Zoom To Inject Anthropic’s AI Chatbot Into Video, Collaboration Products

‘With Claude guiding agents toward trustworthy resolutions and powering self-service for end-users, companies will be able to take customer relationships to another level,’ says Zoom’s Chief Product Officer Smita Hashim.

Zoom is inserting more artificial intelligence across its platform via a new partnership with and financial investment in AI startup Anthropic. The partnership comes just months after Zoom partnered with Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT.

The new collaboration aims to boost Zoom’s AI capabilities by allowing Anthropic’s AI assistant, Claude, to be integrated with Zoom’s platform, which includes Team Chat, Meetings, Phone, Whiteboard, Zoom IQ and its Contact Center.

“With Claude guiding agents toward trustworthy resolutions and powering self-service for end-users, companies will be able to take customer relationships to another level,” said Smita Hashim, Zoom’s chief product officer in a statement.

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Claude is a large language model (LLM) that is similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT which can rapidly answer employee or customer questions when prompted.

The San Jose, Calif.-based video conferencing and collaboration star also unveiled that its venture capital arm, Zoom Ventures, has invested an undisclosed amount into Anthropic. The investment aims to help drive research and development (R&D) to create trustworthy and responsible large-scale AI systems.

The AI news follows a massive layoff round from the video conferencing company.

In February, Zoom unveiled it was laying off 1,300 employees, or about 15 percent of its total staff. Every organization across Zoom was affected by the job cuts.

Zoom And Anthropic

The first integration will see Anthropic’s AI technology injected into Zoom’s Contact Center portfolio, which includes Zoom Virtual Agent, Zoom Contact Center and Zoom Workforce Management. The goal is to improve end-user outcomes and enabling superior agent experiences.

“Anthropic’s Constitutional AI model is primed to provide safe and responsible integrations for our next-generation innovations, beginning with the Zoom Contact Center portfolio,” said Zoom’s Hashim.

Zoom said the integration will enable customize AI models to perform better for a clients based on their specific business needs.

“Partnering with Anthropic also furthers our commitment to providing customers with our federated approach to AI, optimized to deliver outstanding customer experience outcomes,” Hashim said.

Zoom And OpenAI

In March, Zoom formed a partnership with OpenAI to add AI-driven capabilities into the platform.

Zoom and OpenAI are working on new features for Zoom IQ, the company’s AI assistant that can summarize chat threads, write content and create meeting agenda, to name a few.

The partnership is enabling Zoom to use generate AI as a driving factor in making its customers’ business more productive.

“We’re taking a federated approach to AI to leverage our proprietary AI models, those from leading AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, and select customers’ own models,” said Hashim in a blog post. “These models are also customizable, so they can be tuned to a given company’s vocabulary and scenarios for better performance.”