Zoom AI Companion offers generative AI features to all Zoom commercial customers at no additional cost, improving meetings, chats, emails, calls, events, and documents. This approach enables everyone in an organization to have access to AI-powered tools.
The Zoom AI Companion addresses several high-value use cases, including meeting summaries, asking questions of the AI during a meeting, creating and refining documents, assistance while composing email and chat messages, summarization of chat and SMS threads, and improving phone calls.
AI Companion can transcribe and summarize discussion and action items from meetings. This can potentially free up time and allow meeting participants to focus on the meeting as opposed to note taking.
In a recent survey, most leaders (75%) said they manually take notes and share action items with colleagues multiple times per week so, for these respondents, the Zoom AI Companion would likely free up time. In the same survey, 44% of leaders said they would use the extra time to develop better processes and workflows for their team. Again, this would likely benefit many.
Key things to know about summaries:
If enabled by the meeting host, meeting participants can ask questions of the AI Companion during the meeting. Standard prompts such as “Catch me up”, if you joined a meeting late, “Was my name mentioned?”, for those not paying attention <smile>, and “Are there any action items?” can be asked. This can even be done with a single click through suggestions in the prompt.
More nuanced questions such as “Summarize what Sue said about this sub-topic in 3 bullet points” or “Detail the different options discussed with pros and cons in a table” can also be asked.
Questions and responses are available in more than 30 languages.
Key things to know:
Zoom calls its new Zoom Docs an “AI-first collaborative docs solution.” Zoom Docs was launched on August 5, 2024 (but announced in October 2023), and according to Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom, “Zoom Docs is our first Zoom Workplace product with generative AI built in from the ground up; it effortlessly transforms information from Zoom Meetings into actionable documents and knowledge bases, so teams can stay focused on meaningful work.”
Zoom Docs provides a co-editing canvas for creating documents, project plans, checklists, data tables and more, and via Generative AI, allows users to more quickly create and revise content.
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AI Companion can help you reply to emails or chat messages or create new messages based on a prompt describing what you want to say.
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AI Companion can summarize long chat threads or SMS messages for a call queue or auto receptionist.
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With a paid Zoom Phone license, AI Companion can summarize calls, extract tasks from voicemail transcripts, and prioritize voicemails.
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AI Companion can help generate content when using a digital whiteboard and supports creating content, images, email, and chat messages for Zoom Events.
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By default, all Zoom AI Companion features are disabled. You will need to have your Zoom admin enable the desired AI Companion features. Features can be enabled/disabled at the account, group, or user level.
You first need to enable AI Companion features via Account Settings before you can enable them at the group or user level. Phone policies related to AI Companion are managed separately on the Zoom Phone page.
Zoom has very clearly stated that they do not use any customer audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, or other communications content to train Zoom’s or its third-party AI models (“other communication content” includes poll results, whiteboard, and reactions). Detailed information can be found in the Zoom AI Companion Security and Privacy Whitepaper.
Although the above summarizes the current state of the Zoom AI Companion, things change quickly related to UC, collaboration, and especially AI. Expect new capabilities and new announcements during the Zoomtopia 2024 conference October 9 and 10.
Zoom AI Companion can provide significant beneficial features for all Zoom commercial customers at no additional cost. If you are using the Zoom platform you should pilot and then leverage these powerful AI capabilities appropriately within your organization.
If you have not decided on a UC and Collaboration platform, Zoom should be considered as a viable option, along with other leading platforms.
Zoom has focused on simplicity and continues to deliver a user experience that most find straightforward. However, as Zoom adds more capabilities and features, it may be challenging to continue to make things simple. So far, Zoom has delivered new generative AI features in a way that appears to engage user experimentation and adoption.
