Zoom Announces AI Features to be Free: Here's the Reasoning

Zoom has made a bold move by committing to offer its artificial intelligence (AI) features to paid customers on its video-conferencing platform without any extra charges. The tech giant is betting big on this strategy, hoping it will set them apart as companies start eyeing the cost of similar features from other providers. Zoom is also touting the benefits of what they call a federated multi-model architecture, which they claim will boost efficiency.

There's been some buzz about the potential costs of using generative AI, especially among larger enterprises. Zoom's Asia-Pacific head, Ricky Kapur, pointed out the sticker shock, saying, "At $30 per user a month? That's a significant cost factor." It's a valid concern for large organizations who might hesitate to give every employee access if the price is too steep. Kapur shared with ZDNET that executives face tough choices about who gets to use these powerful AI tools.

Interestingly, Kapur mentioned that Zoom's decision to include these AI features at no additional cost has sparked a flurry of "accelerated" projects among their paying customers. Over the past year, Zoom has rolled out several AI-powered tools, like AI Companion and Zoom Docs. The latter, described as a cutting-edge document workspace with modern collaboration tools, is set to be widely available next year. Zoom Docs integrates seamlessly into the Zoom interface, making it accessible during meetings, team chats, and through both online and mobile apps.

AI Companion, previously known as Zoom IQ, is a generative AI assistant designed to streamline those time-consuming tasks. It can craft chat responses tailored to your desired tone and length, based on your prompts, and even summarize unread messages. Plus, it can give you a rundown of what was discussed in meetings, who said what, and highlight the key points. And the best part? AI Companion comes at no extra cost for those on Zoom's subscription plans. The Pro plan is priced at $149.9 per user per year, while the Business plan costs $219.9 per user per year. Business Plus and Enterprise plans are customized to meet specific customer needs.

With Zoom Docs and AI Companion working together, users can get summaries of their last five meetings and a handy list of action items, according to Zoom's chief growth officer, Graeme Geddes. Since its launch in September, over 220,000 users have jumped on the AI Companion bandwagon, which now supports 33 languages, including Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.

Geddes emphasized that by including AI Companion at no additional cost, Zoom believes these data-driven features should be accessible to everyone in the organization. He also stressed the importance of their federated AI architecture. Rather than relying on a single AI provider, Zoom has opted to weave together multiple large language models (LLMs), including their own and third-party models like Meta Llama 2, OpenAI GPT 3.5 and GPT 4, and Anthropic Claude 2. This approach, Geddes claims, allows AI Companion to evolve, optimize for quality and performance, and reduce latency and costs for customers.

Zoom's CTO, Huang Xuedong, shared in a post that their internal tests show a significant quality improvement with their federated approach over single-model strategies. He noted, "The relative difference is 99% vs 93% quality rating, per our proprietary quality evaluation methodology." Huang also mentioned that Zoom's AI Companion offers reduced costs and faster response times compared to other models like OpenAI's GPT-4-32k, while maintaining comparable AI quality.

Geddes reiterated that Zoom's goal is to make these technologies accessible to everyone, ensuring the economics make sense. He also underscored their commitment to privacy, stating that Zoom will not use customers' meeting data to train its own or third-party AI models.

In August, Zoom faced some heat over changes to its Terms of Service that could have allowed the company to use customers' video and chat data for AI development. After public backlash, Zoom backtracked and confirmed that data from both free and paid users would not be used to train its AI models. This episode led to a crucial decision, driven by customer feedback, to never use any customer data for training their LLMs.

This stance means Zoom does not use any customer audio, video, chat, screensharing, attachments, or other communications, including poll results, whiteboards, and reactions, to train its AI models. Instead, as Geddes explained, they rely on public domain data, purchased data, and data they create themselves to train these models.