Zoom to Integrate Anthropic’s AI Assistant Into Its Products

Zoom, a videotelephony software company, announced a strategic partnership with Anthropic, a Google-funded AI safety and research startup. Zoom intends to integrate Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude across its products.

Zoom revealed that its Contact Center product, which serves as a customer support channel for businesses, is first in line to get a Claude boost. “With Claude guiding agents toward trustworthy resolutions and powering self-service for end-users, companies will be able to take customer relationships to another level,” Smita Hashim, chief product officer for Zoom, said in the company’s press release.

Claude can act as both a sales and customer service representative. It can do administrative work, help with email responses, task prioritization, and more. In particular, Claude will act as a self-service tool for Zoom customers, guiding them on how to make the most out of the software. For managers, Claude will deliver insights that they can use to better train customer service agents.

What’s interesting is that Zoom has also partnered with OpenAI, a Microsoft-backed company that created the popular ChatGPT. Anthropic is a rebel company that emerged from OpenAI’s former employees, who claim OpenAI has shifted its non-profit focus to an overly commercial approach after Microsoft invested billions of dollars in the startup.

Zoom has yet to share how it intends to integrate Claude across its other products, such as Meetings Phone, Teams Chat, Whiteboard, and Zoom IQ. The latter is an AI-powered assistant built in partnership with OpenAI and designed to boost collaboration and productivity. Based on text prompts, it can draft content for emails, chat, and whiteboard sessions, organize ideas, create meeting agendas, and summarize chat threads, among other things.

Zoom is taking a federated approach to AI, which includes a combination of its proprietary AI models, state-of-the-art AI technologies from leading AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, and customers’ models. By leveraging multiple AI models, Zoom can advance its products to meet diverse needs.

Zoom is also pouring money into Anthropic through its subsidiary Zoom Ventures, which invests in startups. Neither of the companies disclosed the amount of the investment, but Anthropic did receive $300 million in investments from Google in late 2022.