Zoom Communications kicked off its Zoomtopia 2023 confab with innovations underpinned by artificial intelligence. It’s showpiece, Zoom Docs, is a collaboration tool built from the ground up around AI. The modular workspace integrates with Zoom and third-party apps as a way to streamline teamwork, manage projects and stay organized. Scheduled for general release in 2024, Zoom Docs combines traditional document functionality with AI assists for things like adding content generated from Zoom Meetings to docs, summarization and search. Zoom Docs leverages the power of the previously announced Zoom AI Companion, a GenAI assistant that just got whiteboard capability.

The Zoom AI Companion is also adding for business customers Meeting and Team Chat summarizations that are specifically geared to higher education and healthcare customers. Eligible accounts will be able to access these functionalities at no additional cost, the company says in a news announcement.

“As work continues to evolve and present new challenges, one thing will remain the same: effective collaboration and communication tools are crucial for businesses to succeed,” Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan said at the event, emphasizing Zoom will continue to evaluate new AI opportunities that help “to empower people, or reduce the complexity of IT solutions.”

Stressing “problem solving” in Zoom’s solutions, Yuan said the company’s improvements address the challenges of a hybrid work environment and increased demands on customer service.

“At its core, Zoom Docs provides document creation, editing, and collaboration features like other cloud document solutions. However, its tight integration across Zoom differentiates the product,” VentureBeat reports, noting “documents, wikis, tables and other content can all be created, edited and searched for within Zoom Meetings, Team Chat or the Zoom web and desktop apps, offering a direct competitor to up-and-comer Notion” (assessed here by ZDNet).

“Let me be clear, this is so much more than your average document,” explained Zoom’s Theresa Larkin, global lead for product marketing in UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) as reported by Computerworld. “It’s really a next generation way of collaborating built from the ground up with AI at its core.”

“Modular content blocks let users customize layouts to specific workflows through options like drag-and-drop table blocks, offering competition to the likes of project management software such as Monday or even content creation tools such as WordPress and Mailchimp,” VentureBeat writes. Zoom Docs “can auto-populate docs with insights from meetings to expedite creation,” generate summaries of large files, and help “users quickly find information across documents.”

Such functionalities are also being addressed by Google and Microsoft Office 365.