KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysians have grown accustomed to online meetings since the pandemic, which forced the country’s workforce onto video platforms; virtual calls have become a fixture of daily work life.
A 2024 survey by Zoom itself found that Asia Pacific workers, including those in Malaysia, rank among the heaviest users of video conferencing globally, clocking significantly more online meetings per week than their counterparts in Europe or the Americas.
Zoom Communications Inc, an American video communications giant, has launched ZoomMate and its AI Productivity Suite, a set of tools designed to do more than just host conversations — they are built to turn those conversations into finished tasks, documents and business actions, automatically.
As Malaysian companies push deeper into digital transformation and hybrid work becomes the norm rather than the exception, the demand for tools that reduce the friction between a decision made in a meeting and the work that follows it has never been sharper.
Zoom’s ZoomMate and its AI Productivity Suite help users transform workplace discussions into completed tasks, business processes and ready-to-use deliverables.
The new offerings form part of Zoom’s wider ambition to position itself as a ‘system of action’ for modern workplaces, connecting meetings, calls and chats directly with documents, presentations, follow-up activities, customer records and enterprise applications, the company said in a statement.
ZoomMate is an agentic AI workspace that brings together real-time meeting and collaboration context with business platforms including Salesforce, Jira, Slack, ServiceNow, Workday and tools from Google and Microsoft.
Users can search across Zoom, the web, and connected third-party applications, create work outputs, and carry out follow-up activities without constantly switching between platforms.
The solution combines agentic search, workflow management and content generation. It can retrieve relevant information from company files, customer records, support tickets, project updates, knowledge bases and collaboration platforms, while maintaining organisational access permissions, governance requirements and security controls.
In the context of a meeting, ZoomMate can identify possible next steps and initiate the necessary actions.
These can include arranging meetings through Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook, updating business records, creating tasks, drafting customer correspondence and activating onboarding or support processes.
It can also convert meeting discussions into completed presentations, documents, spreadsheets, reports and project plans, helping teams reduce the time between making a decision and carrying it out.
Supporting this is Zoom’s AI Productivity Suite, which focuses on content creation and includes Zoom Canvas, Zoom Slides, Zoom Sheets and Zoom Paper, powered by Zoom AI.
The suite is intended to generate context-aware materials based on information discussed, decided or shared during meetings, calls and chats.
Outputs can remain linked to the original conversation, giving teams greater clarity on how the work originated and the reasoning behind particular decisions.
Users can create, revise and collaborate on content within Zoom before exporting it to Microsoft Office, Google Workspace or PDF formats. Zoom Paper, Zoom Slides, and Zoom Sheets also support the .docx, .pptx, and .xlsx file formats, respectively.
Zoom said the tools could be used by knowledge workers, sales personnel, product and engineering teams, human resource departments, operations teams, consultants, agencies, financial advisers and small businesses.
ZoomMate is generally available in North America, with prices starting from US$20 per user per month, including AI credits.
The company expects to expand availability to other markets, including Asia Pacific, later this year.
ZoomMate is being introduced in phases and may not be immediately available to every user.
