Summary Bullets:

• Zoom CX is a credible option for enterprises looking to transform their customer engagement with omni-channel and AI capabilities.

• Working with a broader partner ecosystem is pivotal for Zoom to win in CX space since this involves workflows and different business applications.

Zoom is well-known for its conferencing solution, which is used extensively in modern workplace, but it has gone well-beyond conferencing in recent years. The core business of Zoom has been the enabler of conversations within the workplace. To go beyond communications, the company sees new opportunities by expanding its role to help enterprises automate workflows during and after conversations (i.e., meetings and phone conversations). This vastly enlarges the value Zoom can deliver to enterprise customers, especially with the application of AI. For example, AI can eliminate many manual tasks such as generating documents from meeting with summaries and next steps, or updating CRM records after a discussion within the sales team.

Taking this concept a step further, conversations can also include external parties including customers and partners. One area that is of great strategic importance for Zoom is around customer experience (CX) – a rapidly transforming space as a result of enterprises striving to enhance CX to gain an upper hand against competition. This expands Zoom scope to help enterprises streamline workflows related to customer engagement, which can happen across customer services, delivery, marketing, and sales functions. The launch of Zoom Contact Center in 2022 was a major step toward building out the Zoom CX portfolio. The company has developed the product ground up, giving it the ability to meet customer demand with speed without the baggage of legacy systems and features. This is especially useful in having AI natively embedded in the platform instead of building a separate stack. Moreover, there should not be separate communications systems for the internal workplace and for the contact center. A key value proposition for Zoom is its common platform to address both scenarios and deliver the same experience.

Zoom Contact Center is an omni-channel solution with a single routing engine. It enables businesses to engage with their customers over channels such as voice, video, SMS, and chat. In 2023, the company added Zoom Virtual Agent, initially as a chatbot, and now as an agentic AI platform. To close the gap with other contact center offerings, Zoom also added Zoom Workforce Engagement Management, which includes Zoom Workforce Management and Zoom Quality Management. Moreover, it has introduced Zoom AI Expert Assist, a ready-to-deploy AI agent to provide end-to-end interaction guidance to contact center agents. Moreover, Zoom CX Insights provides a conversational intelligence layer to synthesize data across the CX portfolio to provide more accurate insights for faster decision-making. With the aim to simplify workflows, the ability to integrate with third-party applications is crucial. The company is enabling this through Zoom Marketplace, which already supports integration with a wide range of business applications (e.g., Google Workspace, Jira, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, and many more).

While Zoom is a relatively new competitor in the contact center market, it has seen strong traction and winning significant deals. Oracle is the largest customer so far as the company moves its 15,000 global services agents to Zoom and integrates the tools with Oracle’s existing workflows. Zoom also leverages Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to run Zoom CX, which can appeal to enterprises using OCI extensively. There are other customers that Zoom can reference too. National Storage, a self-storage company based in Australia with over 250 centers across Australia and New Zealand, has adopted Zoom Contact Center to connect with customers as well as its centers together. The company is now engaging customers through multiple channels (e.g., chat, email, and video); using Zoom AI to gain insights into customer interactions; and using Zoom for internal meetings and webinars. This highlights the power of having a single platform for both employee and customer engagements. With the system in place, National Storage is also able to further strengthen its CX leveraging AI, for example, using Zoom AI Expert Assist to provide cues to operators during customer interactions so that they can offer the best solutions.

The local government of Nara City (Japan), has also adopted Zoom Phone, Zoom Contact Center, and Zoom Virtual Agent, to replace its legacy PBX and contact center solution. This is part of its efforts to improve citizen services (a population of about 350,000) through its ‘’Nara Digital City Hall’’ initiative and to drive digital transformation within municipal operations. This customer highlights the importance of integration between the cloud-based PBX and the contact center to deliver a seamless experience for employees. AI is a requirement as well. Nara City is looking to use AI features such as call recording, transcription, and summarization to enhance visibility and efficiency of phone operations. It is also leveraging Zoom Virtual Agent for automated voice inquiry response that is available to citizens 24 by 7, and it is using multiple models alongside its proprietary models to meet requirements (e.g., accuracy, compliance, and cost) of different use cases.

Enterprises understand that the delivery of superior CX will involve different business functions that interact with customers along the buying journey. Data and AI will play a key role in delivering the CX magic. But implementation is anything but straightforward. While enterprises see the potential of agentic AI, there are still concerns around data privacy, AI governance, security, and cost. Having the right business culture and skills is equally important. This means that to accelerate the adoption of Zoom CX, Zoom will need to expand its go-to market ecosystem to help enterprises implement the solution with confidence and delivering business values. This is totally different from selling a contact center solution, which traditionally only involves the customer service function. CX specialists, systems integrators, and consulting firms are now playing a more central role in supporting enterprises in their CX transformation.

The post Zoom is Delivering Better CX by Combining Communications, AI, and Workflow into One Platform appeared first on IT Connection.

Summary Bullets:

• Enterprises are deploying AI agents leveraging Google Cloud’s solutions and achieving positive business outcomes.
• Google Cloud offers the full AI stack, and its sovereign cloud and cyber solutions are especially crucial for enterprise customers.

AI agents are no longer an idea. They are now being deployed by enterprises to improve internal workplace productivity and external customer experience. At Google Cloud Summit Sydney (held on June 25, 2026), more examples of agentic AI in operations were presented, moving from deterministic AI chatbots to more autonomous systems. Bunnings, a home improvement, gardening, and hardware products retailer in Australia, upgraded its Buddy AI chatbot that helped customers with product search to an AI agent that takes customers’ descriptions of their projects and fills the shopping carts with the products that they need. Bunnings indicated an uplift of conversion rates and basket sizes when customers engage with Buddy. Similarly, Woolworths supermarket has an agentic AI powered Olive assistant that is able to build shopping baskets from recipe photos and assist with proactive meal planning. These two examples demonstrate how AI agents trained with proprietary knowledge (e.g., Bunnings’s DIY catalog and Woolworths’ recipe catalog) can deliver greater customer outcomes.

Enterprises deploying AI will appreciate the importance of data. To benefit from AI, it is necessary for enterprises to tap into corporate data to impart knowledge to AI agents. Google Cloud has the advantage in this area since enterprises have been adopting its products such as BigQuery to manage their data more effectively. Moreover, the company has other associated products such as Google Maps, Google Search, and Google Workspace that customers can leverage to enhance their AI capabilities. Transurban, an Australian road operations company and toll road operator, works with Google Cloud to transform its interaction with customers. While customer relationships are mainly transactional, Transurban now leverages Google Cloud’s solutions such as Gemini Enterprise, BigQuery, and Google Maps to power its Linkt app with the “Linkt AI” assistant, which proactively suggests optimal travel routes and toll options, dynamically adjusts schedules for prevailing weather, delivers timely account balance notifications, and offers discounted hotel and attraction bookings for upcoming road trips.

Data is the most valuable asset for enterprises particularly in the age of AI. Many companies across jurisdictions are increasingly concerned about security and sovereignty. Google Cloud offers a set of options for enterprises to meet their data and AI sovereignty requirements. It addresses not just the issue of data residency but also operational sovereignty and software sovereignty. Firstly, Google Cloud Data Boundary helps customers to meet data residency requirements through a set of controls, e.g., regions where data is stored, compliance programs, and external customer or partner managed encryption keys. This option allows enterprises to enjoy the benefits of hosting data in the public cloud for operational flexibility and high availability. Google Cloud is also offering support services with personnel meeting specific geographical locations as well as monitoring capabilities with real-time alerts when organization policy changes violate the defined compliance posture.

For customers that have a more stringent requirement on operational sovereignty, Google Cloud Dedicated addresses the need by enabling solutions to be operated by an independent local partner. The solution is hosted in a standalone, local instance of Google Cloud. The local partner maintains exclusive control over security-critical systems, identity management, authentication, etc. as well as controls over communication between Google and the Google Cloud Dedicated environment. For example, S3NS (a joint venture between Thales and Google Cloud that is headquartered in Paris, France) offers PREMI3NS services built on Google Cloud Dedicated for customers in Europe, now generally available in France. S3NS has achieved SecNumCloud 3.2 qualification from the French National Agency for the Security of Information Systems (ANSSI). Google Cloud Dedicated is also available in Germany (in preview).

For clients with the most stringent sovereignty requirements, Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) air-gapped allows complete isolation, without connectivity to an external network. The solution gives customers the flexibility to use general purpose compute and GPUs, and leverage open-source software. Google Cloud has also made its Gemini available in this air-gapped option, giving customers generative AI capabilities including automation, content generation, discovery and summarization. The GDC air-gapped solution is now deployed by many government agencies including those in Australia and Singapore within the Asia-Pacific region.

Besides sovereignty, Google Cloud has been bolstering its capability to offer stronger cyber defense. This includes the acquisition of Mandiant to add threat intelligence and incident response capabilities as well as Wiz for multi-cloud security defense. At the Google Cloud Summit, the company together with Wiz demonstrated how agentic AI can help to improve protection at scale and speed. Wiz is offering three AI agents with distinct roles: the Red Agent helps to uncover vulnerabilities and validate exploitable risks across web applications and APIs; the Blue Agent is the threat investigator that gathers evidence across cloud telemetry, runtime signals, and identity context to assess the severity of a threat and allow threats to be resolved more proactively; and the Green Agent is the investigation and remediation engine, identifying the root cause of a risk and the safest and most effective resolution. Wiz is known to provide security for cloud-native applications across major cloud environments including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle. Following the completed acquisition on March 11, 2026, Wiz joins Google Cloud but operates independently to maintain its brand and key value proposition.

Google Cloud offers the full AI stack including applications and agents, AI models, data platforms, and infrastructure. It has also demonstrated strong momentum through broad customer references. However, the ability to drive AI adoption ultimately lies with its partner ecosystem and its willingness to support third-party products (including AI models) and help customers operate within a multi-cloud environment. Consulting partners such as Accenture and Mantel Group were featured at the Google Cloud event, and these partners play a crucial role in helping enterprises develop their business strategy around AI and implement solutions addressing data, security, governance, and other technology challenges.

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