Zoom introduces new AI-powered features, products to be rolled out starting April

Zoom unveiled new AI features that aim to improve team collaboration when using the platform.

Photo from Zoom

AI-powered Zoom!

According to a statement, Zoom said its new Zoom Workplace is an "AI-powered, open collaboration platform." The company introduced new AI Companion expansions to help "reimagine teamwork."

Zoom also announced customer experience enhancements to Zoom Contact Center with the help of AI.

Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom, said: "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 said its latest AI Companion features will include Ask AI Companion which will help users prepare for their workday across Zoom Workplace, plus AI Companion for Zoom Phone and additional capabilities for Team Chat and Whiteboard. All AI Companion features will continue to be included at no additional cost with the paid services in eligible user accounts.

Users can enhance their productivity with Ask AI Companion, which will gather, synthesize, and share information from Zoom Meetings, Mail, Team Chat, Notes, Docs, and more, it noted.

Zoom said the Ask AI Companion can help prepare users for and recap meetings, show relevant action items, draft agendas, and summarize chat and email threads, as well as documents. In the future, it will be able to pull relevant content from select third-party applications (if the customer chooses to enable them), the company noted.

Also enhanced by AI Companion is the Zoom Phone. With this, users can request a post-call summary and next steps, so they can focus on the conversation. Voicemail prioritization helps elevate urgent messages, and voicemail task extraction delivers tasks from voicemails to help users understand the next steps without listening to every voicemail.

Team SMS thread summary also provides a concise overview of Team SMS threads in PowerPack.

Other AI Companion innovations across the platform will include new Team Chat and Whiteboard capabilities.

Zoom Workplace will elevate the Zoom experience with Zoom AI Companion so that all employees within a company can be more productive, collaborate better, and enhance their skills. Zoom Workplace will continue to be an open platform that enables customer choice, the company said.

Aside from these features, Zoom is also now allowing users to choose from four color themes within the app. Hosts will also be allowed to tailor customized virtual meeting backgrounds.

For Zoom Meetings, users will see a new Meetings tab within the app that will allow for more collaboration. It supports traditional calendar views and serves as the central place for agendas, recordings, and other shared assets, AI Companion smart recordings, and meeting summaries.

With the new Meetings tab, users can also access continuous meeting chats from the Meeting card before and after the meeting.

During meetings, Zoom said the new multi-speaker view will automatically adapt the video layout to highlight active speakers. The AI-powered portrait lighting will help illuminate users’ faces in poor lighting, and generative AI virtual backgrounds will allow users to create custom backgrounds, the company said.

Other new features for Meetings will include a customizable toolbar, multi-share, and document collaboration.

In the Team Chat, Zoom said asynchronous communication will be enhanced by Team Chat tabs that will help users stay organized.

For hybrid and onsite organizations, navigating the office will be easier with the introduction of a Workspaces tab, providing access to Workspace Reservation with wayfinding and Visitor Management directly from the Zoom Workplace app.

The Zoom Rooms will now include the option to enable new smart name tags, which will be able to automatically apply name tags to people 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 feature with Zoom Rooms will allow immediate broadcasting of important updates, news, and events to employees using Workvivo TV with certified devices for Zoom Rooms.

At launch, Zoom One bundles will be rebranded as Zoom Workplace bundles to offer simpler pricing for the different offerings.

Zoom said its business services also include AI-powered solutions for marketing, customer care, and sales.

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, Zoom said.

In Zoom Contact Center, businesses can now expand their digital communication channels to include WhatsApp and inbound email.

Agents will also benefit from custom app integration with Zoom's open and flexible framework that allows teams to build apps from proprietary or third-party data sources that surface relevant customer information directly within the agent desktop. Agents will also benefit from deep integration with Zoom Workplace, which will allow them to directly transfer customers with AI-generated engagement summaries to back-office experts using Zoom Phone Power Pack.

Zoom Contact Center and Zoom Phone will also offer an integration with PCI Pal to enable secure capture of payment data, including PCI attestation of compliance (AOC). Also, Zoom Contact Center customers now have the ability to store certain data locally in Zoom’s EU data center, designed to meet the needs of EU-based customers.

Revenue organizations who use Zoom Revenue Accelerator can now improve their customer conversations with deal memos, which will provide a brief summary of a conversation and an analysis of its impact on the possibility of winning a deal. To be added is a built-in automated scorecard that will help improve sales outcomes by creating scorecards that rate customer interactions and provide actionable feedback.

For marketing professionals, Zoom Events enhancements will amplify their hybrid events to help make them more engaging. With new AI Companion image generation, hosts can create custom images based on a simple text prompt for event registration pages, virtual backgrounds, and marketing emails. To help bridge the gap between hybrid events and in-person events, the Swoogo integration for Zoom Events allows event professionals to reach broader audiences.

The newly announced products and features are expected to roll out over April and May, Zoom said. Some features and products may not be available for all regions and industry verticals at launch, it noted.

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