The collaborative workplace vendor is integrating productivity-enhancing AI workflows across multiple offerings, all with the intent to save users’ time.
I recently attended a pre-briefing on Zoomtopia, the Zoom conference taking place from October 9-10, in San Jose. The briefing highlighted the announcements, innovations, and product developments that the company will unveil this week.
The intro music to the discussion was “Pump Up the Jam,” which Zoom transcribed in the meeting like this:
Unknown Speaker? Any AI worth its salt would know that was Technotronic’s 1989 song from Pump Up the Jam: The Album. In theory, Zoom could send the song to SHAZAM or another service to find out who authored the song. In reality, I’m sure Zoom has several other customer feature requests that would jump ahead of song identification, but it might make a cool feature.
Although I’m not sure the crowd was jumping—analysts rarely do—we were undoubtedly anticipating the discussion, which promised to include insights from key Zoom executives.
Chief Product Officer Smita Hashim and members of the company’s product marketing team outlined major updates across Zoom’s product suite, especially the expanded use of AI technologies across various platforms. A focus in the briefing was the launch of Zoom AI Companion 2.0 and new features aimed at improving productivity and collaboration.
New Zoom AI Companion and Other Launches
Smita Hashim began by noting the rapid pace of development since Zoomtopia 2023: over 3,000 features launched, including significant products such as the Zoom AI Companion, Zoom Workplace, and Zoom Docs AI.
Positioned as a generative AI assistant, Zoom designed AI Companion (available at no additional cost to paid users) to enhance user productivity across various functions, from meetings to document creation.
One of the central features of the AI Companion is its federated model approach, which integrates multiple AI models like OpenAI and Zoom’s proprietary models to optimize quality and reduce costs. The AI Companion works across various Zoom platforms—including meetings, phone, chat, and events—to help users with meeting summaries, transcription, and task management tasks.
Importantly, Zoom ensures user privacy by not using customer data for AI training purposes, a stance presented as an industry-leading approach to AI trust and safety.
Zoom AI Companion has been generally available for about a year. To get a sense of how the product has done in the field, I asked Joe Rittenhouse, Co-CEO of Converged Technology Professionals, one of Zoom’s top resellers. He said, “We have been impressed with how fast Zoom has innovated. Customer feedback has been positive, and adoption far exceeds our initial expectations.”
This is consistent with the discussions I have had with customers. Meeting summaries, transcripts, smart recordings, and other features are very sticky. The key is to get customers to try it — once users do, they soon find it hard to live without them.
V2 of Zoom AI Companion: a More Robust Personal Assistant
During the briefing, the company introduced Zoom AI Companion 2.0 as a more robust, personal AI assistant that can work across the Zoom Workplace. The initial iteration offered productivity-boosting features like meeting summarization, asking questions of the AI during a meeting, creating and refining documents, assistance while composing email and chat messages, summarization of chat and SMS threads, and improving phone calls. The updated iteration of the AI Companion will provide users with contextualized assistance, such as identifying unread messages, summarizing meetings, and suggesting actions across various communication platforms. Zoom intends to extend the AI Companion’s functionality to integrate with external applications like Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar so users can manage workflows more efficiently.
Zoom revealed key capabilities, including the AI’s personalized assistance and remembering user history and tasks to suggest relevant actions. With this release, Zoom says it will expand AI-driven productivity across its workplace ecosystem. As proof, the company says customization through the new AI Studio will enable users to tailor their AI experience, including creating industry-specific workflows or integrating custom data like employee handbooks into the assistant’s functionality.
While there are many things an AI assistant could do, Zoom has prioritized laborious, information-rich tasks, which is where users should see the most value. I know very few people who are good at putting together post-meeting notes or have the time to scan emails for unread messages. These new features should continue to give people time back during their day, a commodity I know all wish we had more of.
Customizing and Personalizing AI
Zoom is introducing a Custom AI Companion Add-On to cater to diverse organizational needs. Customizations include integration with third-party applications like Workday and Jira and the ability to automate more complex workflows across departments. For example, a marketing team could use AI Companion to integrate multiple backoffice systems and automate tasks such as provisioning new software for employees.
Zoom also emphasized its AI Studio, in which users can fine-tune models by adding domain-specific knowledge and creating advanced AI skills tailored to specific business needs. The studio’s customization options extend to AI-driven meeting summaries, where professionals can generate industry-specific reports or documents based on predefined criteria.
The ability to work with third parties addresses one of the biggest challenges for AI assistants today – AI overload. It seems every application now has its own AI assistant, co-pilot, or whatever name the vendor chose. This is valuable but creates AI silos, which can make work more complex. By integrating with other vendors, AI should be able to work cross application with existing tools and applications, making it more valuable for all.
AI-Driven Productivity and Workplace Enhancements
Theresa Larkin, Global Lead for Zoom Workplace Product Marketing, expanded on the integration of AI within the Zoom Workplace. She highlighted how AI Companion helps streamline workflows and reduce information overload from emails, meetings, and chats. She added that introducing Zoom Tasks is a critical feature that will use AI to detect, recommend, and complete tasks based on ongoing conversations.
Again, this feature is designed to simplify the complicated nature of work. Users spend so much time, about 40% by my estimates, managing work rather than doing work. Having an AI help focus and understand what to prioritize is invaluable.
Another feature that boosts productivity is the AI-generated meeting agenda and real-time meeting summaries, which will organize meeting outcomes based on the agenda’s structure. The company designed these innovations to optimize meeting effectiveness by ensuring critical topics are addressed, and action items are clearly defined and tracked.
So if someone implores you to pump up the jam, it’ll definitely get done.
Industry-Specific Innovations
Zoom says it plans to introduce industry-specific solutions for sectors such as education, healthcare, and frontline industries. For example, the AI Companion for Education will assist teachers in generating lesson plans, monitoring student engagement, and summarizing class discussions in real-time. Similarly, healthcare professionals will benefit from automating custom medical dictionaries and clinical notes, reducing administrative burdens and enabling better patient care. In industries like retail and manufacturing, Zoom will introduce Zoom Workplace for Frontline, a mobile-first solution designed to address frontline workers’ specific communication and work management needs.
I was glad to see Zoom take the vertical route, as it shows an understanding that the needs of different workers vary. The AI Companion needs of a teacher are dramatically different than those of a knowledge worker which vary from a front-line worker. These other flavors of AI Companion will help Zoom gain adoption across a broader set of users.
Customer Experience Enhancements
In the pre-briefing, Michelle Couture, Global Product Marketing Lead for Customer Experience, spoke about Zoom’s AI-driven customer experience solutions to improve self-service and agent-assisted customer support. She said the company will upgrade the Zoom Virtual Agent with multi-intent query handling, which should reduce the need for live agent intervention by resolving more complex customer inquiries. In addition, Zoom Contact Center will come with AI expert assistant, which integrates knowledge base articles and CRM data to guide agents through customer interactions more effectively.
Zoom also enhances supervisors’ tools, such as supervisor flagging and auto quality management, which provide real-time insights into agent performance and customer interactions. These tools optimize customer service efficiency while maintaining high customer satisfaction standards.
Zoom as a very late entrant to the contact center, so late that I wasn’t sure many would look at it. Initially, Zoom’s ability to compete was driven by high customer loyalty, so some decision-makers were willing to give them a look despite only having a basic offering. Since then, the company has been “all in” on CCaaS, with CEO Eric Yuan as the GM. This intense focus has enabled Zoom to catch up in a highly competitive industry quickly.
Some Final Thoughts
The Zoomtopia news underscores the company’s strategy of integrating AI across its platforms to enhance user productivity, streamline workflows, and provide customized AI experiences across industries. Zoom’s decision to offer AI capabilities at no additional cost makes advanced technology accessible to a wide range of businesses, removing a barrier to entry.
By focusing on responsible AI usage, improving customer experiences, and offering industry-specific solutions, Zoom continues to expand its product suite to meet the diverse needs of its global user base.
As these features roll out, Zoom’s ongoing developments will likely drive further adoption across small businesses and large enterprises. Whether it will pump up the jam is another question.
