Updated on 30th October:

Zoom’s AI Companion has reached a milestone today with more than 125,000 accounts using it, generating more than one million meeting summaries. (Watch out, Otter.ai)

The AI Companion now supports seven new language, with plans to extend this to a total of 32 languages before the end of this year.

Early October, we attended the annual Zoomtopia (via Zoom, of course) to hear from CEO, Eric Yuan and Zoom’s key executives across the globe about what’s new for Zoom in the coming months. While AI-led announcements were expected from the San Jose based company, Zoomtopia went beyond by announcing not just one, but several new platform innovations underpinned by powerful AI capabilities, aimed at helping organizations streamline the workday.

The first to debut was Zoom AI Companion, a complimentary addition with its paid services assigned to Zoom user accounts. Users can now manage their AI Companion settings for Meetings, Team Chat, Whiteboard, and Mail all in one place in the web portal. The company’s generative AI assistant promises to expand on current capabilities, and improve the efficacy of its summarization capabilities to new industry customers in higher education and healthcare.

Zoom also unveiled its breakthrough product, Zoom Docs – an AI-powered, modular workspace built from the ground up for hybrid work. The new platform innovations and integrations are designed to drive impact with intelligence, enable flexible collaboration, strengthen customer relationships and build an open ecosystem with seamless integrations that give Zoom’s customers choice.

During its annual flagship event, Zoomtopia APAC 2023, Zoom brought together thousands of customers, partners and communities in the region to explore how organizations can navigate a new modern work era.

Since Zoom’s evolution into a robust unified communications and customer experience platform, the company has achieved several key milestones in the region:

• In the last year alone, Zoom’s speed of innovation has translated into 600 features for Zoom Contact Center customers. Zoom launched Zoom Contact Center across APAC, with enhancements like Zoom Virtual Agent and Zoom Workforce Engagement Management adding to Zoom’s suite of platform solutions.
• Zoom has worked with leading organizations across industries in APAC to reshape how they deliver employee and customer experiences, including Grab, Petronas and SingHealth in Southeast Asia.

Regarding concerns of data privacy when using generative AI solutions for businesses, Ricky Kapur, Head of Asia Pacific, Zoom explained that Zoom ensured that their models are trained from sources that can include a combination of public domain data, purchased data, and data we created. Zoom also continues to evaluate and closely review using data from diverse sources and will select the ones most applicable for customer use cases. 

Zoom takes a federated and responsible approach to AI, where the company leverages its proprietary AI models based on the Meta LLaMA2 family of models and third-party models such as OpenAI and Anthropic. With this flexibility to incorporate multiple types of models, Zoom aims to provide the most value for their customers’ diverse needs. These models are also customizable, so they can be tuned to a given company’s jargon and scenarios for better performance.

Zoom’s goal is to empower employees by helping them focus on what matters most — be it collaborating with each other or innovating on customer experience outcomes for their end users. By helping to expedite these smaller tasks, Zoom hopes to give employees more than just time — the ability to unlock greater creativity and collaboration between their teams.

Creating AI-Powered Experiences for Asia Pacific Customers

Beyond Zoom AI Companion, customers who utilized Zoom’s AI-powered products and features include Caring For You, an award-winning nursing agency in Australia, who leveraged the Zoom Contact Center (ZCC) solution to intelligently reroute customer calls. The challenge Caring For You faced was that as they expanded operations and established interstate offices in Australia thanks to rapid growth during the pandemic, Caring For You found it difficult to educate customers about contacting their respective local support teams instead of the central office. Manually updating contact details for existing customers, such as the new local number for each state’s office, would have been a time-consuming task — which was made easier and faster with AI-powered features on ZCC.

Zoom’s Contact Center solution

Other Zoom customers in APAC also took to the virtual stage to share their digital transformation journey. “Grab’s digital transformation journey was guided by several key principles, including keeping user-centricity at the core and making data-driven decisions to understand consumer behavior and optimize operations – both values which we also share with Zoom,” said Paul-Eric Licari, Regional Head, Group Business Development at Grab.

“Digital technology integration was a significant driver of this journey. Externally, integration with the Zoom platform helped us to better understand user needs and provide improved customer experiences across our offerings. Internally, Zoom facilitated collaboration between our cross- functional teams sitting in offices across the world. This helped us pool together our collective expertise to fuel innovation and solve complex problems at Grab.”

This article includes adaptation from Zoomtopia 2023’s press announcements