AWS has announced that its Amazon Q Business index now integrates with the Zoom AI Companion.
The index connects to a company’s knowledge sources, customer records, call transcripts, and more. It then powers Amazon Q, AWS’s “AI assistant for work”.
Now, the index may also power the Zoom AI Companion.
As a result, Zoom users can pull information from various enterprise applications without having to open them.
Those systems include Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Salesforce, SharePoint, and many others.
Consequently, when searching for information, employees don’t have to leave the first app they open every morning: Zoom Workspace.
In a blog post, AWS shared an example of a sales rep seeking additional information before a renewal call on Zoom.
With this integration, they could ask the AI Companion: “When is the customer’s contract up for renewal, and who signed the last one?” The AI Assistant would then pull from the index to provide an instant answer.
“AWS and Zoom are changing the future of work with our latest collaboration,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of AWS Agentic AI, when sharing the news on LinkedIn.
“Q Business brings enhanced accuracy of AI responses and a secure framework to implement GenAI assistants,” he continued.
What I think customers are really going to love about this integration is that they can stay within their familiar Zoom interface and reduce the time they spend switching between applications.
Yet, perhaps most exciting is the potential for AWS and Zoom to take this collaboration further.
Consider the Amazon Q use cases the business index supports beyond extracting enterprise knowledge.
Specifically, think about how Amazon Q uses data from the index to generate content and complete multi-step tasks.
For instance, a sales or service leader could ask Q to extract key insights from a customer satisfaction survey and create visualizations to share with the team.
Meanwhile, a marketing rep might ask Q to summarize what was discussed during meetings – across collaborations apps – while they were on vacation.
There are also many use cases far beyond customer-facing functions. For instance, an HR employee could ask Q to create a job posting for a new position before creating and scheduling a social media post to promote it.
By taking the collaboration further, the tech giants could grant employees access to all these capabilities via the Zoom AI Companion.
In this sense, AWS may help Zoom become the operational center point for a business.
From that center point, employees could share cross-platform data and trigger actions across various business systems without ever leaving Zoom.
To pinch a line from Sivasubramanian’s post: “This is what workplace innovation looks like!”
How to Access the AWS-Zoom Integration
Companies should use the Amazon Q Business Data Accessor to connect Zoom’s AI Companion with the Amazon Q Business index.
Essentially, this acts as a gatekeeper, controlling what data Zoom’s AI Companion can access from the Amazon Q index and ensuring everything follows company rules and privacy settings.
Zoom’s AI Companion can connect to the Amazon Q index through this gatekeeper.
In doing so, companies can pull helpful, real-time information from a company’s internal data via Zoom without leaving the platform.
The AWS-Zoom Partnership Gathers Momentum
The partnership between AWS and Zoom is going from strength to strength.
In February, AWS announced its exit from the UCaaS market, sunsetting Chime and moving its internal teams to Zoom.
At the time, the cloud giant noted in a company blog: “When we decide to retire a service or feature, it is typically because we’ve introduced something better or our partners offer a solution that is a good fit for our customers as well as our own employees.”
Zoom is seemingly the partner providing a “good fit” solution.
Meanwhile, the Zoom Contact Center became available on the AWS marketplace late last year alongside Zoom Workplace, Revenue Accelerator, and Workvivo.
AWS made Zoom their 2024 EMEA Alliance Partner of the Year shortly after.
As that collaboration continues, the potential for Zoom to become the operational center point for business further takes shape.
