Zoom Launches AI-Powered Features to Compete with Slack-Calendly-Google and Microsoft

After laying off 1,300 people or 15% of its staff, Zoom is introducing new features to compete with several companies, including Slack, Calendly, Google, and Microsoft. The video conferencing giant aims to shift more work tasks to its tools by introducing AI-powered meeting summaries, prompt-based email responses, and whiteboard generation, along with video “Huddles” and a meeting scheduler.
Zoom is opening up its email and calendar clients to everyone and offering hosted email and calendar services with end-to-end encryption protection and custom domains for paid users.
The company is also partnering with OpenAI for its AI features, but it hasn't specified the nature of the partnership.

Zoom's AI assistant, Zoom IQ, can now summarize chat threads in the team chat and generate meeting agendas, compose chats, emails, and whiteboard sessions, and ask further questions when you join a meeting midway.
The company is inviting users to try these features next month with plans for a wider rollout later.

In addition to its AI-focused products, Zoom has also introduced Zoom Scheduler, a Calendly-like tool to share availability to book appointments, and virtual coworking spaces called Zoom Huddles, where people can drop in or out at any time.

Zoom faces several challenges as it introduces generative AI features to create emails, meeting agendas, and whiteboards to compete with Microsoft and Google.
It is also fighting to be a relevant workplace tool beyond meetings, competing with Slack, Calendly, and Otter.

Other companies have been launching AI-powered summarization features in different formats.
For example: Slack announced a ChatGPT bot in collaboration with OpenAI, while the transcription tool Otter launched the OtterPilot assistant that automatically summarizes meetings.

Zoom's stock has faced a decline of over 40% in the last 12 months, and the company faced its first quarterly loss of $108 million since 2018 in the fourth-quarter results for the 2023 financial year.
It expects slowed growth of 1.1% this fiscal year, with expected revenue between $4.435 billion to $4.455 billion.

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The information in the Tech News is based on publicly available sources such as news articles, press releases, and company announcements from Zoom and other relevant companies.
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