Zoom Workplace helps businesses improve collaboration with new features and user experience across Meetings, Team Chat, Spaces, and more
April 15, 2024 - Zoom has announced the general availability of Zoom Workplace, the company’s AI-powered collaboration platform, including new features to help users reimagine teamwork, facilitate connections, and improve productivity — all within the Zoom experience users trust and love. The launch of Zoom Workplace comes just weeks after the company’s announcement, delivering on its promise to provide its customers with a platform reimagined to power modern teamwork.
“Zoom Workplace delivers an AI-powered experience that fuels productivity and collaboration to help teams make the most of their time,” said Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom. “Modern workforces need AI deployed seamlessly across their workflows in a cost-efficient way. Zoom AI Companion, available at no additional cost, helps make connecting with colleagues and customers easier, and helps to get work done more efficiently, so they are free to tackle meaningful projects that drive business impact.”
Supercharging collaboration
Available today, Zoom Workplace delivers new enhancements and capabilities to help businesses streamline communications, increase employee engagement, optimize in-person time, and improve productivity.
Zoom Workplace makes it easier to prepare before a meeting with assets and continuous meeting chat in one place.
Streamlined workflows and customization
Users will see a new Meetings tab experience that will provide them with the information and assets they need for meetings in a single place. The Meetings tab and Calendar tab (for users connected to Zoom calendar or a third-party calendar service) can help improve collaboration before and after meetings. Users can easily view upcoming meetings, see who will be attending the meeting, reference any materials shared ahead of the session, such as agendas or attachments, and start or access a continuous meeting chat. After the meeting, meeting assets, AI Companion summaries, recordings, and continuous meeting chats will be accessible from the meeting event.
Users can now choose between four different color themes or the classic Zoom dark or light mode for their Zoom app experience. For easy accessibility to their most-used features, users can personalize the toolbar with their preferred features.
Zoom Workplace includes a new multi-speaker view in Zoom Meetings.
Refreshed look and new features to boost collaboration
To help streamline collaboration during meetings, Zoom Meeting attendees can now experience a new multi-speaker view that will automatically adapt the video layout to feature participants who are actively speaking to help attendees follow the discussion more easily. Additionally, document collaboration will provide the ability to select third-party documents, streamline access permissions, and co-edit right in the meeting.
With portrait lighting, Zoom’s built-in AI helps illuminate users’ faces in poor lighting. To help set the tone and focus of the meeting and visually bring participants into a single space, hosts can choose from an array of different meeting wallpapers for a more immersive meeting experience.
During meetings, users will also be able to use dynamic reactions to enable people to use enhanced emojis to express themselves without having to unmute themselves to share how they feel. Users can pick from an array of emojis that will appear both in front of and behind the user.
Zoom is also introducing personalized audio isolation that will help users’ voices sound clearer during meetings and will help to suppress background noise. This feature is beneficial to users who find themselves joining meetings in open environments, like the office or a coffee shop.
The new Zoom Team Chat experience is now available in split view to maintain productivity and flow.
Work asynchronously with Zoom Team Chat
Within Zoom Workplace, Zoom Team Chat helps teams stay even more connected, collaborative, and productive asynchronously. Zoom AI Companion now provides multi-language support in 38 languages for summarizing chats to help users get caught up after being away from their computers and for helping users compose new messages.
To help users stay organized, Team Chat tabs can help users keep chat-related assets, live links, whiteboards, and other resources in a single view and help foster collaboration with a split-screen view so users can collaborate on the assets and chat at the same time.
Team Chat now includes new generative AI capabilities with Zoom AI Companion, the company’s generative AI assistant that is available at no additional cost.* AI Companion capabilities such as thread summary and sentence completion allow users to catch up easily on long threads and quickly write messages, respectively. The new quick schedule capability detects the intent for a meeting within a chat, prompts the user to schedule a meeting, and auto-fills meeting details specified from the chat message for easy collaboration.
Team Chat users can easily find important messages with new enhancements to the left sidebar, such as a filter that enables users to narrow down the chat view by unread messages, mentions, and more, as well as additional sorting options for folders to help users stay organized.
Also new with Zoom Workplace, continuous meeting chat will automatically share a meeting recap in Team Chat after the meeting that includes assets such as the recording, AI Companion meeting summary, links, files, and Zoom Whiteboards and Notes shared in the meeting.
Other new Team Chat features include markdown support for rich text formatting, support for up to 250,000 members in a channel, and Team Chat compatibility with airline wifi (enabled upon request).
Optimize in-person time
Users who work from the office can now easily make desk reservations and more from the Workspaces tab in the Zoom Workplace desktop app toolbar and easily find that desk with wayfinding on mobile devices, Zoom Workplace app, or a kiosk when visiting an unfamiliar office location. They can also use the new tab to efficiently register and invite guests into an office with Visitor Management.
Additional Zoom Workplace innovations coming soon
Zoom AI Companion recently launched new capabilities for Zoom Phone and Zoom Whiteboard and will debut additional AI Companion capabilities in the near future, including generative AI virtual backgrounds and Ask AI Companion, an enhancement of the digital assistant that will help users prepare for their workday across Zoom Workplace.
Additional Zoom Workplace innovations launching in the coming weeks include multi-share, which will allow multiple participants to share their screens and documents, whiteboards, and notes simultaneously. Team Chat shared spaces will give users the ability to group channels together to improve the discoverability of relevant projects or team-based topics. Team Chat will also debut external collaboration enhancements and dozens of new APIs and webhooks for deeper integrations and automation in the coming weeks.
Account owners and users (if admin-approved) can update their Zoom app to version 6.0.0 starting today or download it from the Zoom website to get access to Zoom Workplace and its new features and capabilities.
*Note: Included at no additional cost with the paid services assigned to Zoom accounts. AI Companion may not be available for all regions and industry verticals.
About Zoom
Zoom’s mission is to provide one platform that delivers limitless human connection. Zoom Workplace — the company’s AI-powered, open collaboration platform built for modern work — will streamline communications, increase employee engagement, optimize in-person time, improve productivity, and offer customer choice with third-party apps and integrations. Zoom Workplace, powered by Zoom AI Companion, will include collaboration solutions like meetings, team chat, phone, scheduler, whiteboard, spaces, Workvivo, and more. Together with Zoom Workplace, Zoom’s Business Services for sales, marketing, and customer care teams, including Zoom Contact Center, strengthen customer relationships throughout the customer lifecycle. Founded in 2011, Zoom is publicly traded (NASDAQ:ZM) and headquartered in San Jose, California. Get more info at zoom.com.