In response to the competitive landscape of the videoconferencing market, Zoom has embarked on a comprehensive update and rebranding initiative for its AI-powered features, which includes the transformation of the formerly known Zoom IQ generative AI assistant.
This move follows a recent controversy surrounding Zoom’s revised terms of service, raising concerns about the potential utilization of customer videos for the training of its AI tools and models. In response to the public outcry, Zoom promptly clarified its policy to explicitly state that “communications-like” customer data will not be employed in the training of AI applications and services, either for Zoom or its external collaborators.
The Software Freedom Conservancy, a nonprofit organization providing support and legal services for open-source projects, has also encouraged developers to seek alternatives to Zoom due to these changes in the terms of service.
Zoom, in a press release shared with TechCrunch, emphasized its commitment to investing in AI-driven advancements designed to enhance user experiences and productivity while maintaining a steadfast focus on trust, safety, and privacy. Furthermore, Zoom clarified in August that it refrains from using customer audio, video, chat, screen-sharing, attachments, or other similar customer content (such as poll results, whiteboards, or reactions) for the training of both Zoom’s and third-party AI models.
Zoom’s AI Companion
The rebranded Zoom IQ, now known as the AI Companion, harnesses a similar blend of technologies as its predecessor, Zoom IQ. It leverages Zoom’s in-house generative AI alongside AI models sourced from various vendors, including Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Notably, its influence extends to more aspects of the Zoom ecosystem, encompassing Zoom Whiteboard, Zoom Team Chat, and Zoom Mail.
One of the most significant developments is the introduction of a ChatGPT-like bot integrated into Zoom through the AI Companion. By spring 2024, Zoom will introduce a conversational interface that enables users to engage in direct conversations with the AI Companion. Users can pose inquiries about past meetings and chats and even delegate tasks to the AI Companion.
For instance, users will have the ability to query the AI Companion for project statuses by drawing insights from transcribed meetings, chat histories, whiteboard annotations, emails, documents, and even third-party applications. During meetings, users can interact with the AI Companion to retrieve essential information, create and manage support tickets, and draft responses to inquiries. Additionally, similar to the capabilities of Zoom IQ, the AI Companion can summarize meetings, automatically identifying action items and highlighting the subsequent steps.
Starting next spring, the AI Companion will introduce “real-time feedback” on participants’ engagement during meetings, along with coaching on their conversational and presentation skills. It’s a feature that may not resonate with every user, particularly those who have concerns about Zoom’s intentions with AI. However, Zoom emphasizes that users can deactivate real-time feedback and other AI Companion features at any time, providing account owners or administrators with control over these functionalities.
In Zoom Team Chat, the messaging application by Zoom, users will soon have the option to condense chat threads through the AI Companion, a feature previously offered by Zoom IQ. By early 2024, users will also gain the ability to auto-complete chat sentences, similar to the AI-generated responses in Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, as originally promised with Zoom IQ. Furthermore, users will be able to schedule meetings directly from a chat.
In an anticipated feature, Zoom Whiteboard, the collaborative whiteboarding tool, will receive the capability to generate images and populate templates with assistance from the AI Companion, set to arrive in spring 2024. The exact image-generation model powering this function remains undisclosed, but it is expected to align with text-to-image tools like OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and Midjourney. The presence of content filters and bias mitigations remains uncertain.
During early fall, users of Zoom’s email client, Zoom Mail, will have access to AI-generated email suggestions from the AI Companion, similar to the functionality of Zoom IQ. By spring 2024, Zoom users will also be able to incorporate meeting summaries into the platform’s note-taking application, Notes, and condense text message threads and calls from Zoom’s VoIP service, Zoom Phone.
Most of these AI Companion features will reside within the side panel of the Zoom application. However, it’s important to note that only paying Zoom customers will have access to these features once they are deployed.
Zoom Revenue Accelerator
In a second rebranding move today, Zoom is transforming its sales assistant tool, Zoom IQ for Sales, into the new Zoom Revenue Accelerator.
Zoom IQ for Sales faced initial criticism upon its launch, with critics highlighting concerns about the accuracy of its sentiment analysis algorithms. Over two dozen rights groups urged Zoom to abandon its efforts, citing the technology as “inaccurate” and “insufficiently tested.”
However, Zoom did not discontinue Zoom IQ for Sales. Instead, it shifted the tool’s focus from sentiment analysis to more conventional use cases, an approach that it appears to be continuing.
Zoom has now unveiled several upcoming enhancements for the newly renamed Revenue Accelerator. These include the introduction of a “virtual coach” designed to simulate conversations for the purpose of onboarding and training sales team members. This virtual coach can evaluate the performance of sales professionals in pitching products using various sales methodologies, akin to other AI-powered sales training platforms available in the market.
