EP 237: Zoom Exec Tells How AI is Changing Real-Time Collaboration

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If you want to have a successful business in the age of generative AI, you have to be able to work and collaborate in real time. Not just the pandemic has has changed how we work and you know, hybrid and in remote working in office, it's something different every day. So it isn't just kind of post pandemic work life that has changed how we collaborate in real time, but obviously the advent of just different generative AI tools, it is changing the way that business gets done. And if you want to stay ahead, you have to keep up. All right, we're going to be talking about about that today and more on Everyday AI. Thank you for joining us. If you're joining us live, thanks as always. Make sure to check out the show notes if you're joining us on the podcast as well. We're going to get a little visual in this one, but not too much. And as always, a lot more information on the podcast as well as our daily newsletter. So we're going to be talking a lot today. I'm actually excited. We have the chief Product officer from Zoom and we're going to be going over some new Zoom announcements. So you're not going to want to miss those. We're going to have a lot more in our newsletter at your everyday AI.com I tell people it is a free generative AI university. More than now, 230 episodes. No matter what you want to learn about. We've talked to experts in those fields and we will have the Daily News. Technically this is prerecorded by a couple hours. You know, we're talking to people from all over the country. A very busy day today. But let's go ahead and talk about how AI can change real time collaboration. There we go. Joining us we have Smita Hashim, who is the Chief Product Officer from Zoom. Smita, thank you so much for joining the Everyday AI Show.

Thank you for having me, Jordan. I'm really excited to be here.

All right. And hey, if you are joining us live, you can see that Sumita is in an event right now. So right now we are in the midst of Zoom Enterprise Connect. Right? Like, Samita, can you tell us a little bit about first your role, but then we'll get, we'll get a little bit more into what's going on right behind you. So tell us a little bit about what you do at The Chief Product Officer at Zoom.

Yes, Jordan. So I am, as you said, the Chief Product Officer at Zoom, which means I'm responsible for the entire product portfolio and strategy. And I'm sure you are familiar and many of your audience is familiar with Zoom. Zoom, Zoom Meeting, Zoom Chat, Zoom Phone, Zoom Contact Center. So I own that entire product portfolio and I consider it really a privilege to be here at Zoom building these products which users love. So that's my role. I love video. I love video communication. So I feel like it's a dream job for me. And then for me, where I'm at, I'm at Enterprise Connect right now. It is a huge show on unified communications and as well as customer communications. So UCAS plus ccas. I am on the trade show floor. There's a big Zoom booth behind me with a lot of attendees and yes, there's a lot of excitement going on.

All right, so I can't, I can't wait to talk about some of those new announcements. They are fresh from Zoom, the Zoom workplace. But pun intended. I first want to Zoom out right before we get into all the new exciting excitement. We got to keep you listening and watching to the end. Right? But Samita, can you share a little bit about your background because it's extremely impressive. Right? You know, because a lot of times I like to tell people, you know, we don't just push a single product, you know, a single service on this show, but even your background when it comes to real time collaboration is extremely impressive. Tell us a little bit about your, your background and where you've worked. Before Zoom.

Yeah, absolutely. Before Zoom, I was at Microsoft for some time where I was responsible for real time communications aspects of Microsoft Teams. Before that I spent a lot of time at Google working on many different products. But I was responsible for Google Meet during the Pandemic Search and Google Voice and Google Calendar and the Meet hardware. So many products over there. I worked on many other products too, from like devices to, to you know, to like very metrics driven products. I did a PhD in video compression way back. So, you know, so video has been video communications, connecting people, flexible work. That has been something which, which I'm super passionate about and you know, and that's my history. So. Yes, and Zoom to me is perfect. Special. Special because Zoom has truly transformed flexible work and not just for the employees, but also for customer facing agents. So I feel like as a world we work differently now. And Zoom to me has the biggest portfolio, the best quality and really embodies customer care and speed of Innovation.

Yeah, and smita. Like even just what you said there, if you are working in any, any hybrid or remote capacity, you probably use all the tools that you just mentioned, right? Between Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meets. So I'm curious, right, so you've been working in this space for way more than a decade. How have you even seen real time collaboration change throughout the last 10 or 15 years?

Yeah, I feel like actually to me it is incredible where we are in terms of real time communication and collaboration. If you so, so if you think, I mean video communication or. All of us used phones for a long time, we used emails, right? And then we started moving to chat based product. Video started coming in and there was already traction on these technologies and moving to unified communication. If you remember the old days, you'd walk into the airport and you would see the Zoom ads. We'd say, meet happy, right? So things were transforming and they were changing. But then we went through the pandemic and I would say, I mean it was a very, very hard time for so many of us. But to me, the gift of pandemic is the normalization of flexible work and helping all of us connect in ways that is more flexible. So, you know, so we have gone through that phase. I feel like flexible work is really what most of the world is doing right now. Even if companies are bringing you back in office, you are still some, some of your employees, some of your colleagues are going to be remote, your partners are remote, your, your customers, you're connecting with them. So I feel like this normalization of flexible work is an amazing opportunity, but it's also a huge challenge for all of us to get this right and make sure we do it in effective ways.

You know, I remember, you know, being on my first, you know, probably Zoom call like I don't know, eight, eight years ago. And at the time it, it was almost like this, this cutting edge, right? Like, like this brand new thing and you had to walk, you know, walk people over, but now it's just a verb, right? But I'm wondering even, even through your personal experience, having worked on, you know, three of the biggest video calling projects or three of the biggest video collaboration tools ever, right? Can you walk me through even, what was it like for you early on, maybe eight, 10, 12 years ago, when you were doing some of your first video calls for business? I want to talk about what that was like for you as you've built these products for so long.

I feel like, yeah, I think way, way back, I actually remember and this is, I'm dating myself when we had very poor quality Internet connections. I remember the days of the dial up modems. Video did not work in those days at all. It was such a novelty. And then as video started scaling up and started becoming more mainstream, I think there were challenges around like how many people could get on a call at the same time. What was the quality of the call? The did it really work on every single device? Could I just get into it and get out of it? It felt like it was there, but it was not there. You know, it was, you couldn't really count on it all the time. I think that is what has shifted is that I think Zoom came and changed the game. Zoom made the quality amazing and Zoom does it because they go deep on every. Like whether you are on a MacBook or a Windows laptop or a mobile phone, they go deep and they make the quality really, really good. And then the infrastructure and the connectivity has expanded. So I mean it's like a dial tone video better work and I feel like some companies provide a better dial tone than others. But, but you know, but that is where we are at right now. And it's pretty, it's pretty amazing when you think about it, where things have come.

Yeah. And even, you know, not just, you know, what you mentioned. Yes. Like Internet speeds, you know, video call quality now makes it feel much more collaborative. But even, you know, if you look at pre generative AI versus post generative AI, I know even for myself personally, I'm a former journalist. So you know, five, eight years ago in those rare occurrences when I was on a video call, I would be typing, you know, typing the notes, I would try to record it. But it was so hard back then. Right. Like the processor couldn't keep up. It might crash. But it at least for me, I felt that sometimes before generative AI a video call was actually more cumbersome than in person. Now I think it's the opposite. What, what was your take even on like pre generative AI and how generative AI is, is changing, you know, video calls and real time collaboration in general.

Yeah, absolutely. So generative AI, I feel like it's generative AI has the potential. It has to be. We all have to be thoughtful and we have to cut across the hype and we have to make it real. But it is really, it can really transform the routine, the mundane where you spend a lot of like our mind share and cycles. Imagine if you had an amazing note taker that could accompany us to every meeting and you could just focus on the conversation. Those are the kind of possibilities generative AI can provide, and those are the possibilities that we have made real in the last few months. We launched Zoom AI Companion and we have made that available not just for meetings, but across a variety of other products. I think that is the true potential of generative AI is that it can help users reclaim time, be a lot more efficient. And then what it does is it opens your mind up, it opens your space up for creativity, for collaboration, so we can all do like more meaningful work, get more business impact. I think that is where the power lies in these kind of like new exciting changes that are coming in.

All right, speaking of new excited changes, I think I made everyone wait long enough. So let's talk about what we have going on there at Enterprise Connect. So if you're joining live, I have the announcement up on the screen. But Samita, maybe if you could walk us through what has been announced at Zoom Enterprise with the new Zoom Workplace.

Absolutely. So Jordan, Zoom has gone so far beyond meetings. Customers love Zoom and they've been asking us to do more. So we have meetings, we have phone, we have chat, we have the communication products and we have been adding products which help you with productivity, like whiteboard, notes, clips. We announced Zoom Docs, we acquired Work Vivo for employee engagement. So how can you keep a flexible distributed team, work styles really engaged and amazing products for in office. When you're coming into office, you're collaborating with people in the office as well as outside the office. Workspace, reservations, amazing conference rooms with AI built in visitor management. So we are putting all of these together into Zoom Workplace. So that is a big announcement. So Zoom Workplace is here for you as your AI powered collaboration platform. AI is built into all parts of Zoom Workplace and we want every customer, every user to benefit from it. Zoom AI Companion is a generative AI assistant. It is included at no additional cost. This is a radical move which we did. We did that because we want everyone to have that productivity boost. So Zoom AI Companion is going to be available across. So that's a big announcement. Zoom Workplace, it's about really reimagining teamwork with this modern AI powered collaboration platform that just works and it innovates really fast.

Okay, a lot to unpack there, right? A lot to unpack there, right? I essentially just heard like, like a handful of even just, just new products so showing here on the screen. So we now we have a whiteboard functionality, all real time docs as well as the AI companion. So I'm sharing on my screen now from the Announcement, blog post. This kind of Whiteboard feature and functionality, which I think is huge for real time collaboration. I think sometimes, you know, you can talk about it, you know, all you want, but if it's just eight people talking, that can be hard. So, Smita, can you walk us through even just, you know, as an example, some of these other features specifically, you know, kind of this, this Whiteboarding and the, the Docs collaboration?

Yeah, so I mean, whiteboarding we have, you know, whiteboarding is, is our whiteboard product. We have had that Docs is, is Docs is coming later in summer. It is really an AI powered, very modular platform. But what is really exciting about all of these products is one is their quality and they just work. But second, they are all elevated with Zoom AI Companion. So let me tell you more about Zoom AI Companion. Zoom AI Companion within meetings. We talked about it. Zoom AI Companion is there. It can summarize meetings, it can get you next steps and really high quality next steps. So actually our CTO just published a blog today which is showing how Zoom AI Companion for our popular features is beating the quality of GPT4. Let me repeat that. It is beating the quality of GPT4 and we include it at no additional cost. That is because of the innovations we do. When you think of other products like Zoom Team Chat, you can compose chats, you can summarize those threads. So if I'm like, I'm very busy right now, as you can imagine, but for me it's super easy to catch up on the chats that I missed. I can just go and summarize them and I can catch up in minutes at the end of the day. Saves me so much time. If I'm in Zoom Whiteboard, then I can create a whiteboard. Just calling Zoom AI Companion the big new announcements which we are adding because we continue to innovate an AI Companion. It's coming to Zoom Phone. So when you get all those voicemails, and I bet Jordan, sometimes you get a lot of them, is that it prioritizes those for you, it extracts tasks for you. And then we are also broadening AI Companion to come across the entire platform so it can work across your meetings. Chat phone, it can do things like, hey, prepare for my customer meeting and extract all of that information. Just prepare you. So, you know, so this is a quick summary of all of the things that we are launching. We move fast. We have 40 new features as part of this launch. But I'll focus on the AI ones first for the everyday AI audience.

There we go. And submit one other thing. So even on this blog post here, it's talking that 80% of global workers experience information overload. So even for us, I'm excited to use this now. I was just on a Zoom call, you know, 10 minutes before we jumped on to record this live stream and this podcast. And I'll even say it right now, I haven't been using all of Zoom's AI features. So I'm excited about these new announcements now. But I would have to use a third party AI assistant and then I might have an automation that would take the transcript from there and send it somewhere else. So can you talk a little bit now about how all of these things kind of coming together in the workplace can maybe help combat that stat that we're talking about there that 80% of global workers experience information overload. Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow your business with AI? Maybe your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on gen AI. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating the masses around generative AI to get ahead. And some of the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to use Gen AI. So whether you're looking for ChatGPT training for thousands or just need help building your front end AI strategy, you, you can partner with us too. Just like some of the biggest companies in the world do. Go to your everydayai.com partner to get in contact with our team or you can just click on the partner section of our website. We'll help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on gen.

Yeah, I mean, Jordan, really, I would say I'm so excited about flexible work, but I also feel like it's a very challenging time for workers. They crave connection and, you know, they're trying to connect through so many different ways and there's such an information overload going on. So with Zoom AI Companion, now that a lot of your routine tasks can be now delegated to Zoom AI Companion, it is there as your assistant. So your meetings can be summarized, your chats can be summarized, you can create, you can create whiteboards, you can also look at your phone calls. You can extract, like, prioritize them, extract information from them, and you can bring it all together. So things which used to take you hours to prepare. I mean, an example is if you're preparing for a high stakes meeting, really like all of us have been there, trying to traverse the multiple sources of information and grabbing that. With Zoom AI Companion, you will be able to do it literally in minutes. And think about that like, you know, being able to pull all of your data across channels together into creating useful outcomes for you. It could be preparing for a meeting, it could be about writing for an executive group, and it could be really helping you focus on the task at hand by doing things like we've talked about, note taking, summarization, composition, and so on.

Smita, I'm curious how long, I'm sure internally you all have been using these new features for quite some time. How long have you all been using these new Zoom workplace AI features?

Oh, absolutely. We launched Zoom AI Companion in September of last year. We actually already have over half a million customers using them. But internally we started the development before that. And within Zoom, we dog food our features. We try them out ourselves. We have been using these features ourselves for, I would say maybe early to mid last year. We have been working on these features. We have been using them and now of course, like, you know, we are using all of these across Zoom.

So I'm curious for you, you know, someone that's been working, as we talked about earlier in the show, you know, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, et cetera. So all of these new AI powered features that the rest of the world is just getting access to now, you know, in this unified workplace kind of environment, what is the one feature that you have personal, personally benefited from the most that now the rest of us are all just now getting access to?

I mean, I feel like, well, you all have had access but you know, but we make sure you have control so you turn it on. But the feature which I would say is if you are not using our meeting summarization feature, the note taking and next steps, you are missing out. The quality is amazing. It really saves up time. I can tell you. Like, I talk to people. I mean, I've even talked to like, you know, people I'm assessing or interviewing. And then after that, you know, I just send it to the person who asked me to have the conversations to say, here are the notes. It would take me so much time to do that before. So please, I would say turn it on, try it out and see what it does for you. You will be amazed at the quality of the results and how useful it is. I've had customers come and give me a hug, literally, Jordan, and say, smita, thank you. You have made all of us so much more productive. A consulting company has come and said that all of my consultants are using it and they're really, they can focus on the meeting now.

What would you say? Right, because there's no end all, be all. It's not like you release Zoom Workplace and all these new AI features and you call it a day. Right. The work continues. So specifically when it comes to real time collaboration and using Generative AI in that process, what are maybe next steps as we look in the, you know, coming months, coming quarters, coming years, how, how might we expect? Whether it's, you know, Zoom, I'm sure there's things you can't talk about, but in general, with someone as as much industry experience as you, what are the next steps for, you know, improved real time collaboration with AI? Kind of what's next?

I feel like, I think the possibilities are so amazing right now and I feel like you will see there's so much attention. It's actually a very exciting time and the speed of progression on how these capabilities evolve is also going to be incredible. So what we should continue to see is rapid evolution. Rapid, like, you know, rapid deployment. People have to be comfortable with the security aspects of it and we will. I think the challenge is people have to cut through the hype and they have to really figure out what is real. Is my data being used in a way that I'm comfortable with? We don't use any data for training. They also have to look at the cost we provide. High quality, very easy to use with no additional cost. So I feel like what we will see is really a boost of productivity to. But you also asked about where it will go. I think Generative AI Digital Assistant, Zoom AI Companion will continue to connect more and more of our data in ways that will make us more productive. So as teams, we will be able to do a lot more. And we are talking right now about a lot of the content which we are talking about text and speech and discussions, but also things like creating a small reel which has highlights of your meeting. How powerful will that be? We have smart chapters already, right? Like, you know, think about how it can really come together across all of the different areas, which is called multimodal. It can take your audio, it can take your video, it can take your text, and it can really make you more productive. I personally am even really excited about, you know, the, like the, the work we'd be doing with Apple and IMMERSIVE reality. Augmented reality is going to be an exciting time. My advice to readers, to listeners would be that you must start using features and trying them out. And you must make sure that you're looking at the aspects, all aspects, which I'm sure you are, security, responsibility, cost and usability in order to get started on your journey. It's a very exciting one.

So I'm glad you brought up all the data and privacy, so I didn't have to grill you on that one. So we got that out of the way. Right. But maybe as we wrap up, I have one other question because I think in my mind I've, like, probably, you know, countless millions of other people that use Zoom on a daily basis. I've always thought of Zoom as a meeting tool, but it seems like a lot of these new AI features, this, this new Zoom Workplace that was just announced, you know, like this week. Right? Is. Is. Is Zoom taking on more of being a content production tool, a productivity software suite versus just a meeting platform? Is that kind of happening?

Absolutely. So really, Zoom Workplace is about the total employee experience. It's about communications, meetings, chat, phone, email. It's about productivity, it's about engagement, how do we stay connected with each other within a company. And then it's also about making sure our in office experiences are great. So it is the total employee experience, which we are so excited. You know, we have been on a mission to build this out based on the interest and demand from our customers. But, you know, but now Zoom Workplace brings it all together, along with the power of generative AI with Zoom AI companion.

All right, I love it. Just some fantastic insights from an industry expert. Breaking news as always here on the Everyday AI Show. Smita, thank you so much for joining the show. We appreciate your insights.

Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here, Jordan.

All right, as a reminder, that was a lot, a lot of features, a lot of things that we maybe didn't even have time to talk to. It'll all be in the newsletter. So if you haven't already, make sure you go to your everydayai. Com. Sign up for that free daily newsletter. If this episode was helpful, please consider sharing it with your friends, your network. Hey, if you need another content production tool, productivity tool, it might be that thing that you're using literally every single day for meetings alone. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Everyday AI. As always, check our newsletter for your daily news and we hope to see you back tomorrow and every day for more Everyday AI.

Thanks.

Thanks, y'.

All.

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