The recently concluded Zoom AI Companion Webinar, led by Randy Maestre, Zoom’s Head of AI, Developer Ecosystem & Industry Marketing, and Enrique Plaza Garcia, Zoom’s Product Marketing Manager, provided a profound dive into Zoom’s AI capabilities. What sets Zoom apart is its unparalleled AI versatility, surpassing the constraints of single-model AI solutions.

The discussion revolved around how Zoom serves as a catalyst for seamless connection and collaboration, converging both employee and customer experiences within an intelligent, all-encompassing platform that garners genuine user affection. Randy spotlighted a staggering statistic – approximately 60% of a person’s workday is consumed by administrative tasks rather than value-added work, a significant productivity drain. In today’s hybrid work landscape, teams grapple with disengagement, underscoring the pressing need for heightened connectivity, a sense of belonging, and an enabling company culture, identified as prime drivers for successful digital transformation.

Moreover, Randy shed light on the fact that customer expectations have soared, with a significant 60% of customers indicating a willingness to switch brands after just one or two subpar experiences. These trends beg the question: What's causing these shifts? One prevalent challenge in the landscape of knowledge workers is the presence of friction and complexity. Enterprises, as Okta confirms, typically manage a staggering 211 different applications in their tech stack. This complexity poses a formidable obstacle to maintaining a streamlined, user-friendly experience, which employees increasingly desire.

In response to these challenges, Zoom introduced Zoom AI Companion just four weeks ago. This generative AI digital assistant empowers users to amplify productivity, enhance team effectiveness, and refine skills. Randy emphasized Zoom’s distinct approach to AI – a federated model that dynamically incorporates Zoom’s expansive language model alongside Meta Llama 2, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Importantly, no customer audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, or other communication content is used to train Zoom’s or third-party AI models. Admins and account owners maintain precise control over the activation of AI features (all features are initially disabled). Meeting hosts are granted controls once enabled, and participants are apprised when features are in use. Ultimately, Zoom AI empowers our customers to achieve higher productivity, better team connections, and deliver top-tier customer experiences – all in an intuitive manner, seamlessly integrated into your daily workflows across the Zoom platform.

If you missed this session and wish to delve deeper into Zoom AI Companion, please feel free to leave a comment here. Additionally, you can register to watch the on-demand recording here.

I have just completed a Zoom meeting, the number of  participants shown in the report page in Zoom is 90, however,  after I have exported the attendance report, the file only contained 10 participants.   What can I do? Can zoom help us export? I feel helpless because I cannot find any technical support from Zoom to answer my  question over the phone.

Hi, I conduct lessons on zoom and I post the lessons' recordings online. Zoom sent me a note saying that I don't have anymore room on cloud to save other recordings. If I delete the recordings on cloud I wont' be able to show the lessons on the website. What can I do?

Thank you, 

Beatrice.

In the past few months, I've been encountering a lot of customers having the same use case when it comes to their company all hands and new hire trainings. They would usually run the same programs having the same speakers and talk about the same topics for everyone to consume.

There came a point where they were looking for a solution or a feature to help them run their sessions with minimal effort and no fuss during the event. So I introduced them to the Simulive Feature. 

The Zoom Webinar Simulive is a powerful tool that can help you reach a wider audience with your webinars. With simulive, you can record your webinar in advance and then host it live, allowing people to watch it from anywhere in the world. This is a great way to save time and money, and it also ensures that your webinar is accessible to everyone.

Here are just some of the use cases for Simulive:

• A company wants to deliver a training course to its employees in multiple time zones. Instead of hosting a live webinar for each time zone, the company can record the training course and then host a simulive webinar that is available to all employees at the same time. This saves the company time and money, and it ensures that all employees have access to the training course at the same time.
  
• A marketing team wants to broadcast a webinar to promote a new product. The team can record the webinar in advance and then host a simulive webinar that is available to anyone who wants to watch. This allows the team to reach a wider audience and to save time on hosting a live webinar.
• A school wants to hold an all-hands meeting for its faculty and staff. Instead of holding a live meeting that requires everyone to be in the same place, the school can host a simulive webinar that is accessible to everyone from their computer or mobile device. This saves the school time and money, and it allows faculty and staff to participate in the meeting from wherever they are located.

Needless to say, they were quite satisfied with the feature and they are all planning to implement this on their upcoming sessions internally and externally. As a CSM that's working in Zoom, I look forward to more features and innovations that will be available in Zoom Events.

You can find out more about Simulive by clicking on this link here: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/12338105688205

The future of work is hybrid. That much has been clear for some time, and nowhere more so than in the United Kingdom.

In May 2023, 83% of UK organizations polled by the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD) revealed they had adopted hybrid working arrangements, and a separate study from the Institute for Economic Research, also using data from May 2023, found that UK employees now spend an average of 1.5 days per week working remotely – higher than any other developed nation in the study except Canada (averages 1.7 days). 

This widespread adoption of hybrid and flexible work reflects its popularity: Zoom’s own polling with Morning Consult found that only 8% of UK workers with some experience of remote working prefer working in an office full time – lower than in any other country polled.

Zoom has been helping customers in the UK and around the world to navigate these changes and maintain connections via Zoom Meetings, Team Chat, and Zoom Phone. In addition, many of our products including Zoom Rooms, Zoom Workspace Reservation, and Zoom Whiteboard have been designed to enhance physical, modern workplaces for today’s hybrid workforces. We could not be prouder that our unified communications platform continues to support the shift towards hybrid work: by keeping teams that work remotely or asynchronously connected, the Zoom platform helps foster the mutual sense of trust critical for teams to do their best work from anywhere. 

Making the most of the shift to hybrid

But having the right technology is only one part of the puzzle to getting hybrid working ‘right’ for any organization. Thoughtful workplace policies, intentional new internal practices, manager training, and workspaces re-imagined for today’s hybrid world will all be equally critical to future business success in crucial areas such as recruitment and culture.

That’s why Zoom partnered with several other businesses, membership organizations, and leading employment academics to co-found the Hybrid Work Commission. The Commission was established to examine and make recommendations to UK policy-makers on how they can respond to the rise in hybrid and remote working to the advantage of people, communities, and the broader UK economy. The research included business and consumer polling designed to gauge the perceived benefits and challenges of hybrid work among UK employers and employees, helping to paint a picture of how expectations have shifted across sectors and organizations that have adopted different working styles. 

Here are three things we learned that may be relevant to your organization:  

1. Organisations embracing hybrid work will have easier access to talent

In today’s economy, access to talent can make or break a business and be the difference between growing and stagnant organizations. Research from Nick Bloom at Stanford University estimates that workers with choices over when and where they work value it equivalent to an 8% pay rise, citing reduced commuting time and benefits to work-life balance and well-being. 

Insights from the Commission suggest that organizations that require employees on location full-time will increasingly have to pay significantly more to find and keep the talent they need both in terms of the salaries they offer and higher recruitment costs, impacting the bottom line. Our polling revealed that: 

• 70% of UK employers polled that have adopted hybrid working said it had made it easier for them to hire, and 77% said it had improved staff retention.
• 51% of UK employers polled that have adopted hybrid working said it had helped them recruit staff from further afield, boosting access to talent.
• 75% of UK employees with hybrid arrangements said it had improved their work-life balance, and 62% said it had improved their wellbeing. 

2. The shift to hybrid has given many UK women the ability to take on more hours

For decades, professional women in the UK have worked fewer hours than they would ideally like because of the responsibilities associated with caring for children and other dependents. However, the rise of flexible and hybrid working opportunities is beginning to reverse this. 

An economic analysis conducted for the Commission found that hybrid working has encouraged large numbers of professionally educated women to move to full-time work – particularly mothers. The Commission found that:

• UK women who have hybrid working arrangements are much more likely to work full-time than those who work mainly in locations other than their homes. This is especially true for women with children.
• There has been a significant increase in the share of UK women in specific sectors (banking, ICT, and other professional services) working full-time between 2019 and 2023, which again was especially pronounced for women with children.

3. Individuals with disabilities and long-term health conditions highly value flexibility 

In the UK and elsewhere, declining labor market activity has been an important recent economic challenge that has contributed to tight labor market conditions and persistent inflation. Increases in the number of economically inactive individuals with long-term conditions, especially since the Covid pandemic, have been a key contributor. The Commission concluded that greater availability of hybrid and flexible opportunities can help to address this, while also enabling organizations to benefit from the talents and skills of individuals with conditions that make full-time location-based employment untenable: 

• 42% of UK businesses polled reported finding it easier to hire people with disabilities since the rise of hybrid working.
• 44% of UK workers with long-term health conditions reported wanting more flexible working in their role, and 47% said that flexible working had improved their wellbeing. 

Time to embrace the shift – or face losing out on talent

Taken together, the three insights above indicate that organizations with rigid location-based work policies could increasingly struggle to attract or retain the skilled workers they need to grow and thrive, leading to more staff churn and higher recruitment costs. Nearly half of respondents to our Morning Consult survey now consider flexible work a basic expectation of their employment, rather than a perk, and 70% said they would consider leaving their current job for a more flexible working environment in the future.

Of course in some instances, certain organizations may feel they need their teams on location 100% of the time. However, it’s clear from the UK Hybrid Work Commission that those organizations will need to pay higher salaries to attract talent, and risk missing out altogether on the skilled contribution of individuals with disabilities, long-term health conditions, or childcare responsibilities, for whom working full-time in an office won’t be suitable. 

This need not be the case. To learn more about how embracing hybrid work can help your organization, get in touch or read the conclusions from the UK Hybrid Work Commission in full here for free. 

*Original article posted in Zoom Blog

I have viewed instructions and videos for changing video settings. They all refer to a little green Video icon under Settings. However, under my Settings, I have nothing of the kind. Nothing that refers to Video Settings and no little green camera icon. Is this because I'm a 'Basic' user? Do I not have access to this feature? My system requirements for my Mac OS are fine, so that's not it. Any help appreciated!

Hello!  Appreciative of any help asap.

Setup as follows:  I am recording someone participating in a sport lesson.  It is my Zoom account and I am using my iphone.  The clinician is on the Zoom with me.  The person being taught is on her phone with the clinician separately.  We would like to record the session with MY CAMERA VIEW, able to hear the clinician as well.  So we want to lock the screen on MY VIEW, not that of the clinician, who will be the speaker 99% of the time. We have only been able to record with it capturing the speaker, who is the clinician, every time she speaks, while we want to see the person being taught only, while able to hear the speaker's lesson.  

Thank you!

We have tried everything we know and have learned online.  Could someone please help asap?  

Hello,

I accidentally clicked Educational Institution while trying to sign up and now I cannot complete a sign up through the email I wish to use Zoom through. Is there any way to undo this so I can continue the sign-up process, can you send me a support ticket? I cannot get onto any of my school Zoom meetings. 

Thank you!

We have a very exciting webinar coming up on October 26 at 8 a.m. PST to dive into Zoom AI Companion! Join us to learn about: 

Agenda:

Challenges of Modern Work

Impact of Generative AI

Zoom’s AI Strategy and Principles

Zoom AI Companion Overview

Industry and Departmental Use Cases

Discussion / Q&A

Register here: https://success.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_uc_yySOKQGe1xEJPvpjItw#/registration