Summary Bullets:

• Three voice-activated features coming to Google Workspace reflect a broader trend of AI becoming incorporated into everyday workflows.

• The features also mirror how vendors are opening their team collaboration platforms to support the multi-platform environment in which their users operate.

Google recently announced three voice-activated AI features coming soon to Google Workspace. ‘Gmail Live’ lets users ask conversational questions to retrieve information from their Gmail inbox such as “What’s my flight’s gate number?”. Users can talk to ‘Keep Live’ to capture ideas that cross their mind and turn them into organized, actionable notes. With ‘Docs Live’ users can engage in real-time conversation to create documents on the fly. Although Workspace users cannot avail themselves of the features quite yet, ‘Gmail Live’ and ‘Keep Live’ are available to Google AI subscribers on the Plus, Pro, and Ultra plans while ‘Docs Live’ is reserved for Pro and Ultra subscribers.

Google, like all vendors in the team collaboration space, is integrating AI agents and assistants into everyday workflows. In theory this allows users to remain head-down on their work and avoid shifting gears to access AI in a separate space. The new features are intended to fulfil that vision, and they do to a degree but there is a cleaner approach.

Rather than users invoking a given feature, in the course of conducting their work users could simply describe what they would like to accomplish and AI, working in the background, would decide which feature should be leveraged to complete that goal. If the user is best served with information living in Gmail, then AI would tap Gmail Live. If a set of well-organized notes would do the trick, then AI would leverage Keep Live. If the user’s task could be best represented with a concisely written document, then AI would engage Docs Live. Regardless of the route AI chooses, everything would happen behind the scenes, transparent to the user.

In addition to reflecting how vendors are merging AI and the flow of work, the features mirror a second trend in the team collaboration space.

Rivals have acknowledged the need to open their platforms to support the multi-platform environment in which their users operate. Specifically, AI is moving from use in silos to being leveraged on a far grander scale – across vendor platforms, joining parts of organizations, and linking organizations with external partners, suppliers, and the like. AI is increasingly serving as connective tissue, threading sections of vendors’ platforms such as meetings, chat, and calling; establishing links between those platforms and third-party applications used in various parts of the business such as CRM; and integrating platforms from different vendors making things possible such as attending a meeting on one platform with an external partner that uses a competing platform.

The expanding reach of AI comes with a heavy price. Compliance, confidentiality, and security issues, among others, multiply when platforms are intra- and inter-connected with data flowing across boundaries and AI agents manipulating and disseminating that data. Vendors have made assurances regarding the integrity of their platforms, but there remains a sense that these issues have not been adequately addressed. Vendors need to take a much deeper look.

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Summary Bullets:

• New features from Zoom reinforce its recently reconstituted platform vision, extend its ongoing transformation, and support an important, contemporary trend in the team collaboration space.

• This latest batch of improvements underscores Zoom’s place among the top team collaboration and contact center vendors such as Microsoft, Cisco, and Google.

Earlier this month, Zoom held the latest installment of an ongoing series of customer webinars highlighting new platform features. In keeping with tradition at Zoom, the enhancements were wide-ranging, covering various tracts of its platform.

Here is a sample: the capabilities of ZoomMate, Zoom’s agentic AI assistant built into Zoom Workplace, have been expanded through several partner integrations. Users can incorporate AI models such as Anthropic; leverage connections with third-party apps including Dropbox, Canva, Zendesk, Box, Microsoft Teams, and others; and take advantage of an expanded set of tools and capabilities available in Claude and OpenAI. Aside from partner integrations, ZoomMate now supports more languages, an important move as Zoom attempts to grow its share-of-wallet outside the US. In addition to ZoomMate improvements, Zoom Contact Center now features a redesigned agent workspace that makes it easier to access a customer’s profile and history, handle live customer interactions, and pin commonly used business tools such as CRM for easy access.

The new features further Zoom’s vision for offering a ‘system of action,’ the heart of which involves using AI to convert siloed content into finished deliverables that enable users to move work forward with reduced effort. A key source of content is conversations held in meetings, chats, calls, and live discussions. The system of action is more complex than it sounds on the surface, involving three layers and additional components: a memory layer that stores information from meetings, chats, and the like; a federated AI layer that mixes AI models from Zoom and partners such as OpenAI; an orchestration layer – along with ZoomMate – which connects Zoom to third-party tools; and Zoom AI canvases (AI Docs, AI Sheets, and AI Slides) where finished deliverables are born.

Considered in their entirety, Zoom’s new capabilities extend a dramatic transformation that has been taking place at the company over recent years. Zoom ignited a corporate renaissance with the October 2023 introduction of Zoom AI Companion, a digital assistant that leverages GenAI to extend everyday capabilities such as generating action items and meeting summaries. In 2024, Zoom AI Companion 2.0 was introduced, which surfaces information across the Zoom platform. Zoom AI Companion 3.0, launched in November 2025, brings agentic AI capabilities that work across the Zoom platform as well as compatible third-party integrations. In June 2026, ZoomMate was introduced as an upgraded version of Zoom AI Companion 3.0. This latest round of announcements continues the focus on broadening Zoom’s platform, making it poised to further its transformation.

The new features also reflect a trend in the team collaboration space. Specifically, AI is moving from use in silos to being leveraged on a far grander scale – across vendor platforms, connecting parts of organizations, and linking organizations with external partners, suppliers, and the like. AI is increasingly serving as connective tissue, threading sections of vendors’ platforms such as meetings, chat, and calling; establishing links between those platforms and third-party applications used in various parts of the business, such as Salesforce; and integrating platforms from different vendors making things possible, such as joining a Zoom meeting with an external partner from a Cisco device.

Zoom has earned a place in the discussion of the top team collaboration and contact center vendors such as Microsoft, Cisco, and Google. This latest batch of platform improvements underscores that position. The stage has been set for Zoom to achieve further accolades.

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Summary Bullets:

• Slackforce Surfaces are front doors into data and context that enable users to grasp a deeper understanding of their business and make more informed decisions.

• Slackforce Surfaces represent the latest chapter in the renaissance of Slackbot, advancing Slack as a key part of the Salesforce organization.

Salesforce has deepened its investment in Slackbot, the AI-driven personal work agent built into Slack, with the debut of Slackforce Surfaces. The introduction will raise the utility of the Slack platform and further cement the starring role Slack has come to play at Salesforce.

Some clarification regarding terminology is in order. ‘Slackforce’ represents a vision of eliminating the need to ever log in to the Salesforce platform, manifested through a conversational, AI-powered interface to Salesforce built directly into Slack. ‘Surfaces’ are essentially front doors into data and context that reside in a shared space and take the form of objects such as a report, presentation deck, microsite, or dashboard. Surfaces are created by issuing natural language commands into Slackbot; for example, “Generate a dashboard that shows my sales pipeline health” or “I need help visualizing AI token usage relative to ROI.” Users can tailor Surfaces to reflect their preferences and the audience and purpose for which they are intended or let Slackbot determine the format. However Surfaces are built, they provide a live, interactive view of the data and context upon which they are based that gets updated automatically as those components change.

Surfaces serve a highly valuable function. They spare users the arduous task of corralling relevant resources such as conversations, files, and data residing in multiple, often far-flung repositories, performing analysis, and constructing some type of vehicle to depict the findings. However, the most genuine gift they deliver is insight. Surfaces enables users to grasp a deeper understanding of their business and make more informed decisions.

Despite its value, Surfaces draws some concerns. What controls are in place, if any, to prevent duplicating Surfaces across a team or an organization is unclear. Also murky is the question of whether measures exist to prohibit a user from accidentally editing or deleting a Surface. Even more critical is the issue of security. Slackbot can access a wide range of inputs in constructing a Surface. While Surfaces are built using existing permissions, in theory allowing a user to see only what they are already allowed to see, what if the permissions themselves are faulty? There seems to be nothing to stop, for example, a user in one department from accessing sensitive data from another department and having that data appear in a Surface if that user is mistakenly provided access to the data. Salesforce needs to clearly articulate how these concerns, and how to resolve them, are being addressed.

The Slackforce Surfaces feature is the latest chapter in the renaissance of Slackbot. It closely follows the July 2026 Salesforce announcement that the scope of Slackbot had been extended to enable users to get work done far more effectively by serving as a unified front across the Slack and Salesforce platforms. Slackbot now acts as a conductor, a digital Arthur Fiedler overseeing an orchestra consisting of Salesforce products, enterprise data, third-party applications, and AI agents.

The new and improved Slackbot advances if not completes Slack’s emergence as a key component of the Salesforce organization having been increasingly embedded into Salesforce’s broader product fabric and now serving as the default collaboration interface for the Salesforce platform.

Although Slack has not achieved the same level of notoriety in the team collaboration space as the likes of Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom, if Salesforce can resolve the concerns surrounding Surfaces, those rivals may soon have company.

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Summary Bullets:

• The Zoom Revenue Accelerator updates combined with the pending acquisition of the Common Room platform will provide Zoom with complete coverage of the sales cycle.
• Providing support for the sales process represents a ‘new frontier’ that vendors are exploring and one that should ripen quickly.

Zoom announced general availability of three updates to its Zoom Revenue Accelerator (ZRA) feature, which helps sales teams close deals by analyzing customer interactions using AI. The updates consist of ‘Sales Roleplay,’ which provides practice simulations of customer conversations; ‘Sales Assist,’ which includes real-time deal guidance to keep reps focused as they engage the customer; and ‘Ask ZRA,’ which allows both reps and managers to perform natural language queries on conversation data post-discussion with the customer.

Taken collectively, ZRA and the trio of updates cover everything from deal prep to deal close. Once Zoom has closed its acquisition of the ‘Common Room’ buyer intelligence platform, which was announced in early July 2026, the entire sales cycle will be covered with the addition of the initial, prospecting stage.

Assembling a suite of tools that together bring deals from inception to completion parallels what Zoom has been doing recently with the Zoom Workplace platform in general – unifying information typically residing across a variety of systems to complete a task. That has involved three components. One is linking functionality within the Zoom platform – such as calling, messaging, and email – to work together more seamlessly. The second is linking the Zoom platform with other vendor platforms as well as third-party apps such as CRM, ERP, and WEM within an organization. The third is establishing those same types of links between organizations, such as a company and their suppliers, partners, and customers.

Providing support for the sales process represents a ‘new frontier’ that vendors are exploring. Vendors have gone ‘all-in’ on team collaboration capabilities for quite some time now. More recently in the last few years, the contact center has morphed into a hotspot. Today, a wealth of information can be gathered on customers and their interactions with an organization through currently available contact center capabilities. The ability of AI to mine and analyze that information has made tools that generate sales leads and manage the funnel a natural extension.

Zoom and RingCentral have taken the lead on that front. Look for this trend to ripen quickly and for all rivals to expand the volume of sales support features on their platforms.

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Summary Bullets:

• 8×8 AI Routing identifies the right expert anywhere in an organization that can resolve a customer’s inquiry, not just the contact center.

• While 8×8 AI Routing is marginally better than legacy systems it still merits a try out.

We’ve probably all found ourselves reciting this famous opening line to a classic song when trying to connect with someone in customer support: “Help! I need somebody. Help! Not just anybody. Help! You know I need someone. Help!”

Desperately in need of assistance, eventually you get connected with either a person or an AI agent. You breathe a sigh of relief but then it turns out they are ill-equipped to handle your inquiry. You need help from somebody, but not just anybody. Well, 8×8 claims that its recently introduced ‘8×8 AI Routing’ will take that sad song and make it better.

8×8 AI Routing identifies the right expert for a given interaction anywhere in an organization, not just the contact center. The technology scans three 8×8 platforms, identifying contact center agents on 8×8 Contact Center plus subject matter experts on 8×8 Engage and back-office employees on 8×8 Work. Each interaction is analyzed in real-time across several factors such as transcripts, historical patterns, and sentiment to match the customer with the right resource immediately. 8×8 claims that legacy skills-based routing systems, in contrast to 8×8 AI Routing, are static, relying on skills inventories that are entered manually and often out of date. Furthermore, 8×8 says, those systems often route to whoever is available rather than whoever is necessarily best suited to resolve a specific request.

While 8×8 AI Routing is better than manual, legacy systems the difference is marginal. Identifying the ‘right’ resource hinges on AI conducting an accurate assessment of skills. While AI in general is powerful it is far from perfect. AI is known to produce errors, and the chance that a customer could get routed to the ‘wrong’ resource is not insignificant. While 8×8 AI Routing does allow for a human in the loop, with administrators having the opportunity to provide final sign-off on the skills assessment, such intervention introduces a manual element into the process. And although organizations can roll out first with a small pilot and grow the system as they gain comfort, that adjustment represents yet another layer of manual manipulation. Bottom line, while 8×8 AI Routing is not radically different than legacy systems, it does have the potential to improve an organization’s customer experience and thus merits a test drive.

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Summary Bullets:

• Salesforce has integrated Slackbot more deeply into its platform, providing access purportedly to the entire Salesforce ecosystem.

• Despite positives the announcement generates concerns, the most pressing regarding security.

Salesforce has greatly extended the scope of Slackbot, the AI-driven personal work agent built into Slack, claiming it now spans the entire Salesforce platform. The change will add substantial value, keep Slack – the company – competitive with rivals, and cement the starring role Slack has come to play at Salesforce.

The new and improved Slackbot advances if not completes Slack’s emergence as a key member of the Salesforce organization. When acquired by Salesforce in 2021 Slack seemed destined to fall into a black hole, a Jonah being swallowed by the whale. Instead, it has been methodically elevated into a central gateway of the Salesforce platform. Slack has been increasingly embedded into Salesforce’s broader product fabric, positioned as the front end for Salesforce’s AI ecosystem and now evolving into the default collaboration interface for the Salesforce platform. Slack has been granted a new and better life by its parent.

In addition to accelerating its rebirth, the enhanced Slackbot benefits Slack by bringing greater value to users and keeping it neck-and-neck with rivals such as Cisco and Zoom, who are infusing their own platforms with the same type of cross-pollination.

This latest version of Slackbot enables users to get work done far more effectively by serving as a unified front across the Slack and Salesforce platforms. At the heart of the rejuvenated Slackbot lies MCP servers from Salesforce, the fuel behind the Salesforce ‘Headless 360’ initiative which seeks to harness capabilities anywhere in Salesforce and funnel them into Slack. Slackbot now acts as a conductor, overseeing an orchestra consisting of Salesforce products, enterprise data, third-party applications, and AI agents.

At a most basic level, users provide Slackbot a request through a natural language interface, and Slackbot fulfils it by pulling together relevant resources such as conversations, files, and data residing in multiple, often far-flung repositories. Users can, for example, update sales pipelines and surface next best actions, discover whether the marketing team is on track to achieve a forecast, or route a service case to the appropriate individuals. Over time, Slackbot gets to know users better, thus fulfilling their needs with greater speed and accuracy.

Despite the positives, there are some concerns associated with the announcement. The largest involves security. The security posture behind Slackbot is an open question and one with serious implications especially given the pooling and sharing of data which Slackbot facilitates; Salesforce needs to articulate clearly what types of safeguards are in place. Another concern is the lack of contact center capabilities to complement the collaboration capabilities found in Slack; a robust contact center portfolio has become critical for remaining competitive in the market. Last, despite rapidly accumulating AI-driven features on its platform and its association with Salesforce, the Slack name lacks the brand equity enjoyed by competitors. The likes of Cisco and Microsoft were well known in team collaboration well before the pandemic, and Zoom became a household name when it hit. Slack has not achieved the same notoriety.

If Salesforce can promptly address each of these issues, it could merit inclusion among the top players such as Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom.

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