How Zoom is Using AI Innovation to Reimagine Teamwork

Founded by Eric S. Yuan in 2011, Zoom has grown to become one of the most widely used web-conferencing products in the world. This growth came thanks to the remote working boom prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, with Zoom’s daily users ballooning to more than 200 million in April 2020. 

As Zoom’s Head of Solution Engineering EMEA Helen Hawthorn told us recently, the company has embraced AI in its solutions, with offerings like Zoom's AI Companion helping draft emails and chat messages, summarise meetings and chat threads, and make brainstorming sessions more fun and productive.

Now, at Enterprise Connect, Zoom has announced a suite of major updates to its collaboration platform, along with several AI innovations and CX enhancements.

The company has 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, will provide its customers with the all-in-one AI-powered platform they need to power modern work. 

“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.” 

How Zoom is driving business 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 says its latest AI Companion innovations will include Ask AI Companion, an enhancement of the digital assistant intended to help users prepare for their workday across Zoom Workplace. 

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, synthesise, and share information from Zoom Meetings, Mail, Team Chat, Notes, Docs and other Zoom apps. Ask AI Companion will also help prepare users for and recap meetings, show relevant action items, draft agendas and summarise chat and email threads, as well as documents. 

Zoom also says that Ask AI Companion will soon be able to pull relevant content from select third-party applications – if a customer chooses to enable them. 

Zoom Phone, the company’s cloud-based business phone solution, 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, while voicemail prioritisation helps elevate urgent messages using AI. 

Zoom Workplace is reimagining teamwork

Zoom has also announced several improvements to Workplace, the company’s AI-powered collaboration platform, which will deliver innovations to help businesses reimagine teamwork, facilitate connections, improve productivity and optimise 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’ favourite apps into Zoom.   

“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.”

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