How AI is starting to integrate and transform your workplace: remote meetings
In this post, we're going to take a look at Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom and how they are leveraging generative AI technology to empower your team to do more with less.
Introduction
You know ChatGPT. Right? Well, if you've been living under a rock, ChatGPT is a chatbot that can understand and write human language as if it were one of us. It can even write code, summarize articles, and a bunch of other cool stuff.
ChatGPT sparked a natural language revolution and the start of a new "AI" age. Soon, you're going to start wondering where all of these AI tools came from and how you're so dependent on them, especially in the workplace.
Meetings, meetings, meetings...
Everybody hates long meetings, especially the ones that provide little to no value. Not only you're forced to be there, but most of the conversations can be summed up in just a quick chat message or an email. Luckily, that's about to change, and in a good way.
You've probably used or are currently using one of the many messaging apps in your workplace to stay in touch and collaborate with your colleagues, and employees, or communicate with clients. Communication apps have had some great years since working from home became the norm during COVID-19 which made them invaluable to get any kind of work done.
Today, we're going to take a look at these tools:
- Slack: Slack AI
- Microsoft Teams: Teams Premium
- Zoom: Zoom AI Companion
Slack AI
Just a couple of weeks ago, on September 6th, Salesforce Inc., Slack's parent company announced Slack AI.
So what is Slack AI? It's a built-in tool that is going to make communications better, by integrating the power of generative AI directly into your Slack Workspace.
Here are some of the ways Slack AI will help:
- Channel Summaries: It will automatically summarize conversations in your work channels. This helps everyone catch up on important information without endlessly scrolling through all the messages.
- Thread Summaries: Slack AI can also summarize discussions happening within threads, which is very helpful when a thread is just too long to read.
- Message Search: Unlike traditional search, this one will function more like a built-in ChatGPT that can directly answer a question using Natural Language from information found in previous messages, documents, and more.
Take a look at the official promo video below:
Slack AI, Source: YouTube
Salesforce Inc. and Slack did not make it clear which language model will power Slack AI. The service is expected to launch this winter. You can read the full story on the Salesforce news portal here.
Microsoft Teams Premium
A while ago, Microsoft announced a lot of AI-powered tools and services that will integrate with its Office suite. Microsoft Teams was no exception, and the company will bake AI directly into the Teams application.
Here are some of the ways Microsoft Teams will help:
- Intelligent Recap: This feature will use generative AI and the meeting transcript generated during the call to prepare notes and key points after the meeting. No more note-taking! Phew.
- AI-Generated Tasks: Teams will also generate tasks and actions based on your meeting transcript so that you and your colleagues can track and follow up easily.
- Live Translations: You're meeting with someone who doesn't speak your native language? No problem. Teams Premium will generate translated captions in real time thereby removing language barriers.
See the features in action in the official promo video below:
Microsoft Teams Premium - Source: YouTube
Microsoft has been a huge investor in OpenAI and will use its LLMs, such as GPT-4 as the main model behind Teams Premium. The service is currently available for just 7$ per person. You can read more details and pricing information here.
Zoom AI Companion
Also recently, Zoom introduced its AI Companion which will be available for paid Zoom accounts. Similar to what we've seen with Slack and Teams the new AI updates will bring lots of features that can save time and increase productivity.
Here are some of the ways that Zoom AI Companion will help:
- Real-time Translation: The tool can generate real-time captions, enabling non-native speakers to understand the speaker.
- Meeting Summaries: Zoom AI Companion will also automatically generate summaries and action items from your meeting transcript, making it easy to share via email or team chat.
- In-Meeting Queries: Joined the meeting late? The tool will help you automatically catch up on what you missed without disrupting the flow by just asking any question about the meeting.
The official promo video below shows how these features will work:
Zoom AI Companion - Source: YouTube
Zoom AI Copilot will use Zoom's own Large Language Model (or LLM for short), in addition to Meta's Llama 2, and Anthropic as per the company.
AI Companion is available starting with the Pro plan, you can find out more about the press release here, and the different packages available here.
Final thoughts
A few years from now, we're going to wonder how we used to get anything done without the assistance we're getting from these generative AI tools.
I think we will increasingly depend on such tools and services that can automate tasks. Instead of spending time reviewing a bunch of emails, chats, and conversations to extract a summary, or taking meeting notes and sharing them with all stakeholders, automation will free us up to concentrate on the stuff that matters.
Companies will undoubtedly increase generative AI adoption across all team functions, as long as these tools bring more value to their clients. So strap on, we're going to see a lot more of this stuff in the coming months and years.
Check out my latest post about AI at work and how it could potentially take over some jobs:
jeff
Thanks for reading!
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