Lucas Lu, Head of Asia, Zoom
During the COVID-19 pandemic, it seemed impossible to find a person who had never used Zoom to support their remote working setup. As travel became limited and team members were confined to their residences, more and more people embraced the use of the video communications platform to connect with colleagues and business partners.
In addition to turning it into a household brand, how does this affect how Zoom innovates through its products?
“Over the last few years, people around the world have started to rethink what makes them happy. This includes their priorities at work. We need to remember that humans are not workers; we are people who work. This may seem like a small difference, but at Zoom, it is at the heart of everything we do,” explains Lucas Lu, Head of Asia, Zoom.
“As such, we’ve doubled down on helping organisations create happiness at work as they relook how, when and where work happens. We are focused on helping remove barriers, lowering stress and providing tools that work best for employees, their lives and their workflows. The results we have seen are encouraging: organisations tell us that employees feel happier, and more empowered because they are able to focus on what matters to them.”
Lu states that ultimately, Zoom believes that it is less about the “future of work” and more about the shifting strategies around work collaboration.
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“Distributed workforces are not new, and the need for flexible work tools has always been there. The last few years have just accelerated the importance of fostering better collaboration among employees – no matter if they are working from home, at an office, or in a different country,” he states.
In this email interview, e27 catches up with Zoom to find out about the next innovation that the company is working on, particularly with exciting technologies such as AI. The following is an edited excerpt of the conversation:
What is the most significant milestone that your company has made recently?
At Zoom, we see artificial intelligence (AI) as the next industrial revolution in the workspace.
Many of the existing Zoom products that our users know and love already incorporate AI, from the virtual backgrounds and gesture recognition of Zoom Meetings to our conversation intelligence solution Zoom IQ for Sales.
Most recently, we have taken that to the next level with the enhancement of Zoom IQ, our next-generation AI smart companion that will empower collaboration and unlock the potential of a flexible workforce by summarising chat threads, organising ideas, drafting content for chats, emails, and whiteboard sessions, creating meeting agendas, and more.
For example, teams will be able to simply open up a whiteboard session to collaborate on a product launch, and have Zoom IQ generate a list of ideas based on text prompts. Once the meeting ends, Zoom IQ will be able to send the meeting summary to Zoom Team Chat, with suggested action items for owners to take on.
Ultimately, the upcoming features of Zoom IQ will help employees focus on what matters by streamlining workflows. The time saved from, for example, finding the notes about a meeting missed, or catching up on unread chats – can be put to unlocking greater collaboration within teams and innovation to deliver better experiences to their customers.
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What opportunities do you aim to seize this year? Any particular trend or vertical that you are interested in?
With CX now critical to companies’ bottom lines, our priority at Zoom is to help customers reimagine their CX roadmaps across various verticals including healthcare, education, and financial services.
The key to success in today’s economic landscape is resiliency, and businesses will need to double down on driving a differentiated customer experience as a priority. Being able to acquire and retain customers is a source of competitive advantage for organisations and helps to build brand loyalty in the long term. Leaders need to invest in the right technologies that can help consolidate business communications across employees, customers, and partners.
Where CX is concerned, this increases convenience and ease of use for customers who can now enjoy a seamless, end-to-end customer journey all within one interface. We developed Zoom Virtual Agent to help organisations with delivering the fast yet personalised experiences customers want. As an intelligent conversational AI and chatbot solution, Zoom Virtual Agent was able to work around the clock to resolve support queries quickly and accurately. For employees, streamlining day-to-day workflows can allow them to devote more time to creativity and innovation, which can also have positive implications for CX.
Our omnichannel cloud contact centre platform, Zoom Contact Center, which will generally be available to Asia later this year, is another example of our platform-first innovations seeking to provide customers with an all-in-one Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution. This can deliver tangible benefits to organisations both in terms of cost savings and enriching CX.
A recent report from Metrigy showed that organisations that integrate unified communications with an omnichannel contact centre gained significant benefits, including improvements of up to 36 per cent in customer satisfaction ratings, in addition to 29 per cent reduction in operational costs.
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What is your major plan this year?
People are central to the success of any flexible work model. For Zoom, that means providing our customers with new ways to keep their employees informed, engaged, and connected, no matter where they work.
Most recently, we announced the acquisition of Workvivo, a modern, feature-rich employee experience platform. With Workvivo’s advanced internal communication and engagement tools, social intranet, and employee app, all blended into one central hub, we can offer our customers the best-in-class solutions they need to unlock the potential of their employees and evolve their company culture in a hybrid world.
Part of our focus on helping organisations improve employee experience is in leveraging AI to support enhancing human connection in the workspace. This is why we are rapidly expanding our Zoom IQ capabilities to offer more innovative solutions powered by generative AI. From composing emails and chats to generating chat summaries – many of these features coming later this year, we hope to bring the power of AI directly to our users.
Earlier this week, we also announced our investment in Anthropic, an AI safety and research company. This is set to boost Zoom’s federated approach to AI by allowing Anthropic’s AI assistant, Claude, to be integrated with Zoom’s platform (which includes Team Chat, Meetings, Phone, Whiteboard, Zoom IQ), starting with Zoom Contact Center.
Our approach to AI is no different than our approach to everything else: with care and with a commitment to empowering our users to save time so they can have more meaningful connections and collaboration opportunities.
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Image Credit: Zoom
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