With the increasing proliferation of generative artificial intelligence in the market, videoconferencing and chat platform Zoom Communications Inc. partnered with Anthropic today to bring its Claude chatbot into Zoom’s product suite.

Zoom intends to integrate the AI assistant with its products starting with its Zoom Contact Center, a combined unified communications and contact center services offering that supports agents, supervisors and administrators hosted entirely in the cloud.

With the addition of generative AI, users will be able to bring their own large language chatbot models, which are capable of understanding human conversational speech and answering employee and customer questions on the fly. The AI can act as an assistant for employees while answering calls or as a first line for customers to answer simple questions – which can be escalated to a human representative if the issue cannot be resolved.

“With Claude guiding agents toward trustworthy resolutions and powering self-service for end-users, companies will be able to take customer relationships to another level,” said Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom.

The addition of Claude follows a partnership between Zoom and OpenAI LP, the developer of ChatGPT, in March. The company has been focused on bringing as many different AI models into its platforms as possible for its customers to choose from in what it calls a “federated approach,” including from OpenAI, now Anthropic and “select customers’ models” on the back end.

As part of the company’s partnership with OpenAI, Zoom added generative AI capabilities to its Zoom IQ smart assistant. With Zoom IQ chat and email compose, users can simply prompt the AI to automatically compose custom messages in chat and emails to create messages for them and with Zoom IQ Meeting Summary, it will automatically generate summaries of meetings that can be shared directly via team chats.

Since different AI assistants will have different approaches to how they provide their services, Zoom hopes to be able to provide the best fit for customer service experiences with a variety of different models based on specific business needs.

Partnering with a leading collaboration platform like Zoom allows us to put robust, steerable AI into the hands of more people and unlock its potential to help streamline everyday processes,” co-founder and Chief Executive Dario Amodei said about the partnership.

Zoom did not give a timeline for when Claude would become available for customers to access but said Zoom Contact Center would be the first product to receive access to the AI assistant. After that, the company intends to continue to extend its use across its entire portfolio of products, including Team Chat, Meetings, Phone, Whiteboard and Zoom IQ.

Microsoft Corp. added ChatGPT to Teams Premium in February, providing meeting notes, summaries and intelligent recaps. Salesforce Inc. also announced it intends to natively incorporate generative AI in its Slack collaboration platform earlier this month that will provide writing assistance and meeting summaries.

In addition to partnering with Anthropic, Zoom’s venture capital arm Zoom Ventures announced an investment in the AI company for an undisclosed amount to strengthen the relationship between them.

Photo: Zoom