Zoom's Advanced Solutions and AI Integration
Transcript is auto-generated.
Introduction to the Discussion
What’s up, everyone? I am Sam Nelson, VP of CX here at Telera. Thanks for joining us today. Here with us is Sean Fair from Zoom. I’m gonna pass it to him to do his intro. Sean, tell us a little bit more about you.
Well, Sam, hey. Thanks so much for the opportunity to connect with you. Sean Fair, head up the Zoom contact center business for the Americas. I’ve got the sales and go to market strategy for the US, Latin America, and Canada. And I’ve been with Zoom for five years. So it’s been great, great great to have a partner like Telarus and opportunity to work together in the partnership.
Amazing. Now we appreciate that partnership so much. You guys have done so much for the industry. Lots of exciting things happening there.
Exploring Future Innovations at Zoom
So I’m gonna just kind of open up the can of worms, but talk to us about future innovations. I know you guys are doing so much over there. We can hardly keep up. What is happening over at Zoom?
Yeah. You know, I’ll reflect back to October at Zoomtopia, and Eric Yuan, our founder and CEO, stood on the main stage and shared over three thousand new capabilities delivered in our platform in only twelve months. So you look at the speed of innovation, it is legit at Zoom.
You know, when you’re near three hundred new capabilities across the platform every thirty days, our engineers really put that speed to work. And, that’s it’s fantastic, you know, when you’re moving that fast. It’s also challenging to make sure our customers and our partners can adopt and understand that speed of innovation that we move at.
Yeah. That’s so much in such a short amount of time. I mean, I remember when you guys rolled out, DCX or the contact center side, and we didn’t even know it was out yet. But you, were already offering it to the market, so that’s really, really exciting.
The Role of AI in Zoom’s Strategy
So it’s no news to you, but AI is a really big deal right now. We’re right in the thick of it.
Talk to me a little bit about sort of how Zoom is incorporating AI and machine learning.
Yeah. You know, I mean, at the core of Zoom is where AI lives. And we’ve been around doing AI for a long time. A lot of our noise cancellation, the background, virtual background.
But we have a tremendous amount of accessibility to data, and we take security and privacy at the utmost importance where we share with our clients as part of the contract that we absolutely do not use any customer data for training models.
But we also have a very federated approach to our AI, which means that we can integrate with different models out there with anthropic and others. But even more so is taking the power of, like, transcriptions of meetings, taking our quality management transcriptions, and then mining that across our ecosystem from a platform perspective to really surface relevant information, through AI companion, through our expert assist. And so we really look at it from a an approach that, you know, transcripts, federated, maybe customer information that they’ve got indexed in a solution to be able to unify the data, is really AI’s threaded throughout the core of our platform.
That’s phenomenal. And I think a lot of people still don’t realize how much AI they’re actually using. The reality is they’re using it every day, really, in everything they do.
Understanding Agentic AI
But what’s even more interesting, I think, is we’re now kind of approaching this next wave of artificial intelligence. Right? It started from the basics of, hey. Push one for sales, press two for support, and then it kind of, you know, evolved into conversational AI, which is great. But now I think we’re into this wave of what we like to refer to as agentic, the agentic sort of phase of AI.
Can you tell me a little bit more sort of about Zoom’s approach on this sort of agentic movement now entering the conversations in AI?
Yeah. You know, I mean, it’s interesting coming from contact center that agentic and agent, we look at it from two different ways, an agent and a contact center, but agentic in being able to conduct task workflow and be able to help automate not just I need this, but maybe I’m looking at I need to change a flight and I wanna sit at the front of the plane and I need to take off at in the morning time. And using the analogy of asking the bot three different questions and and then the agentic capability to go do those workflows and reason with that and conduct the task and complete that task for us. So we’re really hyper focused on the agentic side of the platform right now, really driven by the task management and completion of it. There’s a lot of talk about Agenctic, but until something can actually implement through a workflow and do it for us, once that happens, talk about simplistic and driving simplicity through the experience of our clients.
The Impact of AI on Human Roles
Yeah. That’s phenomenal. I think there’s still a lot of question marks about agentic, and I have to ask the question. I love asking this one. It’s just a fun question out there in the industry generally. But do you think AI is gonna replace humans?
Well, you know, I mean, we see it a little bit today. Right? I mean, you see it in containment or deflection. Either way that you call it is being able to get self-service as a consumer and not have to speak to somebody live.
I mean, it happens in our day day to day lives right now. And so that is essentially replacing, you know, potentially a human interaction or an agent on that. And so we absolutely see it playing out, you know, right now. Our our Zoom support organization will self-service over ninety percent of our engagements.
It’s a tremendous amount of savings for an organization, but more so when you meet the consumer and you can deliver a twenty four by seven, offer, You please the consumer at the same time. So it’s a balancing act, but but we absolutely see it. With the introduction of our virtual agent, voice technology coming out, we showcase the Enterprise Connect, and we’ll be at CCW here in June talking about it.
You know, we we see more of that voice element coming into play as well, not just only chat, but how we do it through the voice aspect of the platform.
Yeah. For sure. That’s awesome. And that’s great that you guys are enabling businesses to offer that twenty four seven support capability. Right?
I’m telling you, customer experiences and expectations are through the roof right now. Right? We expect everything, yesterday, so to speak. So it’s a great way for you guys to be enabling.
Advice for Technology Advisers
Just to kinda wrap this up, what advice would you give our technology advisers out there today, whether that’s, you know, managing conversations around artificial intelligence, you know, and and helping position Zoom as one of the leaders in the industry, which you are. What advice would you give to our tech advisers out there today in as we are right in the middle of this AI bubble?
Yeah. Lean in. Lean in. There’s a lot of podcasts out there. There’s a lot of information out there around Adjentic and AI.
Be curious.
Learn a little bit every day about it. Right? The more knowledgeable you become, you don’t have to be the expert. The more inquisitive you are, the bigger opportunity you have for when you meet with your clients to ask them about their strategy and how are they looking at implementing it, how are they looking at augmenting their workforce, you know, to be able to do more with less or as organization scale, not have to throw people at problems, leverage the technology to it.
So I think some of the element is fear, and it shouldn’t be the fear. It should be, hey. I wanna learn a little bit more about this because I will guarantee you, and it’s happening every day and every minute of the day right now, these conversations on AI and AgenTic are taking place. And the more that you could be a steward of learning about it and knowledgeable, the the more value you’re gonna bring to your clients.
And I think that’s super important. Something that we preach, you know, pretty much daily within Zoom as well is just lean into it, ask questions, sell out of curiosity, because that opens up avenues that will present opportunities for you.
Integrating Zoom with Other Technologies
Also, you know, our platform is so robust, but we also have an awesome developer ecosystem at Zoom. And so the ability to integrate with other technologies, it doesn’t have to be all Zoom. There could be various point solutions out there within our clients’ environments, the flexibility of API and integrate workflows.
That’s truly the power of Zoom’s platform. It’s not just, all one all be all type, strategy. It’s it’s look at the broader platform, from a holistic approach.
Yeah. I love that, Sean. You make a great point about integrating with multiple systems, solutions that someone might have in the technology stack. I think that makes you guys a really agile kind of solution to put into the tech stack. So I appreciate you playing that out.
Conclusion and Call to Action
Well, with that folks, you heard it directly from Sean here at Zoom.
Be curious. Lean in. The Zoom team is here to help. You’ve got experts all around you, whether it’s from Zoom or from Telarus. So, let us know how we can all help. And by all means, thanks for your time today.
Thank you so much.