Zoom to use AI to find friends for hot desk office bookings

Zoom is making a play in the highly competitive world of office layouts, offering AI-driven suggestions on where a friendly colleague might be when booking hot desks.

Zoom’s new reservation tool is already running hot in co-working spaces and more modern offices that are shifting away from permanent desks.

Zoom is moving beyond its video call business and looking to make a play in the highly competitive and lucrative world of office real estate.

But rather than building buildings, the US tech company, which rose to fame during the pandemic, is making a play for the layout of the office.

The company wants to have a say in who sits where and when, and it is using artificial intelligence to make suggestions on where a friendly colleague might be.

The shift is part of what Matthew Saxon, Zoom’s US-based Australian chief people officer, says makes the company’s offering a “superior product”.

In any case, the company’s product suite is beginning to look a lot like that of Microsoft and Google, but Mr Saxon says it’s not intentional.

“I think in some areas, there’s definitely your product overlap,” he said. “The landscape in this space, there are a lot of players that have certain elements of this that we would compete with, but I don’t know if there’s anyone that has this sort of breadth in what we do specifically.”

Mr Saxon says the new reservation tool is already running hot in co-working spaces and more modern offices that are shifting away from permanent desks and towards a hot desk approach – where desks are unassigned and people can change their seat as they please.

“You can see where people are sitting (with the tool) and it will look at people you interact with regularly and say, ‘hey, you might want to sit next to this person’,” he says.

“It’s these little things where we spend a lot of time thinking about what’s the use case and what goes beyond just the nuts and bolts.”

Zoom’s US-based Australian chief people officer Matthew Saxon.

Zoom was one of the lucky tech companies that really found a home during the pandemic. Before the world went into lockdown, the company wasn’t sure it could survive, Mr Saxon says.

“A few years ago we were thinking about how we could survive. By and large we’ve checked that box. It’s now how we enable thriving,” he says.

Zoom’s reservation tool comes after the company released a number of AI-powered plays as it looks for relevance in a post-pandemic world. One of them was an AI sales coach that could give feedback on sales calls conducted over Zoom. Another was called AI companion, a tool which automatically attends meetings on a paying user’s behalf.

That tool can transcribe and summarise a meeting and later be queried on what it heard, even telling someone if their name was mentioned.

Asked if the tool helped deal with workplace anxiety, Mr Saxon said: “Theoretically it could, although I haven’t thought about that”.

“Personally, I thought about it more from a user standpoint, from an efficiency perspective and in giving time back,” he says.

Mr Saxon admits not every meeting requires full attention.

“There’s a lot of meetings where you’ll see an agenda, it’s an hour meeting and there’s just one topic that you’re interested in, or there’s one thing that if it comes up, you want to kind of know about,” he said.