Why video platform Zoom has become a sales coach

Zoom’s bid to stay relevant in a post-Covid world is an AI tool which brings up to speed those who are late to meetings and as well as a virtual coach for salespeople.

Zoom head of ANZ Bede Hackney. Picture: Dylan Coker

Zoom is pushing into new territories, including the use of artificial intelligence to measure and assess the calls of salespeople, in a bid to stay relevant in a post-lockdown world.

The decade-old company, which rose to fame during the pandemic as the video platform of choice for meetings, town halls and even romantic interests, has recently launched new AI-powered tools as it looks to out-compete the likes of Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Skype.

One of those tools is called AI Companion, a service for paying users that allows them to ask questions, obtain summaries and get up to speed on meetings they may have joined late.

“One of the capabilities that I‘m the most excited about is to help those meetings where you’re double booked or you might have joined late,” said Zoom chief growth officer Graeme Geddes, who was visiting Sydney from California for a company roadshow this week.

Zoom global chief growth officer Graeme Geddes.

“You now have the ability to ask the AI companion during the live meeting, to catch you up on what you may have missed.

“It can give you an intelligent summary of your meeting, has the ability to take notes, give people time back and make recommendations as far as what the next steps for follow-up items.”

Asked how Zoom maintained its relevance when face-to-face interactions were possible again, the company’s head of Australia and New Zealand, Bede Hackney, said there was a focus on what he calls “meeting equity”.

“As organisations kind of grapple with returning to the office, (we are looking at) how do we make it so that remote workers and those who might be in the physical meeting room have an equitable experience,” he said.

“One of the ones I love is a capability called intelligent director. If there’s 10 people in a meeting room and 10 people logged in remotely, instead of the meeting room being just one box where you can’t see the expressions on their face, Zoom breaks out each of those people into their own box online.”

One of Zoom’s more interesting new products was targeting sales people. The product, called revenue accelerator, analyses sales pitches made to clients.

“What revenue accelerator allows us to do is use an AI tool to track how much time each person is talking, how much time they are listening and what’s the longest spiel that your salesperson gives,” Mr Hackney said. The tool could tell “how patient they are, if the customer believes it, how they were engaged and what’s the sentiment of the customer on the other side”, he said.

Within that program was another tool called virtual coach, ­allowing sales representatives to practise their pitch on a virtual customer. “We … view it as, the ability to practise before you go out on the field for the big game,” Mr Geddes said. “You set it up in a way where after you get a certain score, that’s when you would be able to graduate to actually taking live customer interactions.”