Zoom Video Communications, Inc. kicked off Zoomtopia 2023, the company’s annual event, unveiling new platform innovations underpinned by powerful AI capabilities to help streamline the workday through effective communication and collaboration tools.
Zoom’s breakthrough product, Zoom Docs, is a next-gen way of collaborating, built from the ground up with AI at its core. Zoom Docs is a flexible, modular workspace that tightly integrates with Zoom and third-party apps, making it easy for teams and individuals to create, collaborate, manage projects, and stay organized. Zoom Docs includes traditional document capabilities, as well as wikis and drag-and-drop content blocks for tables, charts, and images. Zoom Docs users can also leverage its AI-powered functionality to populate docs with content from Zoom Meetings to inform and jumpstart creation, generate content with Zoom AI Companion, summarize content quickly, easily search documents, and more. Zoom Docs is scheduled to be generally available in 2024.
“As work continues to evolve and present new challenges, one thing will remain the same: effective collaboration and communication tools are crucial for businesses to succeed,” said Eric S. Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom. “At Zoom, we’re grounded in doing what’s right and caring for our customers, and we understand that business leaders are faced with new obstacles every day — whether it’s navigating hybrid work, improving engagement and collaboration among customers and employees, deciding how to leverage generative AI to empower people, or reducing the complexity of their IT solutions. Our new innovations demonstrate Zoom’s commitment to evolving our platform in ways that empower limitless human connection and solve real business problems.”
Zoom AI Companion drives impact with intelligence
The recently announced Zoom AI Companion, the company’s generative AI digital assistant, debuted a new Whiteboard capability and is expanding to new industry customers with the introduction of Meeting and Team Chat summarization capabilities to Zoom higher education and healthcare customers. And, unlike other similar offerings that cost $30 or more per user per month, AI Companion is included at no additional cost for paid users on eligible accounts.*
Zoom AI Companion helps users catch up on already-in-progress meeting discussions, summarize long chat threads, compose emails in Zoom Mail, and so much more. Now, AI Companion can also help generate ideas on a digital whiteboard and organize them into categories, so teams can get to work faster.
Enabling flexible collaboration on a modern platform
Zoom is purpose-built for hybrid, remote, and in-office work. Delivering an exceptional employee experience in the hybrid work era that supports employees across different work styles is critical for companies to succeed. Zoom unveiled the following platform innovations to enhance:
- Employee engagement: Workvivo, acquired by Zoom earlier this year, is an employee engagement and communications solution that provides new ways to keep employees informed, engaged, and connected in today’s hybrid work model. Having a strong ongoing employee engagement strategy is crucial for today’s distributed workforces, which is why Workvivo users will be able to access Workvivo right in the Zoom desktop client in the coming weeks.
- Hybrid work:
- In addition to suggesting where people can sit to be close to key collaborators, Workspace Reservation will be adding a Wayfinding feature next year that provides a map to the reserved seat and allows users to review their path on their mobile device when they’re in an unfamiliar office location, making it easier to find their desk.
- Huddles are virtual coworking spaces that bring employees together across in office, hybrid, and remote teams. Now, Zoom has introduced presence indicators and location information with My Office View, so users know when the colleagues they collaborate closely with are in a virtual Huddle or in the physical office. My Office View in Huddles is scheduled to be available in 2024.
- Collaboration: Zoom has streamlined the pre-meeting process with products like Calendar, Mail, Team Chat, and, most recently, Zoom Scheduler. Now, with the latest features available in Zoom Scheduler, users can incorporate single-use booking links to maintain control of their calendar, add customized booking page logos to offer a consistent brand experience, and add multiple account support so that users can check availability across multiple accounts like their work and personal calendars. Coming soon, users will be able to incorporate unique schedules of availability per host so users do not have to block calendars for different teams or regions, delegate support so that executive assistants or other support members can book for others and integrate Salesforce with Scheduler to seamlessly link meeting records from Zoom Scheduler in Salesforce automatically.
