From this Monday, Zoom users can open up a document tool within their video calling app allowing them to create shareable files from meetings. This feature is meant to help Zoom become an all-in-one office space. The users are also going to be encouraged in using generative AI in writing and editing.
The document tool comes with the Zoom’s AI Companion which is built upon large language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and its proprietary models. This AI can organize meeting transcripts into templates or create tables, checklists, and trackers. These documents can be shared and edited during Zoom meetings.
Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom says that “AI is what makes the experience so differentiated.” “The aim is that these dull high-friction tasks that consumes most of our time could be performed by AI.”
Zoom Docs is the latest update to its collaborative tool, Workplace, launched in March. With this move it targets the market where Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 dominate as they have incorporated similar features.
“It’s incredibly difficult to compete,” says Will McKeon-White who is Forrester’s senior analyst. Yet Microsoft Word has ceded ground for Google Docs’ success story. Meanwhile Google Workspace has more than three billion users while Microsoft Teams boasts over 320 million monthly active members.
Strategic Edge of Zoom
Zoom hopes to draw users through price positioning. Its Workplace plans include AI Companion for between $14 per user per month (for small companies) and $19 per user per month (for small businesses). On the other hand MS CoPilot for 365 goes at $30 each user each month while Gemini for Business by Google ranges between $20 and %30 for each user each month.
Gemini helps you brainstorm in Google Docs, create images and refine texts. Copilot across Word, PowerPoint, and Excel analyzes information, rewrites content, and creates presentations.
It is hard to convince businesses to change providers. Nevertheless Zoom believes that the pandemic’s wide adoption will make companies more open to shifting. Zoom is looking for the next big thing after its fast growth during the global lockdowns.
Zoom’s rapid increase during the pandemic has reached a plateau. By early 2023 all the clients willing to pay were captured while casual use decreased sharply. The company was delisted from Nasdaq 100 in late 2023 and by now its share price has fallen almost 90% since reaching its peak in 2020. In early 2023 around 15% of Zoom’s staff were laid off but they have quickly added more functions to keep up with competitors.
Zoom also saw an increase in business-to-business customer support through its Contact Center. However, Zoom must keep evolving if it wants to compete against Google and Microsoft’s bundled services.
Zoom is heavily investing in AI integration into its platform. In April Zoom announced Workplace collaboration tools including an AI assistant that summarizes meetings and chats. In July, it introduced an expanded workflow automation tool that sends automated reminders tied to meetings and scheduled tasks.
Eric S. Yuan foresees a future where people can attend meeting or handle mail via digital twin powered by AI technology (Yuan did not mention current achievements involving digital twins). This vision exemplifies how much emphasis Zoom puts on artificial intelligence research as a company.
According to a principal analyst at Omdia, Adam Holtby, Zoom’s platform has “good potential”, especially for front-line workers. These are the kind of people that Google and Microsoft often overlook yet are susceptible to digitization.
Managing notifications from different places can be challenging for workplace technology. Retrieving information is something workers often waste time on. McKeon-White states that AI would be very useful if everything were in one company’s software.
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