companion

Zoom continues to elevate AI within its platform, helping users harness their productivity directly within their existing workflows, enhancing employees’ skills, and empowering teams to focus their time where it matters. Zoom’s latest AI Companion innovations will include Ask AI Companion, an enhancement of the digital assistant that will help users prepare for their workday across Zoom Workplace, plus AI Companion for Zoom Phone and additional capabilities for Team Chat and Whiteboard. All AI Companion features will continue to be included at no additional cost with the paid services in eligible Zoom user accounts.

Ask AI Companion will provide a new way to interact with AI Companion across the Zoom platform. Users can enhance their productivity and be better prepared for their workday with Ask AI Companion, which will gather, synthesize, and share information from Zoom Meetings, Mail, Team Chat, Notes, Docs, and more. Ask AI Companion will also help prepare users for and recap meetings, show relevant action items, draft agendas, and summarize chat and email threads, as well as documents. In a later release after the initial launch, Ask AI Companion will be able to pull relevant content from select third-party applications (if the customer chooses to enable them) to be even more helpful.

Zoom Phone is now boosted with AI Companion capabilities to help make calls and follow-up more productive. With AI Companion in Zoom Phone, users can request a post-call summary and next steps, so they can focus on the conversation instead of taking notes. If they miss an important call, voicemail prioritization helps elevate urgent messages, moving them to the top of the queue, and voicemail task extraction delivers tasks from voicemails to help users understand the next steps without listening to every voicemail. Team SMS thread summary also provides a concise overview of Team SMS threads in PowerPack, so users can quickly catch up after stepping away.

Other AI Companion innovations across the platform will include new Team Chat and Whiteboard capabilities. In Team Chat, AI Companion now helps users save time with smart scheduling that automatically detects the intent for a meeting in chat and suggests a meeting time, and in the future will provide sentence completion and will expand to support 38 languages (in preview) for the chat compose and thread summary features. Zoom Whiteboard users are now able to generate and refine whiteboard flowcharts and mind maps using a simple prompt to kick-start ideation and creativity. For more information about AI Companion innovations, visit the Zoom blog.

Reimagine Teamwork with Zoom Workplace

Zoom Workplace, the company’s AI-powered collaboration platform, will deliver new innovations to help businesses reimagine teamwork, facilitate connections, improve productivity, and optimize flexible work experiences. Zoom Workplace will elevate the Zoom experience with Zoom AI Companion so that all employees within a company can be more productive, collaborate better, and enhance their skills.

Zoom Workplace will continue to be an open platform that enables customer choice. Zoom’s APIs, SDKs, and over 2,500 integrations in the Zoom App Marketplace make it easy for customers to integrate Zoom into existing tech or integrate users’ favorite apps into Zoom.

With the introduction of Zoom Workplace, Zoom is unveiling a refreshed user experience with more choices, including the ability to choose from four color themes within the Zoom app, so users can make the app their own. Hosts will also have the opportunity to add customized virtual meeting backgrounds to tailor the feel or focus 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.”

For Zoom Meetings, users will see a new Meetings tab within the Zoom app that will allow users to collaborate before, during, and after meetings. It will support traditional calendar views and will serve as the central place for agendas, recordings, and other shared assets such as documents, plus AI Companion smart recordings and meeting summaries. Last year Zoom introduced continuous meeting chat, which helps users continue chat conversations so collaboration can continue outside of meetings asynchronously and throughout the life of a project. With the new Meetings tab, users will be able to access continuous meeting chats from the Meeting card before and after the meeting.

During meetings, the new multi-speaker view will automatically adapt the video layout to highlight active speakers to help attendees follow the discussion more easily. AI-powered portrait lighting will help illuminate users’ faces in poor lighting, and generative AI virtual backgrounds will allow users to create custom backgrounds.

Additional new features for Meetings will include a customizable toolbar that will allow users to pin their most-used features, multi-share, which will allow multiple participants to share their screens and documents, whiteboards, and notes simultaneously, and document collaboration that will provide the ability to select documents, streamline document access permissions, and co-edit right from meetings with documents from third-party apps.

In Zoom Team Chat, asynchronous communication will be boosted by Team Chat tabs that will help users stay organized by keeping channel-related assets like links, whiteboards, and resources in a single view, shared spaces that provide a shared grouping of channels to help users better organize conversations and improve discoverability of relevant project or team-based topics, and workflow automation, a powerful, no-code workflow engine, will be easily configurable to automate business tasks in Team Chat.

For hybrid and onsite organizations, navigating the office will be easier than ever with the introduction of a Workspaces tab, providing access to Workspace Reservation with wayfinding and Visitor Management directly from the Zoom Workplace app. To help make meetings more inclusive, Zoom Rooms will include the option to enable new smart name tags, which will be able to automatically apply name tags to people in a Zoom Room during a meeting.

When one screen isn’t enough, users will be able to expand Zoom Rooms with a companion device for an additional screen to collaborate with audio and video. For Workvivo customers, a new integration with Zoom Rooms will provide the ability to instantly broadcast important updates, news, and events to employees using Workvivo TV with certified devices 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.”

At launch, Zoom One bundles will be rebranded as Zoom Workplace bundles, giving new and existing customers simple pricing for Zoom’s different offerings. For more information about Zoom Workplace, visit the Zoom blog.

Strengthen Customer Relationships with Zoom Business Services

Zoom’s business services include AI-powered solutions for marketing, customer care, and sales. Tightly integrated with Zoom Workplace, Zoom Business Services empower customer-facing employees to provide exceptional experiences throughout the customer lifecycle.

Zoom Contact Center already includes AI Companion for Contact Center at no additional cost. Further real-time capabilities available with AI Expert Assist include intelligently retrieving and suggesting the best responses from a curated set of knowledge bases, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and other systems of record. Now supervisors are getting even more AI Companion for Contact Center capabilities. Supervisors now have visibility into their agents’ live engagements with real-time customer sentiment, live transcriptions, and conversation summaries from a single dashboard to help them better manage agents and easily identify when they need to provide assistance.

In Zoom Contact Center, businesses can now expand their digital communication channels to include WhatsApp and inbound email, giving customers more flexibility and choice, and making it easier for agents to engage and respond to customers.

Agents will benefit from custom app integration with Zoom’s open and flexible framework that allows teams to build apps from proprietary or third-party data sources that surface relevant customer information directly within the agent desktop, which reduces toggling between apps and allows for personalization and faster resolutions. Agents will also benefit from deep integration with Zoom Workplace, which will allow them to seamlessly direct transfer customers with AI-generated engagement summaries to back-office experts using Zoom Phone Power Pack, enabling seamless escalations and helping reduce handling time.

Zoom Contact Center and Zoom Phone will also offer an integration with PCI Pal to enable secure capture of payment data, including PCI attestation of compliance (AOC). Also, Zoom Contact Center customers now have the ability to store certain data locally in Zoom’s EU data center, designed to meet the data storage needs of EU-based customers.

Revenue organizations who use Zoom Revenue Accelerator can now enhance their customer conversations with deal memos, which will provide a brief summary of a conversation and an analysis of its impact on the possibility of winning a deal. Coming soon, a built-in automated scorecard will help improve sales outcomes by creating scorecards that rate customer interactions and provide actionable feedback.

For marketing professionals, Zoom Events enhancements amplify their hybrid events to help make them more engaging. With new AI Companion image generation, hosts can now create custom images based on a simple text prompt for event registration pages, virtual backgrounds, and marketing emails. To help bridge the gap between hybrid events and in-person events, the Swoogo integration for Zoom Events allows event professionals to reach broader audiences. For more information about Zoom’s business services innovations, visit the Zoom blog.

Newly announced products and features are expected to roll out over April and May. Some features and products may not be available for all regions and industry verticals at launch.