The Excitement and Fear of AI in the Contact Center

Paul Weiss, Bluewave:

Welcome everyone. Thank you for watching our video today. This is our Bluewave webinar series called The Current. It is a continuation of our demystifying AI conversations. This webinar series is designed to provide information on the latest technologies and how they can help solve your business challenges. When Bluewave looks at return on investment opportunities for our clients, we look at the building blocks of technology, people performance and experience, and recognize that all of that is in service of operational efficiency and driving company revenues. Today we’re going to explore AI and how the right technology platforms can drive positive impact across people, performance and experience, and the many use cases and personas that exist within an organization. If we can all agree that all the work that we do, whether we’re in sale service, back office, executive leadership, or really anywhere across the business, if that work can benefit from time savings and simplified experience, then we can all agree that a unified platform like Zoom, we’ll deliver expanded value to our business and its success. With that in mind today, we invited our strategic partner, Brandon Knight, the CX AI leader at Zoom to be our guest. I am Paul Weiss, vice president of Solution Advisory at Bluewave, and I will be our moderator. So Brandon, thank you for joining us. It is nice to see you today, and we’re glad to have you here.

Brandon Knight, Zoom:

Well, thanks for having me, man. And it is good to see you. We go way back. You’ve been building in this space for a long time, so I’m excited to be a part of this.

Paul Weiss, Bluewave:

Indeed. Well, thank you. Thank you. And I am too. I’m looking forward to what’s about to happen in real time and purely organically, which is what we love about these sessions, these conversations. So for our audience, the format is relatively straightforward. It’s going to be simple questions and answers. I’ll ask most of the questions. Brandon will give most of the answers. But in that process, remember our theme here is artificial intelligence, how it’s been infused into the various Zoom platforms and who it’s benefiting and how it’s benefiting personas across the organization. So you’re going to hear terms Zoom, workplace work, vivo, zoom, contact center, and we’re going to talk about those platforms, the personas, the impact, the value they deliver, all in the context of AI and efficiency and automation and the like. We hope that our audience gains great insight and finds value in the time we’re about to spend. So Brandon, let’s get started first by you introducing yourself, your role at Zoom. Obviously Zoom is a household name, but my sense is that there’s so much more to Zoom than even many Zoom consumers recognize and realize. But tell us just a bit about your role there, what your charter is in trying to evangelize the Zoom story to the marketplace.

Brandon Knight, Zoom:

And I think you’re spot on. It is one of the biggest challenges that we have. It’s a good bad story, right? Because we went through the pandemic and everyone kindergartners could tell you who Zoom was from because of the meetings platform. But we’ve become so well known for that. Many of even our existing customers don’t even know the plethora of products that we actually offer on our platform. Which brings me to my role primarily, I’m the chief CX evangelist, so my role is to do just that, is to help people understand that we are, as corny as it sounds, one of the taglines is we’re more than just meetings. And that’s really my role is to get that message out there and to talk about the other things that we offer.

Paul Weiss, Bluewave:

And it’s a good point. It got to the point where Zoom became a verb, and I’ll zoom you, right, just like Kleenex for assumptive tissue,

Brandon Knight, Zoom:

Right?

Paul Weiss, Bluewave:

Zoom is the assumptive meeting, but to your point, it’s both blessing and curse. That type of market awareness and brand recognition is both great, but it’s limiting if it’s, yeah, they’re the meetings platform because you are certainly so much more than that and with let’s just call it out now and get it out of the way, right? There’s Zoom and there’s Microsoft Teams, there’s some just core sort of top of marketplace competition. And when folks try to break these platforms down, this little thing or that little thing or that piece we use it for, it may lose the power and the value proposition that unified platform can deliver. And we’re going to talk about that. I’m sure much head on here in the next 30 minutes or so. So my first question for you broadly is why do you think the use of collaborative communication pool like we’re doing here now have become so much more prevalent for enterprises lately?

Brandon Knight, Zoom:

And I think you hit it right on the head. It’s a need for business to be able to communicate. And of course the easy answer is right, we went through the pandemic, everybody went home, we thought it was going to be temporary. So many businesses realize the upside of having their agents and their employees work from home that now we have more hybrid environments. So now we no longer really think of it as well. We have a brick and mortar business or a remote business. Now we know most organizations are running a hybrid business. And while we love the hybrid business, because like you said, zoom became a verb and we love the fact that people can do meetings, but if that’s all you’re doing, if you’re not taking the other steps to collaborate as a business, then you’re missing some parts. You’re missing some things, some integral things that used to happen by the water cooler or on my way out of the bathroom or in in-person meetings, you’re missing some of that.

So that’s why I think the collaboration tool is important. And second to that, to me, more of a direct issue as being a contact center person. I came up, agent supervisor, manager worked my way through. There was always a little bit of a disconnect between the contact center employees and tools they had access to and back office or operational employees, the tools they had access to. Even from a morale perspective, contact center employees sometimes don’t feel a part of the big picture or a part of the whole organization. Sometimes they were even in separate buildings. So having this employee experience and customer experience, having technology join together is not only a nice to have, it’s a necessity If you want the morale and the communication that needs to happen for your business to be successful, it’s a necessity. Now,

Paul Weiss, Bluewave:

I couldn’t agree more. And it is far from a past tense challenge. That siloed mentality is very much a reality. Organizations build today have struggle with cross-functional alignment and leadership communication and what’s good over here needs to be good over here. And there’s an African proverb, I don’t know how to say it in an African dialect, but in English it is if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

Brandon Knight, Zoom:

Yes.

Paul Weiss, Bluewave:

And that particular, I think there’s particular meaning in that because especially the larger organizations get where decision making is provincial, the value proposition of a technology is sort of specific to me. And if I wait for anybody else’s consensus or alignment, I don’t get what I want as fast. And it creates these walls, these silos and the technology prior to what, and Zoom is really unique in the marketplace. We’re going to talk about that. But companies have built point solutions at these siloed challenges. And then the buying marketplace has bought solutions in that methodology. Now where Zoom is connecting the use case for AI and for collaboration across customer facing workflows or internal facing workflows, companies are able to connect in greater visibility, more consistency, leverage purchasing power, and reduce total tech spend because they’re buying from a unified provider. So it really is changing the game and the technology that Zoom is offering is leading that ability for companies to think differently about how they procure and maybe break down these silos rather than technology supporting the siloed approach. It may be one of the biggest challenges that I see consistently with organizations that we interact with of really any size is fragmentation and silos and approach.

So as we talk about Zoom, workplace, work, vivo and Zoom contact center at the highest level, zoom Workplace is the remote worker, the administrator, the executive managers, the sales folks, the people that collaborate message talk on the phone and meet. We all meet Work Vivo is likely the least known of the value proposition platforms that Zoom offers around employee experience and collaboration. And then Zoom Contact Center is what it sounds like it is meant for primarily customer facing activities, leveraging AI and all the effective ways to simplify and automate and deliver better experiences. Since we just talked about silos, we just talked about the way companies procure and decide in silos. It’s also a fact that companies day in day out, operate in silos and work Vivo really attacks that in just what the platform enables. So let’s talk a little bit about Work Vivo, who IT impacts and what value it delivers.

Brandon Knight, Zoom:

Yeah, I think work Vivo, and of course I’m a little biased, but to me it’s one of the greatest acquisitions of the last several years. Bringing that product, that company into our fold. And the way I look at it is I look at Workplace, which is mostly we consider our legacy products, it’s what we are known for in addition to the newer products like Docs that are coming out. That’s kind of like how you communicate work Vivo is more to me, what are you communicating and the interaction, it’s an intranet, internet in its purest form. It is an internet, so for your internal employees, but the way it’s set up, it really to me can impact culture, which I think is one of the things that’s lacking when you go out of a brick and mortar. One of the challenges is how do I maintain my culture, how I maintain what people like about it.

I think the fact that Work Vivo allows you to communicate everything from important human resource policies to what’s on in the Olympics and everything in between. And you can have the individual teams and departments. Everybody has their own page. And let’s face it, I mean there really isn’t a teenager or adult around that doesn’t know how Instagram or Facebook Works and the importance of it from a collaboration tool. And that’s really what Work Viba is to me on the work side. It allows me to go in and find out about business things, but it also allows me to interact with my coworkers on fun things. I can comment on things. I can like things just, and that’s what we’re doing anyway,

Paul Weiss, Bluewave:

What we’re doing anyway, it brings, and by the way, it has long been a challenge, particularly when commercial residential bandwidth started to be delivered to everybody’s home faster than they had it at work. And then the mobile devices got dropped in everybody’s hands. People started to say, why can’t I have similar experience in my business work life that I do in my personal consumer life and work vivo? And many of the other products you offer are helping to do that. So with Work Vivo, we want to improve engagement. We are improving engagement, interactive features, recognition systems, feedback tools, connecting the workforce, to your point, never more important than now with the physical disconnection that work from home. And expanded geographies can put upon us streamlining channels for updates, news and important announcements. And earlier you mentioned culture boosting morale, the reason all of that matters, and when we’ve, in past webinars like this, we’ve talked about AI and driving efficiency, and it’s not just about automating work that was manual.

It’s not just about total operating costs coming down because you spend less time doing tasks. One of the not so silent killers in companies is turnover and attrition. The cost of sourcing, screening, hiring, training, onboarding people can be anywhere from half to three times the cost of the actual person inside of an organization. But because that cost is felt cross departmentally, hr it here, there, it might not fall to one bottom line. It is sometimes not as an obvious to the organization what the bleed out that attrition has on an organization. And so engagement and culture are so important to drive against the attrition trend.

Brandon Knight, Zoom:

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It’s no secret that if I feel a sense of belonging, if I feel a part of something, if I feel that I’m engaged in, then I am more likely to have ownership in it. And if I have ownership and a stake in it, then I’m more likely to do it. So of course my tenure is going to be great. And I’ll tell you one of the things that’s also great about Vivo is that I’m talking about a lot from an employee perspective of what I am putting into it and what I’m looking to get from my coworkers and stuff. But because this is an enterprise wide tool, you have in my opinion, access to c-suite personnel. You have access to other departments that you might not normally interact with. You can see, like I said, not just the work side, but you get to see the personality, I think of leadership that you might not normally see because you get to see their comments and what they like and what they don’t like, and you get to get a kind of a personal look at your leader, which we know is important to how I feel about doing my work.

So I think the culture part, of course it enhances communication, but I think the culture part is huge.

Paul Weiss, Bluewave:

It’s funny as you’re talking about that I’m faking about our professional sales lives and the way you and I have interacted with clients over the years and where this work from home sort of disconnected challenge can cause issues with how companies internally build culture and inclusiveness and belonging in a weird way has had the reverse impact and to some degree on interacting with external parties. And so Zoom workplace, putting the two of us together in this kind of room, now both of us have our company logos behind us, but oftentimes you have a peek into the office or the home or the gidgets and gadgets, the Star Wars, the poise, the things that people have in their homes. And in the old days we were putting our suits and ties on it with a bit more pop and circumstance and we were walking into an environment that was armored and structured and now we’re interacting with people oftentimes in their homes. We’re dressed much more informally. And so I don’t want to blow by the significant, I think positive impact that Zoom Workplace has had putting people from all over the world together in real time in ways that have made communicating to external parties, whether sales or service or otherwise more productive, more time efficient and a lot more informal I think to all of our benefit.

Brandon Knight, Zoom:

And I think that that informal part, so many businesses, the businesses are taking advantage of us know this. There’s so many businesses I think that might be missing out because what we found is that that informal part breeds productivity. Go figure. People are more productive when they’re comfortable, when they’re relaxed, when they’re engaged. And you get that just by, like you said, them being home. I mean, of course, like you said, we have the virtual backgrounds on now, which is a cool feature. But I love that aspect that you mentioned of when I’m interacting with people that I can see their backgrounds and I can see what matters to them and what’s important. And not to be too far, I’m going to put it on the business side. We’re salespeople at heart, right?

That’s what a lot of people are doing in this technology space and basic sales is we know people buy from people they like. It’s not always the product or the offering, but it’s the ability to make a connection. And we know. But back when you had to actually do research, a good sales rep would look up whatever they could about the customer or the person they wanted to interact with. Now you can do a Zoom meeting with them. And like you said, I can see Star Wars, I can see their sports, I can see whatever is of interest to them right there. And I think it makes for a great conversation starter. I think it makes for a personal touch to it. I love it and I love the collaboration of it as well because we all know about the meetings and stuff, but there’s whiteboards, there’s docs, there’s ways you can share information, you can share your screen.

Everybody knows about those types of things. But I think it allows for great collaboration and also not just post covid, but even for some businesses that are, they might be financially conscious about their travel and the amount of time they spend, an additional amount of time they may spend away from home. So it does create both some financial responsibility and a balance of work life, which we know is hugely important. Even in this day and age of super productivity, we all still want our time with our family and we want to have some balance there.

Paul Weiss, Bluewave:

The common experience, the connectedness that you talk about, being able to be into a person’s life a little bit and find common interest is just so important. It’s why everybody talks about the weather because before you get to know somebody, your one shared common experience with them is whether you’re both standing in that very moment. So there we go. But people watching this are going to say, Paul and Brandon, I know we’ve been meeting for years now. Why is that new? So let’s talk about what innovation that Zoom has brought with AI companion into those environments. First of all, we still experience organizations with a tremendous amount of app confusion, jabber for this teams, for the internal Zoom for that, companies that have different folks operating in different systems. And it makes it very, very hard and confusing and nobody can get a sense of what really truly is happening across all these systems.

So one, just the utility of being able to call message, meet text within a unified platform and have that experience simple for you, whether you are in an office sitting at home or on the road is though it’s relatively pay stakes in unified communications, many organizations have not achieved that synchronicity. Exactly. And then now beyond that, what are we doing? Okay, I have a meeting, six people were on it. I was focusing on the content and the people. So what’s my takeaway from that meeting? Did I get good notes? Do I know what my to-dos are? How do I save myself time in preparing for my next step in rationalizing what just happened within that meeting? And so let’s talk just a little bit about the infusion of AI into Zoom workplace and how that’s helping individuals simply perform more effectively.

Brandon Knight, Zoom:

I agree wholeheartedly, and I will tell you there’s something that you hear a lot. People always say, time is money. I will tell you as I’ve matured, I have learned that time is way more valuable than money. Money’s good and it helps me get things, but my time is extremely valuable to me. And this is the thing, as corny as it sounds, just the thing you can’t get back. So that’s what I love when you talk about AI being infused in these tools. Some of the simple things we know about is summarizing the meeting, right? So I get stuff. I don’t care how good you are at taking notes or making reminders for yourself, you’re not going to be as good as ai. You’re not going to hear everything that everyone is saying and be able to summarize that meeting in its totality, which AI is going to do for you.

Another feature that I probably take advantage of a little too much, but I tend to be double booked sometimes. I tend to be back to back in meetings and prior to this feature, I may get to a meeting five minutes late, six minutes late, seven minutes late, the meeting is already going on. I can ask people, Hey, what happened? Or who said something? Or I can embarrass myself by asking something that was already mentioned before I got in the meeting like most people do. But one of the things I love is with AI Companion, you don’t necessarily have to wait until the meeting’s over. I can be caught up in real time and get a synopsis of who said what before I got there. And that helps me out a lot. I’m working on being on time for meetings. I don’t want people to get the right idea, but

Paul Weiss, Bluewave:

You and me both.

Brandon Knight, Zoom:

Yeah,

Paul Weiss, Bluewave:

You and me both. I was born six minutes after my twin brother and I’ve been six minutes late ever since. Let’s just be clear about that. I want to transition a bit to contact center and what you just talked about with AI patching me up in real time. So one of the, I think a paradigm shift with AI in contact center, and we’re going to talk and my direct question to you will be what’s your take on why there is both excitement and fear in how AI could be used in contact centers? And I will want you to answer that question, but getting my thought out first, AI is going to analyze big data sets faster and better than we can is going to recognize trends and help us make better, smarter, more informed decisions than we will. It’s going to fill the gaps and the holes that we most organizations have in their data sets today.

But the other thing that it does is it shifts in my view, the context center from the traditional posture of reacting after things happened, looking at quantitative measurements of how much and how fast and how quick, how many did we lose? How many did we answer, how long did it take? And being able to focus more on the qualitative assessments of how well we did, why our clients or customers called us, how we left them feeling, but also not just analyzing that after it happened to try to remediate or respond, but guiding your agents in real time, supporting them with emotion next best action and access to knowledge in the during rather than the after. So that rather than reacting to a situation, we preempt one from happening in the first place. And so as I lay that out and start thinking about where you’re seeing AI drive impact and what Zoom’s AI story is, just tell us a little bit about your thoughts there. Let’s focus first on the excitement pieces of what you’re seeing and then we’ll address the apprehensions that buyers may have.

Brandon Knight, Zoom:

Yeah, I think the excitement piece comes from one of the things you just said, right? It is the old announcer prevention is worth a pound of cure if I’m being proactive, is an ability that quite honestly, most of the traditional contact centers just didn’t have because everything was based on the customer calling in or then the customer emailing or whatever presenting the agent with a problem that now the agent is solving. And even in sales environments where we were doing outbound calling, it was still get the person on the phone and then try to get through some objections, but it was based on a list I didn’t really know much about The person Being able to crunch data and being able to do it in real time is hugely valuable. I think when you think of what a consumer is actually contacting a business for, either you have a product I want to buy or I have it and I don’t know how to use it, doesn’t work, or I have it and it’s something wrong with it, but whatever it is, being able to track that conversation in real time and offer that agent actual assistance, things that help.

And of course we look at it like, well, that’s great, that makes the agent more knowledgeable, makes the agent more efficient. But what it’s really doing is it’s making me as a customer happier because I’m getting what I wanted faster and more efficiently. You’re reducing the amount of times that I have to call you or email you or whatever like that. So I love that aspect of it. I’ll tell you something that, and this goes back to my days of managing contact centers. There’s another feature with AI and our contact center product that honestly it might be my favorite feature. I love the virtual assistant on the front end. I love the smartest Asian assist, but I love the fact that, and I don’t want anybody to take this the wrong way, but I’m telling you this is a person who’s managed contact centers. I’ve had hundreds actually had thousands of employees and human beings.

If you have a list of 10 to 15 resolution codes or disposition codes on what happened on a call, I could have a hundred of them take the same phone call. I’m probably going to get 80 different responses. And most of my responses, quite frankly, are going to be the first three or four because they don’t want to read through the list anyway, right? And then of course, then I got to look at their notes and depending on who wrote the notes, I could get it the first time or I may have to call somebody or I may have to go meet with that person in the old days to figure out,

Paul Weiss, Bluewave:

By the way, if everybody nodded their head when you said 10 minutes ago that none of us are going to take meetings in real time while also participating in a meeting in real time, as good as AI is going to do it, the exact same thought applies to what you’re just about to tell us.

Brandon Knight, Zoom:

Yes,

Paul Weiss, Bluewave:

I’m an agent rowing my way through an interaction with perhaps an upset customer trying to get to a resolution that they’re happy with, and then somehow I’m required to in the little bit of time, I have probably some finite amount, I got to jam this in so I’m ready for the next call to figure out and disposition all that just happened and summarize it effectively and accurately remove my emotion from it and do it right and clear. That’s hard work,

Brandon Knight, Zoom:

And I have to do that under the constant pressure of seeing the amount of calls that are in queue and my average talk time and little flashy lights and everything going off. So I’m pressured to end this call. I’m pressured to put in the notes about this call, pick a disposition. I got the other calls coming in when you’re talking ai, listening to an entire call, picking the right disposition based on the conversation, putting in the notes so the agent doesn’t, just the benefits of accuracy and time saved alone are worth the cost of admission for this product. And it’s my favorite piece,

Paul Weiss, Bluewave:

Millions of dollars, no doubt, millions of dollars. When you think about the impact that wrap time has on agent occupancy and ultimately how many agents you need to carry the work, the impacts are significant. So these very simple things that summarizing accurately and faster drive huge impact to companies. And they’ve oftentimes are these jewels, these ROI jewels that are sitting there waiting to be grabbed. And we talk a lot with our clients about the difference between clarity on the scale of your challenges or what I’ll call triggers, things that you feel that are painful or don’t work right, and I want to focus my entire 2025 budget on solving for those triggers. Meanwhile, the clarity or benefit of what better might look like falls a lot more often than we don’t know what we don’t know

Brandon Knight, Zoom:

Exactly.

Paul Weiss, Bluewave:

And if somebody hasn’t been made aware that by automating this or simplifying that or delivering a better experience here, I can return millions of dollars back to my organization in revenue creation or in total cost reduction. Those ROIs sit there waiting for somebody to recognize, and that’s the work that you and I do with our clients is to help deliver clarity on the benefit of outcome. I want to think less about my triggers and more about my intents. And the challenge for many of the buyers is as lack of awareness on the intents, and it’s not their fault. The market is moving fast, innovation is an a rocket speed takeoff of innovation. It’s

Brandon Knight, Zoom:

Impossible. It’s impossible to track. And I want to say this, and I’ll tell the audience, Paul, to not ask me to say this, but I’m going to say this because you brought it up as a user, and I managed thousands of agents that I was responsible for during the age of premises based equipment. There are several people that came to me when cloud was becoming a thing. I’m not going to tell you what my response to them initially was. I was one of those guys that liked the idea that my punch down room was down the hall and I could go in and do all those things myself, but I would tell you because you touched on something, and I want to say this to the leaders that are there, not as an accusation, but as someone who’s done it, you don’t know what you don’t know.

I spent every waking moment keeping the hurricane that is a contact center level and moving my business forward and motivating my employees and things. It’s impossible to think that I’m also going to be knowledgeable about all the various technologies that are available to me. And all of my operation was based on workarounds anyway. So it wasn’t even about new technology. It was like I fixed this because the system didn’t do this. So now I taught my agents how to do this, and then the agents taught each other how to do this. So we were going a hundred miles an hour with what we know with no bandwidth for benchmarking or best practices. So I’ll say this to the audience as someone who’s been there, don’t let your pride cost you money. Bluewave is an outstanding organization to help you audit, evaluate whatever the right word is, what your operation is doing and how you can be better. You don’t have to be an expert in that. So I know you didn’t ask for that, but

Paul Weiss, Bluewave:

I’m going to buy a T-shirt and I’m going to put, don’t let your pride cost you money on your tshirt. You ask me what my ideal customer profile is, and I will not talk about vertical or location count or employee size. I will say start with an open mind. You start with an open mind that recognizes that good ideas come from all kinds of places and that let’s explore possibility in an intentional smart conversations. So many great things happen just from there. So I appreciate your saying that. So with the excitement we didn’t even really get into, so I’ll say this now, the best customer service is that your customer doesn’t have to call you at all because you’ve anticipated their need. You’ve leveraged AI to understand patterns and trends and issues. You fixed the product defect or things like that before your customers had to well up and tell you about it in too much volume, and now you’d simply get less problem calls to begin with.

The next best level of service is that your customers have a path to self resolve if that’s what they choose, that at their volition in the channel of their choice at the time of day that they’re available, they can get their resolution. And then the next best is if I’ve got to interact with you in person because it’s a more complex solution set or simply that’s my preference, that the people within your organization that I speak with are in their Ironman suit and they have all the tools available to them to be able to support me in real time and not just give me a resolution, but leave me feeling good about it. And so that’s the excitement, that’s the power that AI delivers, but then there’s also the fear and the apprehension. What are you seeing as most of the ERs in towards AI that companies are struggling with?

Brandon Knight, Zoom:

I think the most common fear is this narrative that AI is going to take over. It’s going to eliminate jobs, it’s going to have a negative human impact. I think that’s the biggest one. And then after that comes the general unknown of ai. There’s so much that AI can do. There’s so much that AI is doing and there’s so much that AI will do that sometimes it’s overwhelming for an individual, even a group of individuals who are not studying that following, that tracking that going to all the trade shows, it’s overwhelming for them to figure out, well, what does all that mean to me? And I’ll tell you for the first one, yes, AI can save you time and make you more efficient from an operations perspective. But I will tell you also as a contact center leader, in most cases, the efficiencies and improvements I’m going to get from AI from an interaction perspective is things that I don’t want my agents doing anyway because human beings are expensive.

They’re my most valuable asset. And so like you said, if I can get a customer who can be satisfied with self-service, that’s best for me. If I can get something to respond and give a balance or a payment due or a reset, a pen or a user id, an email, all those things are things that need to happen in business, but they don’t require a thinking like a human creative thinker. So I like being able to have certain things handled by AI and then certain more complex things, or maybe even things that need a personal touch depending on what we’re talking about, I like being able to elevate the utilization of my agents, not necessarily eliminate them,

Paul Weiss, Bluewave:

Turn your agents into brand ambassadors and really, really build around that human first experience because you have unencumbered from all of those mundane and repetitive tasks. You’d be amazed what better can look like. I’ve also seen fear and it’s sensible fear when we talk about governance and exposure of PHI and PII and how does the language model learn? And those are also very, very important considerations. I just literally had that conversation with a client about an hour ago, and my advice to that is to be frank is that comes second. What comes first is where is the utility of AI within my organization? What can it do for me first? If it can’t do anything, then I don’t need to care about governance and security because I’m not implementing it

And I don’t want to spend the time on governance and security if I haven’t first determined when and how and where it could help me, how I will budget for it, how I will implement it, and what I can expect for return on investment out of it. When those things are understood, then as part of simply going to market and talking to vendors and evaluating vendors, you’re going to want to understand, is my data exposed? Do you redact? What are your compliances and attestations so that those things are addressed? And for the most part, providers certainly like Zoom, have cared for that. So talk a little bit about, and we just have a couple minutes left about with Zoom Workplace, with work Viva with Zoom Contact Center. Okay, so I’m building a digital first workplace that has a lot of sensitive company content, or I’m interacting with customers and AI is watching and listening and transcribing and summarizing my meeting, or it’s self-serving a client. So that’s a whole lot of potential sensitive company or employee information that might be exposed to ai. How is Zoom pairing for that in advance so that those customers that have those legitimate concerns need not be concerned with Zoom’s approach to ai?

Brandon Knight, Zoom:

Yeah, I think that’s a valid question. And I actually, I know that AI has brought more attention to the issue of governance, but my advice to businesses in general, whether using AI or not, is know where your data’s coming from and know where your data’s going. And I believe that regardless of the type of business and for us when it comes to things like our ai, we’ve chosen a federated approach because it gives us more control over the sources of the data, what can happen to the data and what of our customer’s information is available and to whom. And I’ll tell you even before it becomes how we treat our customers or what’s available in our tools for our customers to have governance, it starts at home. I can tell you me, even as a Zoom employee, I have a specific role and responsibility at Zoom that gives me access to certain types of information.

And I don’t have access to information that is not congruent to me doing my job, even from other Zoom employees. I mean, we have our own, we impose the same rules, policies, and tools within our own organization that we make available for our customers. And we believe in that. We believe there should be a viable business reason. We believe that with certain things, it should require additional approvals outside of the individual. And we have various litmus tests that we must perform internally when information is sought or requested regardless of where it’s coming from. And I know that’s a long-winded answer, but I wanted to kind of paint the picture that that’s what we believe about the governance of AI data and all information that we have available. And we think that all of our customers should be at least equal to that. And so we have tools within our tools to help ’em do that.

Paul Weiss, Bluewave:

Yeah, and I appreciate that innovation is not, it’s not a choice, it’s a mandate. And organizations, we believe that the challenge is existential that as labor costs rise, as talent pools may shrink, and as consumer expectations continue to elevate and we’re all being challenged to do more with less, that the personal story for each business about where and how they can harmonize AI and their human talent in a framework that I like to refer to as better together to drive better experiences for employees and customers and don’t get it, don’t mistake it. They are hand in hand. Your employee experiences will directly impact your customer experiences. That challenge to harmonize ai, AI and human talent effectively and efficiently in the ways that are right for each company’s own use case is in my view, an existential challenge and is panamount to future forward

Brandon Knight, Zoom:

Success. I agree. I agree 100%. And you said it so eloquently, but unfortunately I still see that people, that connection of a happy employee can help generate a happy customer. I think that still needs to get out there more. There’s still disconnect, like you mentioned earlier on, there’s still silos that don’t see the connection between them, but I guess that’s one of the many things that you guys offer, right? You could help a customer figure that out. So I think that’s good.

Paul Weiss, Bluewave:

And so do you again, zoom Workplace work Vivo, zoom, contact center, the impact for personas across the organization are end-to-end A to Z. The value propositions around productivity, engagement, improved experience, better culture that reaches out to both employees and to customers. It’s game changing. It’s a landmark shift and it takes the AI conversation away from task oriented automations. And I really wanted to do that here today and really think about how AI can enrich experience. And I think Zoom is leading the market and driving AI in that sort of experience-based value proposition. So with that, we’re coming to a close here. I would like to thank Brandon and the Zoom team for preparing for and participating in today’s the current session here with Bluewave. So Brandon, thank you very

Brandon Knight, Zoom:

Much. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. I think what you’re doing is awesome. Like I said, as a former user operator, having access to this type of information is very valuable, so I appreciate the opportunity.

Paul Weiss, Bluewave:

Thank you, Brandon, and to our audience, thank you for watching and we’ll look for you in our next session. Take care.