When you think about creating a collaborative document with your colleagues, which app comes to mind? Google Docs? Microsoft Word? Zoom is hoping it will soon be among your top choices.
Zoom, widely recognized for its video conferencing service, introduced Zoom Docs on Tuesday during its annual conference, Zoomtopia.
This new product will feature Zoom’s AI assistant, AI Companion, along with other AI tools that help users draft, edit, summarize, and adjust tones in their documents.
Additionally, it will be able to incorporate items from meeting discussions and answer questions related to the document’s content.
The shared documents will be seamlessly integrated into Zoom’s platform, allowing users to work on them directly from meetings, chats, desktop, and mobile apps.
Zoom Docs is expected to be generally available by the spring of 2024, though the company is still determining its pricing.
Recently, several workplace software providers have integrated AI capabilities into their applications. Both Google and Microsoft have been introducing AI features aimed at automating tasks like drafting and editing in Google Docs and Microsoft Word.
With the upcoming release of its document product, Zoom is stepping up its competition with Microsoft and Google.
Zoom already offers competing products in video conferencing, chat, and email, but Microsoft and Google currently dominate the workplace content creation market.
Some experts believe it would take a significant shift to change the default document apps used by workers.
“Something would have to fundamentally change the nature of how we create content to upend the market,” said Craig Roth, research vice president at market insights firm Gartner.
Replacing the two market leaders in this space, he added, “is unlikely in the near future.”
Zoom isn’t as far behind in the collaborative applications sector, which includes tools for web conferencing and virtual events.
According to market intelligence firm IDC, Zoom held an 11.2 percent market share last year, compared to Microsoft’s 29.7 percent and Google’s 13.5 percent.
Zoom may try to capitalize on its large video conferencing user base to promote its word processing tool. As of the end of the second quarter on July 31, Zoom reported having 218,100 enterprise customers, a 7 percent increase from the previous year.
The company believes that Zoom Docs will streamline collaboration by allowing workers to create and edit documents within the Zoom ecosystem, eliminating the need to switch between different tabs or applications.
“Am I focusing my attention on the document or on the attendees and participants?” asked Theresa Larkin, lead of employee experience product marketing for Zoom. “We’re able to streamline documents so you don’t have to juggle both worlds.”
With Zoom Docs, users will be able to easily integrate information from meetings, chats, emails, and project management tools within the Zoom platform into their documents.
They will also be able to create customized layouts and workflows, tag colleagues for action items, assign tasks, track and manage projects, and link pages with embedded visual trees to display how information is connected.
Users are also expected to be able to drag and drop content blocks, such as tables, charts, and images, into their documents.
Wayne Kurtzman, research vice president of social, communities, and collaboration at IDC, noted that Zoom doesn’t need to dethrone the market leaders to find success. It simply needs to offer features that enhance productivity and meet user needs.
“How we work in five to seven years from now is going to be significantly different than we do today,” Kurtzman said. “That opens up opportunities. The question becomes who can meet the evolving needs.”
