Zoom claims AI-first as it debuts Docs on Workplace

Collaboration and conference technology and services provider Zoom has launched its first product from the Workplace portfolio, with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) built in from the ground up to enable the next generation of team collaboration.

As it continues on its current mission to evolve beyond video-conferencing and enhance meeting effectiveness by transforming team collaboration, document creation and project planning, Zoom Video Communications has announced the roll-out of Zoom Docs, its AI-first collaborative docs solution, to help drive productivity and collaboration throughout its Zoom Workplace platform.

Just over a year since first deploying AI in its product set, the company launched in March 2024 the Workplace AI-powered open collaboration platform and introduced expansions to help reimagine teamwork in AI Companion, the company’s GenAI assistant.

Powered by Zoom AI Companion, Zoom Docs is said to have been designed to help solve critical challenges facing modern workforces, including time wasted on repetitive tasks, information overload and facilitation of cross-functional alignment. By utilising Zoom AI Companion to convert meeting outcomes into actionable documents, Zoom said Docs can “jumpstart” content creation and adapt to different individual and team needs to help boost workers’ productivity.

AI-first capabilities are intended to help Zoom Workplace users make teamwork more collaborative and effective, optimise productivity by keeping information organised, and reduce silos by empowering teams to communicate and share information more fluidly.

As it launched its new product, Zoom stressed that meetings are core to Workplace, and Docs builds on that experience by enhancing collaboration before, during and after meetings, empowering users to stay more aligned and achieve better results. 

Among the core business benefits that Zoom said Docs provides are that it can transform team collaboration and maximise meeting effectiveness to drive better outcomes. It can generate content based on AI Companion meeting transcripts and use custom or preset commands or queries with AI Companion to further create and revise content. The solution can also be used to revise and summarise content such as articles, plans and outlines, change tone and style, catch grammatical and spelling errors, and translate content into nine languages for multilingual teams. Support for additional languages is planned.

“Zoom Docs is our first Zoom Workplace product with generative AI built in from the ground up. It effortlessly transforms information from Zoom Meetings into actionable documents and knowledge bases, so teams can stay focused on meaningful work,” said Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom. “Zoom Docs is included at no additional cost with Zoom Workplace paid licences, creating even more value for our customers. With AI Companion available every step of the way, Zoom Docs is purpose-built to empower people to ‘work happy’ and give them more time back in their day.”

Potential use cases for Zoom Docs include meeting collaboration, business documents, project planning and as an information hub. Zoom Docs is said to simplify meeting collaboration with AI Companion by transforming meeting content into meaningful documents, centralising meeting summaries with meeting documents and facilitating co-editing on documents within meetings. Content generation, revision, summarisation and translation are said to be easy for global teams whether creating content, business proposals or reports.

Noting that planning complex projects can be messy, Zoom said Docs is attributed with being able to help with time-saving templates for project briefs and tracking for a variety of use cases, such as product launches, marketing campaigns and event management, consolidating project-related materials, and improving visibility across progress tracking, status updates and timelines. The information hub use case involves knowledge-base creation, team onboarding and goal tracking, with users able to build wikis for a single source of information.

Zoom Docs with AI Companion is included with all paid Zoom Workplace plans. Basic (free) users can create up to 10 shared documents and unlimited personal docs without AI Companion, but can upgrade to Zoom Workplace Pro, Business or Enterprise plans for access to AI Companion capabilities across Zoom Workplace, including Docs. Account owners and administrators may enable or disable AI Companion for Zoom Docs. It is also available for users of the Zoom Workplace app, version 6.1.6 or later.