Zoom launches AI-platform called Workplace

Zoom Workplace, the new AI-powered collaboration platform, helps reimagine teamwork, facilitate connections, and improve productivity — all within the Zoom experience users trust and love 

Zoom announces 40 new innovations, including new Zoom AI Companion features for Zoom Phone, Team Chat, Events, and Contact Center and its expansion to include Ask AI Companion, which works across the platform to help employees make the most of their time 

New Zoom Contact Center innovations include additional digital channels, enhanced AI features, insights, and additional integrations to help businesses strengthen customer relationships and empower agents 

At the Zoom CX Summit, the company announced Zoom Workplace, an AI-powered platform designed for collaboration.  

The introduction of Workplace includes the AI Companion and a number of new features designed for the modern workplace. Along with this, Zoom talked about enhancing their customer experience with the Zoom Contact Center. 

“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.” 

Zoom’s AI Companion is a digital assistant meant to help users prepare for the workday. Ask AI Companion is a feature that allows users to access other Zoom features at ease. It can gather and share information from Zoom Meetings, Mail, Team Chat, Notes, Docs, among others.

Ask AI Companion can also recap meetings, show relevant action items, draft agendas, and summarize chat and those long email threads. Zoom mentioned that a future update will allow the Ask AI Companion to pull information from select third-party applications. But don’t fret too much about this, since customers have the say to enable this or not. 

AI Companion becomes available in the Zoom Phone. This allows you to make calls and post-call summaries. The idea here is this will allow users to focus on the conversations rather than taking notes. There’s voicemail prioritization, bumping up the most important messages, and voicemail task extraction that basically lists the tasks without listening to every voicemail. This is something I’d want to see in action myself. The AI update includes Team SMS thread summary that would allow users to catch up on anything they might have missed. 

Team Chat gets some neat AI stuff. It has smart scheduling, which automatically detects the intent for a meeting in chat and suggests a meeting time—which I assume, would go through everyone’s schedule and find the best time where everyone (or almost everyone) would be free. A future update will provide sentence completion and support additional languages.  

Another feature is Zoom Whiteboard. Users will be able to create mind maps and flowcharts with a prompt. 

Zoom boasts the Workplace is and will continue to be an open platform for customer choice. Zoom’s APIs, SDKs, and over 2,500 integrations in the Zoom App Marketplace allow easier integration to users’ preferred apps.  

“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.” 

Zoom Meetings sees all these features put together. In a single Meetings tab users can discuss and collaborate—before, during, and after meetings. Calendar is available, which shows agendas, recordings and shared information, AI Companion smart recordings and meeting summaries, are all accessible through Meetings, ensuring the workflow to remain smooth and easy. Other features in Meetings include AI-powered portrait lighting to brighten the screens of users in poor lighting. Then there’s AI-generated backgrounds to simple fun customizations. 

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.” 

Zoom Contact Center already includes AI Companion for Contact Center at no additional cost. Further real-time capabilities 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.