 Hello and welcome to this episode of our Analyst Angle series. I'm Shelly Kramer, managing director of principal analyst here at theCUBE Research. And today's episode is going to cover some announcements coming out of Enterprise Connect. Enterprise Connect was held in Orlando a couple of weeks ago and I am just now finishing waiting through all of my notes about all of the announcements and the briefings and all of that sort of thing. So I thought it would be great to cover some of that here. So today I'm going to start talking about Zoom. Zoom announced a bunch of new features to its AI-powered collaboration platform, the Zoom Workplace. It brings together the entire Zoom ecosystem under one roof for meetings and team chat and phone interaction. And it can be seamlessly integrated into existing technologies, which is kind of cool. As expected, Zoom's AI companion is at the core of Zoom Workplace and it's included at no additional cost, which has always been a significant differentiator in the market from Zoom's competitors. One thing I think that was important, there was a nod to some earlier troubles on this front. Zoom made a very big point at Enterprise Connect to note that the company does not use any customer data or third-party data to train its AI model. So hopefully that gets customers the piece of mind that they're looking for on that front. I'm going to talk a little bit now about Zoom's AI companion. AI companion was introduced in September of 2023 and since that time Zoom has added some new capabilities like auto language detection to generate more valuable summaries for participants. They also announced that AI companion is now generally available for iPhone or for Zoom phone rather, which is a big deal. And that will extend across the platform with a new capability called Ask AI Companion. Let me shift back to AI companion for Zoom phone. This is kind of cool because it posts call summaries and automatically prioritizes voicemails. I need that. Extracts tasks from voicemails and provides SMS team read summaries, which I think is really kind of exciting. So now I want to talk a little bit about Ask AI Companion. This feature was pre-announced at Enterprise Connect and it's all about helping users be more prepared. For instance, in advance of a meeting, for instance, Zoom can use AI companion to gather notes and other assets, summaries that come from Zoom meetings or chat threads or phone calls or emails and all of the disparate places that we have information. Ask AI companion can help grab that information and gather it all together in one place so that you'll be better prepared for your meetings. Another interesting feature is that with your permission, Ask AI companion can pull in relevant documents from third-party products like Microsoft Office 365 or Google Workspace. That interoperability I think is super important and something that's really important to customers. Ask AI companion will be interoperable with Google and Microsoft for starters and it will be included at no additional cost with AI companion, which as I said, is included free to begin with. So Zoom mentioned that there are other alliances and third-party strategies that are in the works and that thing was something to look forward to in the future. Worth noting on this front, the Zoom team shared that 500,000 accounts have been abled AI companion at this point and usage by cohorts that have enabled it have doubled from December to January. So the way that I look at that is December was, hey, I don't know, maybe we should try this out and by January what had happened throughout companies of all sizes is like, holy cow, this is really cool. I need to be using it more or you need to be using it or whatever. So I thought that that was kind of a great stat. And again, 500,000 accounts have this enabled. Usage has doubled from December to January. That's pretty significant. So now I'm gonna move on to announcements around Zoom workplace. So this integrates all of Zoom's tools into a single AI-powered collaboration platform. This will be available at no cost to eligible paid plans. These updates will be rolled out in the coming months and this is where I think we see Zoom's acquisition of work vivo finally coming into play. And I think Zoom is looking to fold this into the work vivo brand or fold the work vivo, no, they're looking to fold this into the workplace brand and we'll use this to continue to build out AI and workplace productivity. So I think this is significant to me because Zoom started out as an easy way to have meetings and easy, the freemium model attracted tons of users then they had the COVID, the COVID boost where everybody in the world quickly learned the benefits of Zoom and video collaboration and all that sort of thing. And I think it was Zoom's ease of use that was kind of the hook there for a lot of people, of course, in the price point as well. So looking at what's next for Zoom when you think about, we've nailed meetings what do we do beyond meetings? And that's what we see with a lot of these product announcements but Zoom is, as I said, looking at the entire collaboration lifecycle and how they can help organizations more in terms of being able to allow users to spend less time looking for stuff and more time doing. And it's funny cause that was the line that was used during the presentation from Zoom and it made me think of that adherence commercial for a Home Depot, less time looking for stuff, more time doing, but the reality of it is isn't that what we all need? I mean, how many times a day do you stop and have to go hot through email or text or collaboration platform looking for things you need to prepare for a meeting or whatever? So I really see this and a view of looking at providing greater efficiencies, more ability to focus and all that kind of thing. I think these are things that are really important and we'll see more of this from Zoom moving forward. Here's a couple of examples though. For instance, on the meetings tab on Zoom desktop this historically contains just kind of meeting information. And now you have the ability to include your agenda, attach assets and then leverage AI to help create your meeting agenda. And as someone who tends to always be thinking about creating a meeting agenda five minutes before a meeting I can promise you this will help me very much. The meeting assets that are created will then follow a user through the meeting experience. And again, there's no more digging which I think is really attractive and functionality will allow the sharing of multiple screens at once. So if I'm in a meeting and I didn't organize the meeting I no longer have to ask someone on my team to let me share a screen I'll just be able to do that. So I think that it's a little change but I think that is pretty cool and it's something that people will find attractive. And you'll also be able to collaborate collectively on a white board. So I think that's kind of an interesting change. After a meeting that meeting tab then becomes the repository for all the assets created before, during and post meeting. So I think it really provides, sometimes I'm in meetings and I use all the different collaboration platforms but hasn't this ever happened when you're in a meeting and someone has shared something in chat and then you know that as soon as the meeting is over if you haven't grabbed that whatever it was that link or document or whatever it's just gone forever. So or you have to go back and ask for it. So I find this again, everything in one place you don't have to go dig for things and I think that's very attractive. Zoom also shared some updates to its web chat functionality. You can chat the floor and during and after a meeting and then that chat stream will follow you throughout the day. This is I was talking about earlier in terms of being a repository for information I think that's really how Zoom views this and it created some customized tabs to streamline this. You have the ability to pin things, collaborate on assets, chat at the same time. And again, this kind of just goes back to the, I think we see this from Zoom, we see this from Zoom and we see this really from all the players in this space. I mean, everybody wants you to get into their platform and to never leave. I don't know that that is always what users want but I do understand the thinking here and I understand why it's beneficial certainly for vendors to get people to come in and use the platform and stay in a platform. I'm just not sure, I'm not sure yet I'm a little bit on the fence about that but I understand the logic here, I understand the strategy here and I look forward to maybe talking to some users who kind of use all of this functionality to see how efficient they feel like it is. So I'm gonna move on now and talk a little bit about Zoom docs. This was pre-announced at Zoom Topia last year. It's a modular workplace where you can create tables and wikis, you can use it for project management. They're of course leaning into AI so that you can pull information from your meetings into that and allow it to do some of the heavy lifting. Zoom docs is targeting being GA by some time this summer. Zoom sees this as kind of the beginning of the notion of synthesis and bringing different assets from different places together to create something of value. I've talked about this earlier here in this conversation but I think that's important again to reduce digging time, to make the assets that you need easily located and at your fingertips. I think that's pretty important. Zoom Contact Center has had some interesting traction. Zoom reported that they sold three times as many contact center licenses as they did the prior quarter. So maturity is coming along, that's showing in the adoption rate. And I think this has something to do with the fact that AI was included in the platform at no cost. So I think that spurred some adoption and also allowed people to experiment with things. In Contact Center, you've got a premium layer of AI called agent assist and Zoom plans to continue to expand capabilities there. Zoom's AI companion for agents and supervisors. I mean, this is not really breaking any new ground. I see a lot of this is just kind of table stakes is what is expected from Contact Center solutions today. Things like personalizing or design for the way that customers interact and the way that agents work and summarizing calls and generating follow-up tasks and analyzing customer sentiment. Again, those are all table stakes in a Contact Center solution. So this doesn't surprise me. I expect it. Zoom AI companion will also gather customer information from your CRM system and other resources and deliver that as needed. Again, not something that other solutions are doing but important. I do think it's interesting that Zoom Contact Center has the ability to do video and audio and they have something that's called whisper capability that's triggered by AI. And this allows for a situation where I'm an agent and I'm dealing with a customer who's kind of escalating and I maybe need some help. So this AI will trigger a whisper capability and essentially whisper to my supervisor, hey, Shelley needs a hand over here. And so they can come in and be a part of the interaction and kind of help save the day and resolve things more quickly for customers. Bringing all of this into the agent's desktop has been a part of Zoom's focus and making that agent desktop more customizable so that they can bring in the elements that they need, a single app and then integrating that with workplace. I think it's pretty, yep, that makes sense to me. You see a customer, Contact Center as a service being integrated, spend some time talking with the Zoom team in a couple of briefings. And being integrated is something that they're really passionate about and connecting the Contact Center experience with people in the company who could make a difference as part of driving their work here. And I think this is where Zoom gets it right. Like Contact Center shouldn't be an island. What happens in Contact Center, those interactions that are happening, your product people need to be aware of it, your marketing people need to be aware of it, your sales people need to be aware of it, your customer service people need to be aware of it. All of these things. And so I think that building one AI stack, making sure that Contact Center isn't treated as its own little entity, its own little island, but that one AI stack with summarization, phone, meeting, Contact Center, agent summaries, all of these things using the same model, I think is tremendously important. So I like that. And again, I feel like this is not, this kind of thinking is not and certainly shouldn't be exclusive to Zoom. I think this is really an important part of thinking about how Contact Center operations should work and how we can best serve not only the customer, but provide the agent with the tools that they need. So good stuff. Zoom's federated approach to AI is really important. So AI is not new. It's not new to Zoom. It's not new to a lot of organizations. So Zoom has used AI for speech recognition, computer vision, machine translation, and LLMs designed to enhance collaboration for years now, right? So the LLMs that Zoom uses include their own large language model as well as third-party models from Open AI, GPT 3.5 and 4, and Anthropics Claw 2. So this federated approach can also include other LLMs like GPT 4 Turbo and from other partners in Open and Close Source LLMs. And what I like about this federated approach and this really fits with Zoom's DNA is that it's designed to keep cost down. And it's also designed, so it's designed to keep cost down, but it does that by using a lower cost LLM where possible. So Zoom has something called their Zscore functionality and it evaluates the quality of the task completion and whether additional work was needed. And if that's the case, if that evaluation proves that a little bit more work is needed, then it'll automatically use a more advanced LLM to augment the original LLM. And so this helps improve the quality of Zoom's AI companion over single model approaches. And one of the things that the Zoom team shared that I thought was really interesting is that Zoom claims that its federated AI approach achieved quality that was nearly equal to GPT 4, yet with only 6% of the inference cost. Okay, that's a big deal. And in its internal evaluations, which are human validated blind benchmarking test, Zoom reported that Zoom AI companion reduced errors by over 20% for Zoom's meeting recaps and 60% for Zoom's next steps recommendation in comparison to GPT 4. So, you know, that's nothing to shake a stick at as my dad might say. So performance is measured on cost and response time and the quality of outputs. And, you know, a federated approach is smart. It fits within overall brand reputation and promise of Zoom, I think, you know, and that to me, that brand promise is effective, efficient, simple to use and priced so that it's attractive across a wide spectrum of users. And as I wrap the show, I'll talk about a couple more things on the business solution side. There were a couple of new capabilities that were announced, the Zoom revenue accelerator. And this is part of sort of the CRM functionality, but the deal memos that are created will provide a brief summary of the conversation, the analysis of its impact and the possibility of a deal. So kind of as an aid to your sales team, Zoom will be expanding its digital communication channels to WhatsApp and email and it'll also include a built-in scorecard to help sales teams predict sales teams in it by providing actionable feedback. So, you know, I spend lots of time on sales calls. I'll take all the help I can get. So I think this is kind of attractive. And last but not least, at least what I'm gonna cover here, Zoom Events will offer the ability to generate AI posts with customized images based on simple text prompts for event registration pages, virtual backgrounds and marketing emails. So it'll also integrate with Svugo to make it easier to manage virtual and hybrid and in-person events. And I will tell you, as somebody, you know, our team does a lot of events. We do a lot of in-person events. We do a lot of virtual events. And so being able to have an assist there and being able to have AI generate images and be able to, you know, use quick and easy prompts to get some of those things created. I am all in, you know, because that's a lot of work. It's a ton of tiny little details. And so I feel like this is definitely something worth taking a look at. So with that, that's kind of my wrap up. Zoom's announcements made at Enterprise Connect 2024. I hope this has been helpful to you. I'll include a couple of links in the show notes that you can dive a little bit deeper into some of the things I talked about and you can take a look at, you know, I will encourage you absolutely to take a look at some of the, I'll include a link to an article talking about how Zoom did the testing against GPT and the results that they got, because I think that's kind of an attention getter and interesting. So with that, Mrs. Shelley Kramer, I am with theCUBE Research. Thanks so much for spending time with me today. We'll see you again here next time.