Read about the latest announcements unveiled at Zoomtopia 2024, including the next-generation AI Companion 2.0, AI-first products like Zoom Tasks, and custom AI offerings.
7 min read
Updated on October 09, 2024
Published on October 09, 2024
As Zoom’s Chief Product Officer, Smita is responsible for leading Zoom’s product management. She is an industry veteran with 20+ years of product management experience across Google and Microsoft. Her product experience spans leading the delivery of television over IP networks at Microsoft, leading and scaling Google Meet, and, more recently, managing real-time communications platforms and products at Microsoft Teams. Beyond video, Smita has led Google Voice (Phone), Google Calendar and Tasks, Google Adwords product suite for local advertisers, and Google Chromebooks device portfolio and ecosystems.
Smita grew up in India, where she received her B.Tech in Electrical Engineering at IIT Kanpur. She then received her master's from Princeton University in EECS and a Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara, where she focused on image and video compression.
Smita is a recipient of the IIT Kanpur Distinguished Alumni Award and founder of the IIT Kanpur Women Alumni Network WIN.
It’s been over one year since we introduced AI Companion as your AI assistant in the Zoom Workplace platform. Since then, AI Companion has been enabled for more than 4 million accounts, helping people get things done and take meaningful action from their meetings by reducing their need to take notes, composing emails and messages, and even jump-starting brainstorming with creative ideas.
AI Companion has grown over the past year as we’ve introduced new capabilities across our platform and launched Zoom Docs, our AI-first collaborative docs solution that transforms your meeting content into actionable documents and project plans.
And today, we’re excited to announce even more innovations that will make Zoom Workplace a true AI-first work platform — one where AI Companion is seamlessly woven into experiences across your workday so you can save time, focus on creative, insightful work, and connect with your colleagues and customers.
Our announcements start with AI Companion 2.0 — your next-generation AI assistant that surfaces important information in a convenient side panel, helping you prioritize what matters most and providing suggestions to help you stay on top of your work.
Imagine getting much-needed help preparing for a meeting or working on key projects during your workday. AI Companion 2.0 will be able to pull in information from interactions across Zoom Workplace (including Team Chat messages, meeting and phone call transcripts, docs, and whiteboards), and — when connected by the user — third-party information sources like Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office files, Gmail, and Google Calendar to answer specific questions about your work, summarize your unread messages, list action items from recent meetings, and more.
It will be able to gain context from your previous conversations and what you’re looking at in the Zoom Workplace app — whether you have a Zoom Doc, Team Chat channel, or Zoom Calendar event open — to provide responses that help you throughout your workday.
Accessible through a convenient side panel, AI Companion is there to help you throughout your workday.
AI Companion 2.0 will even be able to look up information on the web to help answer your questions in and out of meetings.
AI Companion 2.0 will be accessible through a persistent side panel in the Zoom Workplace app, where you can chat with your AI assistant throughout your workday. It will be available in the coming weeks at no added cost with the paid services in Zoom Workplace accounts.
Say your organization has a need for more customized AI experiences. Perhaps you work in an industry with a unique set of terms or vocabulary and you’d like to have AI Companion learn those words to generate more accurate meeting summaries. Or, you want AI Companion to be able to take action for you across your other critical third-party business apps beyond your email and calendar.
Our custom AI Companion add-on, coming in 2025, will allow you to tailor AI Companion to your organization’s needs.
The custom AI Companion add-on will be powered by AI Studio, where you will be able to upload your own dictionaries to help improve the accuracy of AI Companion and create knowledge collections customized to your organization.
You’ll be able to bring in additional third-party applications like Atlassian (Jira & Confluence), Glean, Workday, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Box, Asana, Hubspot, and more. Not only will AI Companion be able to surface information from these apps, but you will also be able to ask it to work with the apps to complete tasks on your behalf, right within Zoom Workplace.
This optional add-on will allow individuals to create more personalized experiences with AI Companion. You will be able to use it as a personal coach and create a digital avatar in Zoom Clips based on a seed recording of yourself. Imagine being able to create video clips for demos or training sessions using just a text script, featuring a digital avatar that looks and sounds like you — no retakes needed.
A lot of AI tools promise better productivity and time savings, but AI Companion for Zoom Workplace is designed to deliver by being present for you throughout your day, fitting seamlessly into your workflows, and helping you complete tasks you’d normally spend minutes or hours on. Here’s what that will look like.
Start your day by checking what tasks you have due today and in the following week. Enter our newly announced AI-first product, Zoom Tasks. It’s deeply integrated with AI Companion, enabling your AI assistant to detect and recommend tasks from meeting summaries, emails, docs, whiteboards, and more. AI Companion will also be able to help you complete those tasks, and you can edit and manage them all from a centralized Tasks tab in the Zoom Workplace app.
AI Companion can identify tasks from Zoom meetings or chats and help you complete them.
If you’ll be in meetings all morning, you can set up AI Companion to generate a smart voicemail greeting in your voice based on your calendar events. This will help keep your colleagues and customers informed of when you’ll be available to return their calls.
Speaking of meetings, you’ll be able to call on AI Companion to help build smart meeting agendas. It will be able to pull in recommended content, add section timers to remind you to keep meetings on track, and make it easy to share the summary and action items afterward.
Next, you hop on a call with multiple participants and talk about several workstreams. To help you keep track of the conversation and action items, you’ll be able to ask AI Companion things like “Summarize action items we’ve agreed on” or “Confirm the deadline that was just discussed.” AI Companion will be able to provide real-time summaries of your Zoom Phone calls.
Real-time summaries provide you with context about your phone call during the conversation.
With too many meetings on your plate, you realize you can free up a chunk of your schedule by sending a quick Zoom Clip to clarify your point. Give AI Companion a short script, and it can generate a clip for you using a pre-selected human avatar (or your own digital avatar, if you have the custom AI Companion add-on).
If you’re headed to the office, AI Companion will be able to help you book a meeting room in Workspace Reservation by recommending options based on your prior reservations and the meeting participants in the office that day.
AI Companion can recommend meeting rooms and help you book a room with a few simple clicks.
In-person meetings are an integral part of collaboration, and soon, you’ll be able to experience the benefits of AI Companion in those conversations, too. AI Companion for in-person meetings will be able to use the Zoom Workplace app on your mobile device to capture those face-to-face discussions and generate meeting summaries and action items. You’ll be able to focus more on the conversation at hand knowing AI Companion will be pulling in relevant meeting information and adding it to Zoom Tasks or using that in-person discussion to help you prepare for a future meeting.
When you want to connect with colleagues, AI Companion will be able to help you create content, generate surveys, and answer employee questions in Workvivo. Workvivo Employee Insights will provide even more information to help organizations measure and improve engagement.
Admins will even be able to ask AI Companion for help with account setup and configuration so they can deploy Zoom products and features more quickly, and create messages to help introduce these new features to account users.
With AI Companion at your side throughout your workday, you won’t just save time, you’ll be better prepared and able to keep track of what matters — without letting things fall through the cracks. All these new capabilities will be included at no additional cost with paid Zoom Workplace accounts, making them a valuable addition to your day.
Our AI-first solutions extend beyond your workday to improve the services you provide to your customers and prospects. We’re excited to announce the following capabilities coming to Zoom Business Services in the coming months.
If creating outstanding customer experiences is crucial for your business, take note of our new Zoom Contact Center offerings. Our AI-first, self-service Zoom Virtual Agent has been enhanced with multi-intent detection to handle more complex queries to make conversations more natural for your customers. We will also introduce a preview of a voice Virtual Agent for self-service interactions later this year. Your customers will benefit from more accurate responses and the ability to choose between chat or voice for their self-service queries.
We’re adding dynamic agent guides to AI Expert Assist capabilities. When your agent is conversing with a customer, AI Expert Assist can analyze the context of the conversation, see which steps the agent has already taken, and guide them to the next step in the process.
Our new supervisor tool, Auto Quality Management, will provide managers with more insights into agent performance. It can score customer interactions automatically, helping managers assess which agents need more support and identify top performers.
Marketers using Zoom Events can use AI content generation to extend the shelf life of their webinar recordings by turning them into video snippets, emails, and blog posts. A new branded content hub allows you to showcase past and upcoming events in a central location that’s easy for audiences to explore.
For sales teams, we’re enhancing Zoom Revenue Accelerator with features like automatic dialer and conversation explorer to help you find key insights from your calls to move deals forward, and automated scoring from your AI coach. You’ll also be able to record Microsoft Teams and Google Meet calls with Zoom Revenue Accelerator recorder.
Different industries have unique needs and use cases for AI. Here’s how we’ve applied our AI-first approach to help meet the needs of frontline workers, as well as those in education, healthcare, and other industries.
Frontline workers, who represent up to 80% of the global workforce, will be able to benefit from a new mobile-centric Zoom Workplace for Frontline offering with AI Companion at their fingertips. Features are purpose-built for efficient on-shift communications with simplified chat channels, pinned shift contacts for quick calling, and a push-to-talk feature. Zoom Workplace for Frontline will also have tools for shift management, task allocation, and automated workflows.
Zoom Workplace for Frontline offers a mobile-centric experience for on-shift communications.
For healthcare workers, solutions that help enhance patient care are critical. Zoom Workplace for Healthcare will include AI Companion 2.0 to help hospital admins, staff, and other healthcare personnel get more done throughout their day-to-day activities. A new Zoom Workplace for Clinicians offering will have a clinical notes feature to generate notes from telehealth or in-person visits that can be integrated with electronic health record (EHR) platforms. Clinical notes can reduce provider note-taking so that they can spend more time engaged with patients. Healthcare organizations will also have the ability to purchase the custom AI Companion add-on to include medical dictionaries and to access proprietary healthcare data or apps.
Healthcare providers can take advantage of AI Companion’s note-taking capabilities by using the clinical notes feature to save time.
Both educators and learners will be able to benefit from new Zoom Workplace for Education offerings at no additional cost. Faculty can take advantage of AI-first features to help them with lesson planning and lecture summaries. A new live notes feature will automatically take notes for students while also creating an interactive environment for students to provide real-time feedback or ask questions. Purchasing the custom AI Companion add-on will enable access to additional data sources such as student information systems, learning management systems, or other institutional content including handbooks and policies.
The live notes feature in Zoom Workplace for Education creates an interactive environment for students and faculty to connect.
If you want to hear more about how all of these announcements will help you and your teams work better, visit our on-demand library of sessions from Zoomtopia 2024, our annual customer conference on Zoom Events.
Watch the keynote featuring these announcements and explore breakout sessions led by thought-provoking speakers where you can learn about Zoom Workplace, AI, collaboration, and more.
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