Good communications and better productivity: Zoom ANZ head on the AI opportunities for SME leaders

Australian small and medium business owners looking to take their business to the next level have been urged to take advantage of AI, with Zoom’s head of Australia and New Zealand Bede Hackney citing it as the key to unlocking productivity gains in any business leader’s day-to-day life.

SmartCompany heard Hackney’s thoughts on how small businesses can harness the power of the technology to grow their business.

Hackney said good communication is vital.

“Regardless of how big your company is, the two most important conversations any company can have are: the conversation you have with your employees, and the conversation that you have with your customers.”

Hackney said better knowledge of the product suite is key to unlocking productivity. “If I was a small business and I was thinking about how I could get the most leverage out of the Zoom platform, the first thing I’d be doing is educating myself on the AI Companion and the full productivity suite, including our scheduler which will save business owners time and stop the endless ‘phone tag’.”

Hackney added that AI has provided a real opportunity for small businesses. “Leveraging cloud-based platforms to compete on a level pegging with large enterprises is one way, and I think all of us need to think about how we can take advantage of the opportunity that AI represents.

“Everybody and every organisation out there is thinking about how to leverage AI,” he said.

“A couple of weeks ago we launched Zoom’s AI Companion and so every paid Zoom license now has a fully featured AI capability built into the platform.

“That AI companion will help people write documents, summarise meetings, be able to send out next steps and action items and it helps people publish professional videos to their website or to their socials. 

Hackney said Zoom has changed the way the world communicates and helps small businesses to up-level the way they engage with employees and customers.

“Some of the largest organisations around the world and some of the largest brands here in Australia are using Zoom,” he said.

“But there’s a huge volume of SMB organisations who have Zoom at the very heart of their operations and it’s just amazing to see the way that they’re leveraging the platform.

“When I think about small business owners to very small business owners juggling work and home life. I think offering the opportunity for them to take high quality communications from anywhere, particularly over low bandwidth connections which is a challenge here in Australia, really changes the way that they have the opportunity to operate.”

Hackney said he believes that a lot of people think of Zoom as just video and meetings. 

“Zoom today is much more than that. We think of ourselves as an end-to-end total experience platform,” he said.

“I think cloud-based platforms like Zoom offer small businesses the opportunity to compete on a level pegging with larger enterprises.

“What I love about Zoom’s AI Companion and our revenue accelerator AI platform is that you can turn those capabilities on and start to get AI based productivity gains tomorrow, no matter your size.