Zoom has announced it will embed a new AI Assistant – named "Claude" – into its CCaaS platform.
The move stems from the vendor’s new partnership with Anthropic, a developer of AI systems and language models.
Claude is Anthropic’s competitor to ChatGPT, which Zoom will soon deploy across its portfolio, staring with the Zoom Contact Center.
Indeed, the CCaaS platform will soon have two new Claude-driven agent-assist applications under its banner.
Discussing these during an earnings call, Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, said:
With Claude guiding agents toward trustworthy resolutions and powering self-service for end-users, companies will be able to take customer relationships to the next level.
As Yuan suggests, the first application will support contact center agents in finding answers to customer queries that sprawl across numerous systems.
Meanwhile, the second will leverage Claude as a self-service tool that customers can use to autonomously search for solutions to their issues.
Unfortunately, Zoom remains tight-lipped about what these applications will look like in practice.
However, the latter application may involve an integration between Claude and the Zoom Virtual Agent, a native solution to the Zoom Contact Center.
Such an integration may increase the scope of bots, allowing bots to answer questions that go beyond the conversational flows the contact center has already created. Yet, this is only one possibility.
When Zoom brings it to market, the innovation could look different.
That is part of the excitement that swirls around these new LLM-driven AI assistants; they bring many more possibilities to life.
From auto-summarizing customer conversations to auto-generating knowledge articles, LLMs have opened up significant room for contact center innovation.
As such, Zoom customers can likely expect much more innovation to come, especially with the vendor investing an undisclosed amount of money into Anthropic through its venture arm.
Get to Know Claude
Claude delivers a similar user experience to ChatGPT, which is unsurprising given its creators left OpenAI soon after the launch of ChatGPT-3.
In doing so, they established Anthropic and built Claude as a challenger to technology that took the world by storm.
Yet, the two models differ in one critical area: how they were trained.
Most LLMs – including ChatGPT - learn from human feedback. So, teams give them prompts, rank the outputs, and – in doing so – train the model.
Eventually, the model picks up on human preferences and optimizes its responses.