Zoom wants to take on Google and Microsoft with its own Docs

Zoom has unveiled its first collaboration tool, Zoom Docs, as it turns to AI in the hopes of expanding its business beyond video meeting software. 

Zoom was little known before the pandemic struck in 2020, but the ensuing rush to work from home amid lockdowns propelled it into the mainstream, posting 355% growth that summer.

However, the company's growth has stumbled since, sparking layoffs and causing its market capitalization falling from $139 billion at its peak in 2020 to $17 billion this year.

To battle that, Zoom announced a shift beyond meetings into AI-powered hybrid working tools. Zoom has now unveiled a key piece of that, Zoom Docs, a document writing and collaboration tool using AI Companion to automate basic tasks.

Zoom pointed to research that suggests 59 minutes of every day is spent looking for information across different applications — so, the argument goes, using a single platform for meetings and documents can help streamline that.

"With AI Companion available every step of the way, Zoom Docs is purpose-built to empower people to ‘work happy’ and give them more time back in their day," said Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom.

Zoom Docs for meetings

Practically, that means Zoom Docs has co-editing tools for collaborating at the same time including the ability to vote or react to items, makes it easy to embed online content with a few taps of the keyboard, and uses generative AI to translate, rework content into new forms (such as notes into an agenda), and summarize a page.

"Zoom Docs is our first Zoom Workplace product with generative AI built in from the ground up; it effortlessly transforms information from Zoom Meetings into actionable documents and knowledge bases, so teams can stay focused on meaningful work," said Hashim.

For example, information from Zoom Meetings can be used to create documents such as meeting summaries, automatically sharing them to meeting attendees and translating them into different languages, or converting the content into agendas, newsletters or other templates, the company explains on its website.

Pay for AI

Whether any of those tools will be enough to shift users away from Google or Microsoft remains to be seen — though the recent attention with Zoom call rallies from US presidential candidate Kamala Harris might help. 

However, bundling Docs in with paid-for Zoom packages may encourage some companies already paying for the conference tool to give it a go.

Indeed, Zoom Docs comes free as part of Zoom Workplace, which are its paid-for packages. 

The free Basic package — the one that cuts off meetings after 40 minutes — will allow ten documents to be shared as part of Docs Basic, a more limited version of the package that doesn't include the AI tools.

By stepping up to a Pro or Business account (£12.99 monthly or £17.49 monthly), users will also get access to the AI companion as well as unlimited access to the full-version of Docs.