ServiceNow, Zoom Integrate GenAI For Seamless Meeting-To-Action Orchestration

‘Think about a Zoom meeting and identifying the people and making sure that the system understands when the last conversation we had was. All those things can come into play by this integration. We’re making sure that our partners can build on top of the Now Assist platform, and we feel this integration makes both products more powerful,’ says Dorit Zilbershot, ServiceNow’s vice president of platform and AI innovation.

Zoom and ServiceNow Wednesday unveiled an expanded alliance under which the two companies plan to integrate their GenAI technologies.

Under that planned integration, ServiceNow Now Assist and Zoom AI Companion will be able to work with each other to automate workflows and tasks based on what was discussed during Zoom meetings.

The expanded strategic alliance between the two was introduced at Zoomtopia 2024, Zoom’s annual partner and customer event.

ServiceNow is working with Zoom to help businesses and channel partners take advantage of GenAI capabilities, said Dorit Zilbershot, vice president of platform and AI innovation at Santa Clara, Calif.-based ServiceNow.

“We are very excited to join forces with Zoom to really turn meeting takeaways into actions, and this is all with the power of generative AI,” Zilbershot told CRN. “We can make employees more productive and make meetings more powerful by taking any conversations and dynamically translate them to actions within the ServiceNow platform.”

This goes beyond what customers could do with GenAI and meetings on their own, Zilbershot said.

“Customers currently have to build this integration,” she said. “And now we are saying this is going to be seamless. It's going to be native into Zoom and in ServiceNow, and it uses the power of each company's AI technologies to really bring the best. Zoom is the expert at taking notes and making sure that they can summarize that and create actions. ServiceNow Now Assist is our generative AI technology that can take that and make it meaningful within the ServiceNow platform. We can understand if you talk about an epic or an incident or who needs to be assigned, we make sure the permissions are according to the ServiceNow permissions. So we really make life easier for our joint customers.”

“Epic” is ServiceNow’s nomenclature for how a desired action is described, she said.

ServiceNow also has a GenAI integration with Microsoft Copilot, Zilbershot said.

“We do see ServiceNow as a platform,” she said. “We announced a partnership with Microsoft Copilot. Now we're announcing our partnership with Zoom. We really look at ourselves as the place where we can connect to any system to help our customers be more productive.”

Integration between ServiceNow Now Assist and Zoom AI Companion is straightforward, Zilbershot said.

“Luckily, both of our products are really built for integration, and we each leverage each other’s intelligence,” she said. “So the integration builds on top of work that was done in both companies for the past 12 months to build that internal intelligence and how Zoom understands meeting and how ServiceNow understands actions.”

The two companies are currently working with channel partners to help them understand the integration, Zilbershot said.

“One of the things that we're very mindful of, both at ServiceNow and at Zoom, is the notion of governance and oversight and permissions and providing oversight,” she said. “From an integration perspective, it's really making sure that if there's an action that needs to be handled from Zoom to ServiceNow, it has all the permissions and guardrails around it to make sure that we're not just creating tasks in ServiceNow without any human oversight.”

ServiceNow, as part of the September ServiceNow Now platform Xanadu release, introduced the concept of a skills kit where our customers can build generative AI skills natively in Now Assist, and we're working closely with partners and channels to equip them with the ability to build those custom skills, Zilbershot said.

“We're seeing that the integration with Zoom creates an opportunity for our partners to build on top of the ServiceNow platform and create a much richer experience within Zoom,” she said. “Think about a Zoom meeting and identifying the people and making sure that the system understands when the last conversation we had was. All those things can come into play by this integration. We’re making sure that our partners can build on top of the Now Assist platform, and we feel this integration makes both products more powerful.”

Zoom is using its Zoomtopia 2024 to highlight the evolution of AI Companion, a product that is included with any Zoom subscription, that is already best in class at doing things like meeting summaries or transcripts, said Ross Mayfield, head of product at Zoom

Zoom is introducing AI Companion 2.0, Mayfield told CRN.

“This is not just having an assistant that can do things like transcribe stuff for you, but it's a more of a powerful system of action,” he said. “It's helping you move through your workday to get things done. We're also announcing what we call the custom AI Companion add-on, a paid version that allows you to have a system of action doing agentic (independent) orchestration of workflows.”

For instance, Mayfield said, a user could say at an internal meeting that he or she wants to provision some software to a group of employees.

“We can tell AI Companion, ‘Hey, we want to be able to provision this app for a group of marketing employees that report to our CMO. Can you help us with this?’” he said. “Then, to orchestrate that workflow, it reasons what your intent is, and it creates a plan and presents that plan for you to confirm before it takes the actions. AI Companion might say, ‘I can get a list of employees that report to the CMO from Workday. I can then attach that list to a ticket in ServiceNow by invoking the ServiceNow Now Assist bot. I can maybe take one more step of filing a Jira with DevOps to do the last provisioning step.”

The integration of Zoom AI Companion with ServiceNow Now Assist is all about agents, Mayfield said.

“We're actually bringing ServiceNow’s AI into our conversational interface, where you would be interacting with our AI,” he said. “That means our AI can talk to their AI. That's agent-to-agent collaboration. It's like having two smart new team members that can talk to each other, reason, make plans, and execute things together.”

The integration of ServiceNow Now Assist Zoom AI Companion is slated to be generally available in early 2025, Zilbershot said.