Zoom will soon integrate Anthropic’s chatbot across its platform

Zoom is partnering with Anthropic to integrate the company’s AI assistant across its productivity platform. In a post on Tuesday, Zoom says it will first add the chatbot to its Contact Center product, which businesses can use as a channel for customer support.

Zoom says Claude, a chatbot Anthropic launched in March, should help customer support agents by creating “better self-service features” that can help guide customers toward relevant solutions. It will also soon be able to surface necessary resources for agents while they’re serving customers.

The company is vague about how it will implement Claude in other areas of the app — like Team Chat, Meetings, Phone, Whiteboard, and Zoom IQ — but Zoom will likely leverage the assistant to help it compete with other productivity apps that use AI, like Slack. Zoom already has a suite of AI-powered capabilities available through Zoom IQ, an assistant it built through a partnership with OpenAI. So far, Zoom IQ can generate summaries and message drafts as well as create whiteboards based on text prompts.

Additionally, Zoom Ventures, a Zoom offshoot that invests in startups, also announced that it has made an investment in the Google-backed Anthropic. Zoom says working with both Anthropic and OpenAI helps bolster its “federated approach” to AI.

“Partnering with Anthropic also furthers our commitment to providing customers with our federated approach to AI, optimized to deliver outstanding customer experience outcomes,” Smita Hashim, Zoom’s chief product officer, says. “Additionally, with our investment, we are advancing leading-edge companies like Anthropic and helping to drive innovation in the Zoom ecosystem and beyond.”