AI-Powered Connected Workspaces Continue to GrowAI-Powered Connected Workspaces Continue to Grow
Zoom Docs is latest entry, as Metrigy data shows rising adoption. Business leaders need to assure they understand corporate policy and responsible use.
August 27, 2024
With this month’s addition of Zoom Docs to the Zoom Workplace collaboration platform, Zoom becomes the latest vendor to deliver an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered connected workspace that brings together the tools an employee needs to accomplish, communicate about, collaborate on, and manage their work.
In Zoom’s case, Zoom Docs brings content collaboration, project tracking, and knowledge bases/wiki features to the Zoom collaboration environment, each powered by the AI assistance capabilities of Zoom AI Companion. Employees using Zoom Docs will be able to do things like convert meeting action items into documents that team members can collaborate on over time, share documents in a video meeting for live co-editing, and get writing assistance when creating reports and other content.
As I wrote in my previous post, “Connected Workspaces Getting Smarter and Smarter,” AI is quickly becoming a checklist requirement for connected workspace apps. Metrigy’s new “Connected Workspace & Collaborative Work Management: 2024-25” research study, conducted with 157 companies, shows the potential.
Of the companies studied, 58% have one or more connected workspace apps in use by employees. Of those 91 companies, 31.9% already support the AI capabilities within those apps, while 29.7% have plans in place to add AI as early as this year and 18.7% are currently evaluating AI offerings. Additionally, our research shows most companies planning on rolling out a connected workspace app this year will do so with AI capabilities enabled.
As companies tap AI capabilities, employees are gaining value for both content-related and project-related activities. For app users, which Metrigy studied separately in research of 171 knowledge workers, summarization is the biggest value proposition on both the content and project sides. Specifically:
For content-related activities, creating content summaries is the top value for nearly 89% of users, followed by surfacing data insights in chart/report summaries (75.9%), and writing assistance and translations (70.4% each). Additionally, 61.1% find value in image generation.
For project-related activities, summarizing projects is the most valuable generative AI capability for 83.3%, followed by building workflows and automation and creating tasks/subtasks (72.2% each), and then scenario planning and provide next-step recommendations in real-time (70.4% each). Managing team workloads rounds out the top-most-valued capabilities, for 68.5%.
With widening use and growing employee reliance on generative AI, companies bringing AI capabilities into their connected workspaces must have clearly articulated policies in place for its use—and most companies studied in the app user research do. Slightly more than 67% already have or expect to have a policy in place for the use of generative AI as part of a connected workspace toolset. These policies, in general, can touch on a wide variety of areas, from compliance to data privacy and security, ethics, human oversight and verification of accuracy, and vendor vetting, to name a few.
For example, 35.6% of companies in this study say they have or will specify the use of internal company data only, while 61.6% will mandate that their vendors provide analytics tools showing the accuracy of AI responses. In general, testing AI response accuracy is a top component of a generative AI security and compliance plan, as Metrigy has found in security research conducted earlier this year. Additional considerations include classification of documents, data leakage prevention, document- and data-retention policies, content-sharing restrictions, and automatic destruction of documents.
As it is with other enterprise apps, generative AI is quickly becoming part of the connected workspace promise. While employees tout the value gained, IT and other business leaders need to assure they understand corporate policy and responsible use.
