Zoom’s official corporate name, Zoom Video Communications, Inc., belies the broad set of features, functions and services baked into its Conversational Cloud. During the pandemic “to Zoom” became the generic term for a meeting online, thanks to its ease-of-use, cost-effectiveness and integration with calendaring and email systems that made scheduling simple. Its “free” version even made forty-minutes the standard, de facto maximum duration of an impromptu meeting.

Its timing was impeccable. At the height of the pandemic it is estimated that it had over 350 million “daily active users” participating in meetings. That user base reached far past the confines of traditional business meeting platforms such as Cisco’s Webex or Microsoft Teams to include family get-togethers, book clubs, continuing education lectures and the inevitable “happy hour.” No wonder one of the first marketing slogans for Zoom’s products was “Meet Happy.”

As demand grew, Zoom proved more popular than established, locked down enterprise-oriented offerings from Webex and Microsoft Teams. Revenue, which totaled $623 million in the fiscal year ending January 2020, reached $2.6 billion (with a “b”) in the year ending Jan 2021 and shot up to nearly $4.1 billion the following year. As it closed the books on the most recent year, total revenue held steady at $4.4 billion. Profit took a hit, falling from a high of $1.4 billion a year ago to $103 million in the past year. But the company still had $6.4 billion in current assets on its balance sheet, including $5.4 billion in cash and marketable securities.

Employing Conversational AI to Deliver Happiness

In 2023 the company slogan of “Meet Happy” morphed into “We Deliver Happiness.” Moving beyond meetings is a customer-driven strategy and the company invests in or acquires technologies designed to appeal to new customers, “delight” existing ones and lead both to employ Zoom-based resources in new ways. The result is a unified communications and collaboration platform whose core products are grouped under six categories: Zoom One, Zoom Spaces, Zoom Events and Zoom Contact Center are the core platforms. All can be informed and enhanced by Zoom AI, thanks to development and support efforts and energy from Zoom Developers.

For the record, Zoom One brings together Zoom Meetings, Zoom Phone, Zoom Team Chat, Zoom Mail and Calendar and Zoom Whiteboard. Zoom Meetings is the foundational product here because hundreds of millions of people were first exposed to Zoom through easy-to-set up meetings. Today it provides HD-quality video to as many as 1,000 simultaneous participants, although (thankfully) the current meeting supports a 49-person video gallery. The popularity of Zoom meetings made it a magnet for partners like Atlassian, Box, Dropbox, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Slack. All of whom have tools that integrate with Zoom.

The rest of Zoom One’s roster of features and functions expand Zoom’s presence across the enterprise. Zoom Phone, for instance, can replace a company’s PBX bring with it advanced telephony features like call queuing, call detail reports, call recording, call quality monitoring and voicemail. The online whiteboard is proving to be a popular add-on to meetings to promote team brainstorming for the visually inclined participants. Adding email and a calendar to Zoom One seems like another natural extension because scheduling and publicizing a meeting starts with building a calendar invite; whether that effort meshes or replaces an existing email system and repository remains to be seen.

What isn’t in doubt is organic demand for Zoom IQ. Supercharged by its acquisition of Solvvy in May 2022, Zoom’s investment in AI innovations are designed to “empower people.”  “Smart Recording” of Zoom Meetings was a good starting point. It is a service that uses transcription and natural language processing to extract and highlight key information from meetings, such as identifying next steps. It also organizes these summaries into “smart chapters” by employing OpenAI’s GPT3. The summaries are made available to meeting participants for comment and editing. Similar capabilities are incorporated in Zoom IQ for Sales, which has been deployed in several businesses as a sales accelerator.

AI Is not the Objective; Personal Assistance Is

Organic adoption of Zoom’s Conversation Intelligence offerings reflects the rapid evolution toward next-gen apps that turn Zoom IQ into a smart companion. As Mahesh Ram, founder of Solvvy and now head of Zoom Contact Center, explained, “The next frontier is not ‘AI’, it is personalization.” Zoom is poised to support Zoom IQ’s transition to a “smart companion” by taking a “federated approach.” Large enterprises have sufficient data in their knowledge bases to train their own models. Zoom is taking a flexible approach that incorporates its existing models with those of partners, initially OpenAI, as well as tailored or customizable language models that incorporate a company’s own terminology, branding and use cases.

Zoom IQ for sales and meeting summarization was a starting point. Zoom Virtual Agent, introduced in January 2023, takes the next step by summoning a personal digital assistant service to complement agents in a Zoom Contact Center. That makes Zoom Contact Center an ideal showcase for the power of what Opus Research calls “Large Enough Language Models.” It supports solutions that integrate with CRM systems like Salesforce and Zendesk and ITSM systems like ServiceNow.

Just as it does for meetings, the digital assistant can summarize conversations and fill in forms based on extracted insights. Like an IVR, the virtual agent can be pressed into service at the beginning of a call to ascertain the caller’s intent and support “precise” routing or transfer to the most appropriate live agent, if needed. Its fused approach anticipates rapid introduction of new features and functions that recognize that enterprise customers will use what’s already working. New features can be introduced as part of meetings or in the contact center. Fusion brings flexibility.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: Zoom