In what the company said is one of the biggest announcements it will make this year, Zoom Video Communications Inc. today introduced Zoom Workplace, an artificial intelligence-enhanced collaboration platform that integrates with customers’ existing technology stacks and supports a wide range of third-party applications.

The company is also enhancing and extending its AI Companion generative AI assistant and improving contact center support.

Zoom Workplace will be included at no additional charge for eligible paid plans. It includes streaming chat in meetings, email, phone, Zoom Docs, notes, clips and a whiteboard. It can also be extended with workplace reservations, dedicated rooms, digital signage and visitor management.

“We’ve redesigned the meetings experience,” said Jeff Smith, head of product for meetings, spaces and whiteboard. The workplace application’s new meetings tab provides calendar views and serves as a central place for agendas, recordings and other shared assets. “From here, I can easily find everything I need, from AI Companion and smart recordings to meeting summaries,” he said.

New tabs have been added for workspace, reservations, and the Workvivo employee hub “so hybrid workers can easily manage their day from a single app within the meetings experience itself,” Smith said. New personalization options and the ability to create a common wallpaper for meetings have also been added.

A new multispeaker view adapts the video layout to highlight active participants (pictured) and portrait lighting to compensate for poor lighting conditions. More than 2,500 extensions and integrations are available in the Zoom Marketplace.

AI copilot

Today, the company is also releasing Ask AI Companion, a new way to interact with the AI Companion released last year. “With Ask AI Companion, users will be able to prepare for their workday, receive critical information instantly, automate routine tasks and stay informed by synthesizing information from Zoom meetings, e-mails, chat messages, notes, docs and more,” said Mahesh Ram, head of AI products.

Zoom said more than a half-million customers are now using AI Companion and the software has been expanded to support 36 languages. Other recent enhancements include language detection that adjusts automatically to the primary spoken language in the meeting.

Zoom Phone will receive AI Companion capabilities that automatically prioritize voicemails and enable users to tap into generative AI to request post-call summaries and extract information from recorded calls for follow-up actions and next steps without taking notes.

“To prepare for a critical strategy review meeting, all I have to do is click on Ask AI companion to help me prepare,” Ram said. “It quickly scans, notes, chats, documents and prior meeting summaries, highlights important action items and anticipates potential roadblocks from earlier conversations. It can even create an agenda.” Source documents are currently limited to Zoom content but will be expanded to support third-party applications like Microsoft Corp.’s 365 and Google LLC’s Workspace.

AI Companion is also set to become an intrinsic part of the Zoom application, appearing as a right-hand sidebar on the screen. It will show a series of suggested prompts and actions that the generative AI agent can perform, such as preparing for an upcoming meeting, drafting content, brainstorming ideas and summarizing calls and meetings.

Preparation assistant

“Ask AI companion accesses my past relevant Zoom meeting summaries, team chats, notes and eventually Zoom docs related to my upcoming meeting,” Ram said. “I can see the information sources that AI Companion used to generate those outputs, whether from that prior meeting summary or the relevant team chat thread.” It can produce meeting recaps and full summaries, including information from related meetings and action items.

Zoom Contact Center is also getting AI capabilities specific to the needs of customer service agents. Every contact center license now includes the AI Companion for Contact Center assistant. It summarizes, calls, generates follow-up tasks and analyzes customer sentiment to enable smoother handoffs, said Michelle Couture, global product marketing lead for customer experience.

The assistant can also gather customer information on demand from connected customer relationship management systems, knowledge bases, and other resources, “so agents are empowered to go off script and solve complex problems faster,” she said.

New features debuting today allow supervisors to monitor agent engagements in real-time with sentiment analysis, live transcriptions and conversation summaries. “This allows them to manage agents better and easily identify when they need to provide assistance,” Couture said. Integration with Zoom workplace lets agents transfer customers and AI-generated call summaries to back-office experts using Zoom Phone.

Digital communication channel support has been expanded to include Meta Platforms Inc.’s WhatsApp and email. Support has also been added for PCI Pal Ltd. payments.

Image: Zoom