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With Microsoft's recent decision to unbundle Teams from its Microsoft 365 suite in Europe, attention was inevitably going to turn to see if similar moves were likely — or even possible — in the US.
Microsoft stated it was unbundling Teams in Europe to balance “the interests of our competitors with those of European business customers.”
However, a document addressed to Microsoft partners, which the Register accessed, puts a slightly different spin on it. It reads, "These changes are a compromise intended to address concerns raised with the European Commission."
However, it also asks, “If this licensing model is so good for customers, why isn't Microsoft offering it worldwide?” It's a reasonable question which Microsoft did not answer.
Zoom CEO Eric Yuan has a take on it. According to a report in Bloomberg, Yuan urged the Federal Trade Commission to look at the decision and consider doing the same in the US, in response to a question posed at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference. "If you have unfair competition, you may not win," he said.
Yuan apparently didn't stop there. Reuters' news service reports he has also spoken directly to the FTC about the problem, as well as regulators in the UK and Germany.
This is likely just the first salvo in an ongoing discussion about the bundling and its effects on the broader market.
At the Golden Sachs conference, Yuan compared competition in the productivity market to sports. If your opponent gets extra points for each shot it takes, then there's no way a competitor can possibly win.
Zoom Rebrands, Extends AI
That is not all from Zoom this week. The company also announced a rebrand of a number of its AI-powered features, including its Zoom IQ generative AI assistant, which is available across the entire platform.
It is unclear why Zoom rebranded IQ to AI Companion, but keep in mind that only last month the company faced a storm of protest over the suggestion that it could, in certain circumstances, use personal data in building its LLM.
In a statement about the rebranding, the company explained: "AI Companion is turned off by default — account owners and administrators control whether to enable these AI features for their accounts. Zoom provides admins and users control and visibility when AI features are being used or activated.”
Essentially, AI Companion will still be driven by its homegrown LLM along with the other LLMs that Zoom uses including OpenAI and Anthropic. Along with the rebrand, the tool's reach in the platform will be extended to include:
1. Zoom Team Chat
The chat capabilities are geared to support asynchronous work. As it stands, with AI Companion, people can draft messages based on the context of the conversation thread. In the coming weeks this ability will extend to allow people to catch up on chat threads, and by 2024, people can use AI Companion to auto-complete chat sentences and schedule meetings from a chat.
2. Zoom Whiteboard
Coming this fall, Zoom will bring AI Companion to whiteboards, to support developing and categorizing ideas. By next year, the tool will be able to generate whiteboard images and fill in templates.
3. Zoom Mail
Zoom will soon offer users email suggestions based on the context and tone of messages. 2024 will see the tool creating and adding meeting summaries to Zoom Notes and summarizing SMS threads and calls with Zoom Phone.
The company also plans to introduce a new bot in the spring of 2024 where people can post queries related to topics such as the content of previous meetings or in progress projects into a conversational interface.
AI Companion will be accessible from within existing workflows such as Zoom Meetings, Zoom Team Chat and Zoom Whiteboard.
While Zoom is widely perceived as a communications platform, the company has started pursuing a wider agenda in the collaboration space in the last year.
The company describes itself as an “all-in-one intelligent collaboration platform that makes connecting easier, more immersive, and more dynamic for businesses and individuals.”
As such, it is setting itself up to compete against two well-established vendors in the space, namely Microsoft Teams and Google Workspace.
Google Rolls-Out Duet AI
Meanwhile, Google has finally started to roll out Duet AI in Workspace. The company announced the news at its recent Cloud Next conference. The functionality was first unveiled at Google I/O in May.
Duet AI effectively brings generative AI deeper in the workplace with its addition to Sheets, Slides and Meet. The full title of the new offering is Duet AI for Google Workspace and it offers a productivity alternative to Microsoft 365 with Copilot.
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The features had already been made available in preview before I/O. Those taking part in the preview had access to generative AI tools for text in Gmail and Docs, and for images in Slides.
We also learned about the cost for the first time at Cloud Next. Duet AI for enterprises will cost an additional $30 per user / per month, which puts it on par with Microsoft’s Copilot.
According to a Google blog, organizations will be able to join free trials before signing up. The company claims millions of testers have already tried it out since May. Pricing for smaller organizations and individual users was not announced.
The blog also stressed that data used by Duet AI will not be visible to anyone, clearly having learned from the controversy around Zoom.
“No other user will see your data and Google does not use your data to train our models without your permission,” wrote Google Workspace GM and VP Aparna Pappu.
Google also recently announced new capabilities to help prevent cyber threats, provide safer work with built-in zero trust controls, and better support for customers’ digital sovereignty and compliance needs.
Pappu added that Workspace will remain an open ecosystem and that the company will continue to build its partnerships with trusted technology providers to further develop its generative AI offerings.
While Google Workspace's Duet AI is now generally available, Microsoft’s Copilot is expected later this fall.
Meta Moves to Hybrid Work Model
Meta has confirmed that for the near future it will expect workers to adopt a hybrid work model consisting of a minimum of three days per week onsite. The move is unsurprising given the company had started informing workers as early as June that this would be the case.
According to a statement sent to CNBC, anyone that is not specifically designated as a remote worker will have to comply with the three-day rule. "We believe that distributed work will continue to be important in the future, particularly as our technology improves," the statement reads.
"In the near-term, our in-person focus is designed to support a strong, valuable experience for our people who have chosen to work from the office, and we’re being thoughtful and intentional about where we invest in remote work."
Like many companies, Meta started offering remote work to all full-time employees in June 2021. At the time Mark Zuckerberg said that the company had learned following the first year of COVID-19 was that “good work can get done anywhere, and I’m even more optimistic that remote work at scale is possible ….”
However, the new policy has been on the cards since at least March. In a blog post published at the time, Zuckerberg indicated that the company was starting to rethink its remote policy.
“Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely,” he wrote.
Meta isn't alone in backtracking its remote policies. Most of the big tech companies have also altered remote working plans to ensure on-site working. However, all this confirms is that the hybrid work model that many have advocated for is emerging as the new reality for work for many.
Gleen Tackles AI Hallucinations With $4.9M Funding Round
Finally this week, chatbot provider Gleen has raised $4.9 million in a funding round led by Slow Ventures. Founded in 2022 by Nagendra Kumar and Ashu Dubey, Gleen's chatbot focuses on counteracting the hallucinations common among large language models.
Hallucinations are particularly problematic for generative AI, especially in the context of customer support/success. According to a Gleen survey of 300 executives, 55% of them consider hallucinations a deal-breaker when it comes to deciding whether or not to deploy generative AI.
Gleen claims to have solved the problem by creating a proprietary AI/ML layer independent of the LLM. This ingests enterprise knowledge from multiple sources, feeds that data into the LLM and crosschecks the quality of the response.
In a statement, the company claimed that LLMs make up less than 20% of its solution stack, with the rest focused on ensuring accuracy and relevance.
The solution proved so popular that this funding round was oversubscribed. The company says it will use the money to focus on building, driving sales and marketing. It will also educate users on issues around hallucinations, security and compliance.
If Gleen has indeed solved the problem of AI hallucinations, we can expect to hear more from them very soon.
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