Zoom Invests in Generative AI Startup Anthropic and Plans Claude Integration
Zoom has inked a deal to incorporate generative AI startup Anthropic’s Claude model into its services. The technical partnership will also see the digital communications platform invest money in Anthropic though the companies didn’t disclose any financial details.
Zoom Claude
Zoom plans to embed Claude, the generative AI assistant introduced by Anthropic earlier this year, across all of its products, beginning with the Zoom Contact Center. The company has already started rolling out generative AI features from a mix of sources for its Zoom IQ digital assistant and said it would maintain the same ‘federated’ approach. That said, Zoom does plan to seed Anthropic’s AI more broadly in the Zoom Contact Center as a way of providing customer service and, eventually, guidance for human agents.
“Anthropic’s Constitutional AI model is primed to provide safe and responsible integrations for our next-generation innovations, beginning with the Zoom Contact Center portfolio. With Claude guiding agents toward trustworthy resolutions and powering self-service for end-users, companies will be able to take customer relationships to another level,” Zoom chief product officer Smita Hashim explained. “Partnering with Anthropic also furthers our commitment to providing customers with our federated approach to AI, optimized to deliver outstanding customer experience outcomes. Additionally, with our investment, we are advancing leading-edge companies like Anthropic and helping to drive innovation in the Zoom ecosystem and beyond.”
Claude AI
For Anthropic, the Zoom collaboration provides a potentially enormous new set of users. There’s also the financial investment as an incentive on top of whatever Claude licensing deal the two firms reached. Anthropic, which was founded by some former OpenAI employees, has pitched Claude as a ChatGPT alternative with fewer problematic responses and more control over conversational direction. That likely had a lot of appeal to Zoom for its enterprise needs.
“Partnering with a leading collaboration platform like Zoom allows us to put robust, steerable AI into the hands of more people and unlock its potential to help streamline everyday processes,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said. “We look forward to working together to showcase Anthropic’s capabilities and our joint commitment to enhancing productivity through intelligent solutions.”
Anthropic hasn’t been hurting for investors before, however. The startup raised a reported $300 million in February in a funding round led by Google. Claude already powers applications like DuckDuckGo’s DuckAssist instant answer feature summarizing Wikipedia articles, Quora’s Poe generative AI chatbot hub, and the new Notion AI assistant.
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