Zoom last week showed off an expanded collaboration suite with a slew of new products and updates –all intended to make the video call platform more comprehensive and effective for hybrid work.
Among the highlights is the AI-powered Zoom Docs. Available in 2024, it promises to create documents, build wikis and track projects on the Zoom platform.
Zoom says that the built-in Zoom AI allows users to populate documents with content from Zoom, allowing more creativity and content generation with Zoom ZI Companion.
“Zoom is helping our customers by bringing the definition of a ‘doc’ into 2023 — with powerful document authoring and collaboration capabilities, modern collaboration tools, and a next-gen workspace built from the ground up with AI at its heart; Zoom Docs is that solution,” said Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom.
Zoom Docs is modular, and integrates with Zoom and third-party apps, allowing users to create, edit, and search Zoom Docs content within Meetings, Team Chat, and the Zoom desktop, Web, and mobile apps.
“Collaboration is shifting from point products to a single unified platform, bringing together multiple forms of communication,” said Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research.
He said that with Zoom Docs and its purpose-built AI capabilities, Zoom is well positioned to reimagine collaboration at work and beyond.
Zoom also added new features to its recently introduced Zoom AI Companion, a generative AI helper. The features include a Whiteboard capability, Meeting, and Team Chat summary capabilities.
This application promises to let customers catch up on meetings that are already in progress, summarise long chat threads, and compose e-mails via Zoom Mail. AI Companion can now assist teams in producing ideas and categorise them on a digital whiteboard.
AI is top of mind for two Asian organisations
Two of Zoom’s Asia Pacific customers also spoke at Zoomtopia, the annual Zoom event that was held last week.
Stephanie King-chung Hung, CIO and director general, IT department, Asian Development Bank (ADB), shared how generative AI has helped the bank leverage its knowledge consumption and provide better input and recommendations for policy conversations and economic opportunities.
The bank has close to 62,000 documents, such as project completion reports, development effectiveness reports, independent evaluation reports, said Hung.
“We are using generative AI to harvest the first-hand knowledge insight, so provide better input and recommendation, whether it is for policy conversation, or to help developing member countries to identify economic and social opportunities,” she said.
However, there are concerns about responsible use of AI, such as inherent biases in the AI model, skill gaps, and deep fakes.
For ADB, Zoom’s interactive capabilities have been helpful as a substitute for face-to-face interaction in online meetings. Emojis like clapping of hands, polls, and sentiment analysis, have been useful to get audience participation and help the host to pivot if the conversation needs to focus on another topic.
Paul-Eric Licari, regional business development manager at Grab, said Zoom is a partner for Grab’s modern work approach, which allows for the automation of tasks, optimisation of internal processes and external services, and better understanding of customers’ needs.
“We use data to understand consumer behaviors, optimise operations, and predict market trends,” he added.
Grab automates tasks by leveraging big data analytics, AI, machine learning to optimise both its internal processes and external services.
Licari said Grab is an early adopter of data science in the Asia-Pacific region, by using high-frequency data sets to build tools to boost its competitive advantage.
For example, heat maps, a type of analytics technology, is used to show high demand areas, guiding the drivers to the areas with more job opportunities.
Grab now uses generative AI to augment internal workflows and processes, allowing employees to debug code and conduct queries faster. For users, Grab has introduced LLM-powered features, such as improved Grab chat translations – targeted at travellers.
Currently, Grab is using Zoom IQ for Sales, and plans to adopt Zoom AI Companion to improve staff efficiency by automatically taking call notes, and writing call summaries.
