Generative AI has made impressive strides in the last one year, taking the technology world by storm. Thanks to consumer- facing tools like ChatGPT, Bard, Claud and the like, there has been a huge perceptional change toward Generative AI – a technology that has been existing ‘silently’ for years! 

In fact, Generative AI or GenAI adoption has been faster than that of smartphones and tablets, according to Insider Intelligence. 

In the enterprise world, this technology has gained massive interest and acceptance in short order. A Box-sponsored IDC survey shows that two-thirds of executives have already deployed generative AI in some areas at their organizations, which is further evidenced by an IBM survey. About 42% of enterprise-scale companies surveyed by IBM report having actively deployed AI in their business. 

But what really lies beyond the hype? Are enterprises reaping real benefits out of their GenAI investments? We asked a few CIOs at the Tech Saga 2024 organized by CIO Klub Pune Chapter. 

“Business leaders are enamoured by the success stories of these technologies that often they tend to ignore the failures and the basic requirements that are associated with GenAI’Business leaders are enamoured by the success stories of these technologies that often they tend to ignore the failures and the basic requirements that are associated with GenAI.”

Shobhana Lele, CIO of Bombay Dyeing

2024 – A year of GenAI in production? 

2023, which could be considered the watershed year for GenAI, was all about experimentation and pilots, indicate studies. In a recent Gartner poll, about 45% of the 1,400 executive leaders surveyed reported that they are in piloting mode with generative AI. An IBM research estimates this figure to be around 40%. Interestingly, about 10% of them have put generative AI solutions into production and this figure is steadily growing. 

A sizable number of the enterprises in piloting mode are expected to shift their focus to practical implementation in the next one year– making 2024 a turning point in GenAI adoption. “For the 40% of companies surveyed stuck in the sandbox, I am confident 2024 will be the year of tackling and overcoming barriers to entry like the skills gap and data complexity.” Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President, IBM Software.

Catapulted by the increasing investments, the GenAI market size is projected to top USD 66.62 billion in 2024 with an anticipated yearly growth rate of over 20% through 2030.

Indian CIOs see more GenAI use cases evolving

Tech leaders in India are bullish about the prospects of the technology. India is already considered a front-runner in the adoption of GenAI, with as high as 81% of Indian organizations already integrating the technology into their operations (Elastic report).

What kind of promising use cases will emerge in 2024? Which industries will get touched the most? 

“GenAI use cases will grow quite exponentially in the coming years,” says Shobhana Lele, CIO of Bombay Dyeing, who is a passionate advocate of AI technology. She believes that the healthcare sector is poised to hugely benefit from GenAI. 

“Of all the mature use cases that will emerge, I find the technology’s impact on the Healthcare sector quite significant and far-reaching. It’s one sector with massive amounts of data and AI can accelerate use cases that are critical for the whole humanity, helping us find solutions for some of the pressing problems that have been around for decades,” she highlights. 

A NASSCOM study from 2023 states that the use of AI and data in healthcare might increase India’s GDP by USD 25–30 billion by 2025. 

Vinod Deshmukh, GM – IT, Haldiram Foods is already exploring various use cases of GenAI at the FMCG firm and believes that the FMCG sector stands to benefit significantly from the technology. “There are strong business use cases already emerging, which help FMCG companies improve product quality, predict outcomes, and increase the overall efficiencies,” he adds.

Generative AI in the banking and financial services sector, which is expected to create a massive USD 12 Billion market in the next 10 years, is another great opportunity. 

“Strong business use cases of GenAI are already emerging, which help FMCG companies improve product quality, predict outcomes, and increase the overall efficiencies.”

Vinod Deshmukh, GM – IT, Haldiram Foods 

“This is another sector that holds huge amounts of personal and sensitive data. AI will be critical in effectively leveraging this data to help consumers get the most out of their assets and investments while devising innovative ways of protecting their critical data,” says Shobhana.

Gen AI is now catalyzing a significant shift in the financial services sector, reports EY, with 78% of the firms implementing or planning Gen AI integration. Around 61% of financial institutions anticipate GenAI to have a profound impact on their value chain, enhancing efficiency and responsiveness, states the EY report.

Banking institutions across the globe are leveraging this technology to improve customer experience, provide personalized marketing and improve collections & recovery. Underwriting copilots are another big use case in the banking sector. 

Noteworthy is the fact that sectors that have been slow in adopting artificial intelligence are moving to a more proactive approach when it comes to GenAI. 

“GenAI is encouraging many brands to push the envelope – even those who haven’t yet considered AI use cases are exploring the possibilities of GenAI, says Vinod. He cites the example of manufacturing industry. In the manufacturing sector, GenAI will soon be leveraged in quality analysis, decision making and other core areas.”

Less than 20% of manufacturers have begun to implement AI technologies, reports suggest. However, GenAI seems to be moving the needle up, with the global market for GenAI in manufacturing expected to reach around $7 billion by 2032. 

GenAI challenges for CIOs

There are several challenges that tech leaders must tackle before they deploy genAI across key business functions. Data privacy and transparency are greater concerns for sure. So are the growing AI ethical challenges which require collaborative work across various stakeholders in the industry. 

Limited availability of AI skills is perhaps the top concern for CIOs today, Vinod emphasizes. “Access to the right skillsets is a challenge, especially for businesses in tier-2 & 3 cities. Tech leaders need to develop the right resources and technology capabilities to take this journey ahead,” he adds. 

The recent IBM Global AI Index highlights that nearly 35% enterprises report lack of skills for implementation is a big inhibitor for GenAI implementation. One-in-five organizations do not have employees with the right skills in place to use new AI or automation tools and 16% cannot find new hires with the skills to address that gap, the same research shows. 

To fill this gap in the current scenario, CIO will be expected to lead the task of reskilling and upskilling the existing workforce – especially because skills in data science, machine learning and MLOps are hard to come by. 

All in all, many CIOs want to take a cautiously optimistic path when it comes to taking GenAI to the next level. And reasonably so. 

“In my observation, many CEOs are gung-ho about implementing AI or generative AI, whereas the CIOs are a little cautious and apprehensive. There is a reason for this apprehension – Business leaders are enamoured by the success stories of these technologies that often they tend to ignore the failures and the basic requirements that are associated with GenAI,” Shobhana says. 

She believes that this perception leads to a lot of pressure on CIOs to start using these technologies with the expectation that it’s going to be successful. “But, every CIO has the responsibility to make the organization aware of AI/GenAI’s basic requirement – the relevant data sets, skillsets and the support. So, it’s a tightrope walk for the CIO,” she sums up. 

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Figure, an AI robotics company developing general purpose humanoid robots, today announced that it has raised $675M in Series B funding at a $2.6B valuation with investments from Microsoft, OpenAI Startup Fund, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions), Parkway Venture Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures, and ARK Invest. This investment will accelerate Figure’s timeline for humanoid commercial deployment.

What is even more interesting is its collaboration with OpenAI in conjunction with this investment. Figure and OpenAI will work together to develop next generation AI models for humanoid robots, combining OpenAI’s research with Figure’s deep understanding of robotics hardware and software. The collaboration aims to help accelerate Figure’s commercial timeline by enhancing the capabilities of humanoid robots to process and reason from language.

“We’ve always planned to come back to robotics and we see a path with Figure to explore what humanoid robots can achieve when powered by highly capable multimodal models. We’re blown away by Figure’s progress to date and we look forward to working together to open up new possibilities for how robots can help in everyday life,” said Peter Welinder, VP of Product and Partnerships at OpenAI.

The Figure team, made up of top AI robotics experts from Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Google DeepMind, and Archer Aviation, has made remarkable progress in the past few months in the key areas of AI, robot development, robot testing, and commercialization (Figure recently announced its first commercial agreement with BMW Manufacturing to bring humanoids into automotive production). This new capital will be used strategically for scaling up AI training, robot manufacturing, expanding engineering headcount, and advancing commercial deployment efforts.

Figure will also leverage Microsoft Azure for AI infrastructure, training, and storage. 

“Our vision at Figure is to bring humanoid robots into commercial operations as soon as possible. This investment, combined with our partnership with OpenAI and Microsoft, ensures that we are well-prepared to bring embodied AI into the world to make a transformative impact on humanity,” said Brett Adcock, Founder and CEO of Figure. “AI and robotics are the future, and I am grateful to have the support of investors and partners who believe in being at the forefront.”

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Intel grabbed the headlines a couple of days ago with the launch of Intel Foundry, its contract chip manufacturing business. The company’s CEO Pat Gelsinger called it as ‘a rebuilding of Intel’ and culmination of the goals that he set for the company when he returned to Intel three years ago. A part of his vision is to make Intel a ‘world-class foundry’ – perhaps a revival of a brand that was once an undisputed force in semiconductor manufacturing. In recent years, Intel’s leadership has been seriously challenged by competitors like TSMC and Samsung.

In its effort to regain the market leadership, it literally split itself into two with the formation of Intel Foundry – world’s first systems foundry for the AI era according to the company. 

“Through our Intel Foundry, I want to manufacture every AI chip in the industry,” said Pat Gelsinger. “AI is profoundly transforming the world and how we think about technology and the silicon that powers it. This is creating an unprecedented opportunity for the world’s most innovative chip designers and for Intel Foundry, the world’s first systems foundry for the AI era. Together, we can create new markets and revolutionize how the world uses technology to improve people’s lives,” he added. 

Watch Gelsinger’s full keynote here: 

The company also announced an expanded process roadmap designed to establish leadership into the latter part of this decade at its first foundry event, Intel Foundry Direct Connect, which stood out due to the presence of Arm CEO Rene Haas, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Intel also announced a big win at the event – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared that Microsoft has chosen a chip design it plans to produce on the Intel 18A process.

“We are in the midst of a very exciting platform shift that will fundamentally transform productivity for every individual organization and the entire industry,” Nadella said. “To achieve this vision, we need a reliable supply of the most advanced, high-performance and high-quality semiconductors. That’s why we are so excited to work with Intel Foundry, and why we have chosen a chip design that we plan to produce on Intel 18A process.”

Intel Foundry has design wins across foundry process generations, including Intel 18A, Intel 16 and Intel 3, along with significant customer volume on Intel Foundry ASAT capabilities, including advanced packaging.

In total, across wafer and advanced packaging, Intel Foundry’s expected lifetime deal value is greater than $15 billion.

Gelsinger also had a brainstorming session with OpenAI’s Sam Altman who reiterated why ‘AI is one of the greatest tools that humans have yet invented’. 

Stuart Pann, senior vice president of Intel Foundry at Intel said, “We are offering a world-class foundry, delivered from a resilient, more sustainable and secure source of supply, and complemented by unparalleled systems of chips capabilities. Bringing these strengths together gives customers everything they need to engineer and deliver solutions for the most demanding applications.”

If all the hype and hoopla are anything to go by, Intel Foundry will turn out to be a big milestone for the chip maker. 

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Udemy, an online skills marketplace and learning platform, released key insights ahead of the one-year anniversary of the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, revealing how global organizations and professionals have embraced and implemented Generative AI over the past year, providing an in-depth look into the impact of emerging tech skills in the workplace.

“As we have observed, generative AI skills will lead to the rise of new roles and industries while simultaneously impacting overall corporate culture,” said Vinay Pradhan, Senior Director and Country Manager for India at Udemy. “Businesses will need to adapt to the new wave of flexible and effective skill development to make their workforce future-ready.”

Key findings from Udemy data collected between ChatGPT’s launch on November 30, 2022, through October 31, 2023, indicate how the technology has been leveraged globally over the last year:

• Nearly 800 instructors created and published more than 1,000 courses related to ChatGPT on the Udemy platform
• Udemy has more than 2.2 million enrollments in ChatGPT courses, with 557K+ enrollments in India.
• Udemy courses about ChatGPT have been developed in 25 languages with the most number of courses consumed in English amongst other languages.
• The highest number of enrollments in ChatGPT courses are from learners in India, the U.S., Japan, Mexico and the U.K.

Broader data trends on professionals learning generative AI reveal:

• The top-ten industries where organizations are empowering their employees with generative AI skills are: Professional Services, Consulting Services, Technology, Manufacturing, Retail, Financial Services, Entertainment & Media, Education, Government and Life Sciences.

• The most popular generative AI courses focus on Midjourney, AI art, Python, and ChatGPT prompts. The Q2 Global Workplace Learning Index also highlighted how AI learning is expanding into other functional fields such as marketing, HR, sales and project management.

The recent 2024 Global Learning & Skills Trends Report by Udemy highlighted that generative AI could help automate up to 30% of current work hours by 2030, contributing an estimated $15 trillion to the global economy. The Udemy platform witnessed a 60% increase in AI-related training over the past year and demand for ChatGPT courses surged 5,226% in Q1 2023 alone, demonstrating how organizations are prioritizing skills acquisition to optimize business outcomes.

“Globally, organizations are adopting generative AI in a purposeful and responsible manner, propelling workforce transformation and cultivating a culture that nurtures agility, resilience and competitiveness,” said Greg Brown, President and CEO at Udemy. “Cutting-edge solutions powered by generative AI have endless potential. At Udemy, we are excited to empower corporations with courses and curated learning paths on emerging skills and lead the transformation to a skills-based economy in this ever-evolving landscape.”

At Udemy’s recent FWD event, business leaders and practitioners from top global organizations gathered to share strategies for excelling in this transition to a generative AI era, including:

• Ensuring all employees have an understanding of generative AI. As companies continue to embrace new technologies and integrate them into transformation strategies, many jobs can be displaced and reshaped. The World Economic Forum predicts 97 million net-new roles are expected by 2025 – understanding the opportunity with generative AI will help organizations plan for the future and ensure they continue to be effective and efficient.

• Using AI as a catalyst for the transition to a skills-based economy. Managing talent is becoming less about degree requirements, and more about understanding where there are skill gaps in an organization and strategically closing those gaps, often with existing talent. AI can help do that at scale and can help upskill and reskill team members.

• Developing strong leaders at scale who possess the skill, resilience and agility to lead through transformational change, resulting in competitive advantage. Organizations must nurture leaders who are able to identify skill gaps and embrace emerging opportunities in the field of generative AI, and to effectively coach and lead teams through significant change. Leaders must ensure the fear of AI taking over roles does not build up and teams embrace the new technology versus reject it.

“AI is changing the way we work and learn, with our data highlighting efficiency and effectiveness as the top goals for organizations wanting to leverage generative AI tools,” said CEO and Founder, Jim Lundy of Aragon Research. “Organizations need to continue evaluating the right AI solutions that address accuracy, reliability, security and privacy concerns to expand their use cases beyond translations and media generation.”

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After a few days of high drama, the OpenAI meltdown continues to fascinate all of us. Started on an otherwise quiet Friday with the sacking of Sam Altman from OpenAI, the series of events that unfolded since then was nothing short of a Hollywood suspense thriller. 

As the slogan “OpenAI is nothing without its people” took over X (formerly Twitter), Satya Nadella and Microsoft were quick to strike when the iron was hot. Nadella welcomed Sam Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman to Microsoft along with all of OpenAI’s 730+ employees who are arguably  some of the world’s best engineers.

OpenAI’s loss, Microsoft’s Gain

OpenAI consists of a bunch of passionate researchers – people who believed they joined a cause rather than a company. Altman’s sacking probably broke their unity of purpose, which triggered an unprecedented revolt against the Board. That worked really in favor of Microsoft – at least at that moment. 

“If you told me 10 years ago that a group of the smartest engineers in the land would evoke the threat, “Do what I say or I will go to work at Microsoft,” I would not have believed you. Amazing shift in corporate reputation (and much credit to Satya),” Benchmark General Partner Bill Gurley tweeted. 

The Board, many of whom later openly expressed regret in their decision, didn’t have much choice but to start talks with Altman. The news of Altman and Brockman leading Microsoft’s AI research arm was already out by then. It seemed like a big crisis and for a while, Microsoft and Nadella appeared to be in a sweet spot despite its $10 Bn commitment to OpenAI.

Nadella’s move was referred as ‘a genius business move’ that can make Microsoft the most powerful player in the AI game. Its stock climbed up $7.59 –  a 2% spike, raising its market cap to $2.81 trillion. Forbes reported the move as the most remarkable ‘aquihires without an actual acquisition’. 

The 360 – degree turn

However, last we heard, Altman and Brockman are back to OpenAI. “I love OpenAI, and everything I’ve done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together. When I decided to join Microsoft on Sunday evening, it was clear that was the best path for me and the team. With the new board and with Satya’s support, I’m looking forward to returning to OpenAI, and building on our strong partnership with Microsoft,” Sam wrote on X, at 11.38 AM IST on Nov 22^nd. 

Brockman kept it simple – “Returning to OpenAI & getting back to coding tonight”. Mind you, this was roughly after 100 hours since he took to X to post a copy of the message that he sent to OpenAI team stating “…I quit.” 

Altman’s return is as dramatic as his exit perhaps. But what does this mean for Nadella who seemed to have larger ambitions? Is it really a setback or he thinks it’s most appropriate to keep Altman where he always belonged? In the process, Microsoft’s stocks reportedly dipped 6 percentage.

Nadella, as always, has been quick to respond to Altman’s decision to return to OpenAI- 

“We are encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board. We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance. Sam, Greg, and I have talked and agreed they have a key role to play along with the OAI leadership team in ensuring OAI continues to thrive and build on its mission. We look forward to building on our strong partnership and delivering the value of this next generation of AI to our customers and partners.” he wrote a few minutes after Altman announced his decision on X, on Wednesday.

Reports suggest that both sides have agreed to an investigation presumably by an outside, independent law firm. TechCrunch reported that the OpenAI board is open to appointing an extended board of upto 9 people that will relook at the governance of the firm, which has been incurring criticism owing to its unusual structure. And chances are, Microsoft will have a bigger say in these governance changes. 

For now, the grand theatrics seem to have finally cooled off and the five days of uproar seems unnecessary. One is left to wonder, however, the motives of the key stakeholders involved in this saga. As one of the users on X candidly wrote under Altman’s come back tweet – “The lengths this man will go to not use Microsoft teams!”. 

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In a big move, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have come together to form the Frontier Model Forum, a new industry body focused on ensuring safe and responsible development of frontier AI models. Frontier models are defined by the Forum as large-scale machine-learning models that exceed the capabilities currently present in the most advanced existing models, and can perform a wide variety of tasks. 

The Frontier Model Forum will draw on the technical and operational expertise of its member companies to benefit the entire AI ecosystem, such as through advancing technical evaluations and benchmarks, and developing a public library of solutions to support industry best practices and standards, according to a blog post on Google’s website. 

The post states four core objectives for the Forum: 

1. Advancing AI safety research to promote responsible development of frontier models, minimize risks, and enable independent, standardized evaluations of capabilities and safety.
2. Identifying best practices for the responsible development and deployment of frontier models, helping the public understand the nature, capabilities, limitations, and impact of the technology.
3. Collaborating with policymakers, academics, civil society and companies to share knowledge about trust and safety risks.
4. Supporting efforts to develop applications that can help meet society’s greatest challenges, such as climate change mitigation and adaptation, early cancer detection and prevention, and combating cyber threats.

The official statement from Google highlighted the need to extend the existing efforts to mitigate the risks associated with AI. 

“Governments and industry agree that, while AI offers tremendous promise to benefit the world, appropriate guardrails are required to mitigate risks. Important contributions to these efforts have already been made by the US and UK governments, the European Union, the OECD, the G7 (via the Hiroshima AI process), and others.

To build on these efforts, further work is needed on safety standards and evaluations to ensure frontier AI models are developed and deployed responsibly. The Forum will be one vehicle for cross-organizational discussions and actions on AI safety and responsibility.”

Brad Smith, Vice Chair & President, Microsoft  said, “Companies creating AI technology have a responsibility to ensure that it is safe, secure, and remains under human control. This initiative is a vital step to bring the tech sector together in advancing AI responsibly and tackling the challenges so that it benefits all of humanity.” 

Also read: Artificial intelligence and human creativity: A tug of war 

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Freshworks, the business software maker, has announced new predictive and assistive generative AI capabilities embedded within its solutions and platform. The new enhancements include Freddy Self Service, Freddy Copilot and Freddy Insights, all of which will be demonstrated for the first time at Freshworks’ Q2 ’23 Launch event. The new enhancements follow the company’s AI upgrades launched in March. 

The company maintains that the new capabilities are aimed at helping agents, sellers, marketers, IT teams and leaders become more efficient. 

The Freddy AI capabilities are built on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and use Azure Cognitive Services including Open AI completions API, GPT3.5-turbo and GPT4 models, to implement features such as message expansion, tone enhancer, summarizer, rephraser, and more. Azure OpenAI Service’s GPT-3 model called text-davinci-003 is also leveraged to build Freddy Copilot. 

Freddy Copilot offers contextual assistance, offloads repetitive tasks, and maximizes team productivity by enabling developers and employees in support, sales, and marketing to use conversations to get their work done; Freddy Self Service offloads monotonous work to bots to scale support and deliver excellent customer experiences; and Freddy Insights automates the analysis of their daily productivity and provides recommendations to drive greater business impact. Together, Freddy generative AI capabilities help businesses automate, scale, and derive actionable insights from their work.

“Our goal at Freshworks is to put the power of generative AI in the hands of the Fortune five million, not just the Fortune 500 enterprise,” Girish Mathrubootham, Founder and CEO.

“We’ve been helping customers run more efficient businesses with AI for half a decade and know they don’t need a billion apps to do so. Every department could benefit from a workplace assistant that maximizes productivity, and that’s what Freddy AI can do – for the support agent, sales person, marketer, IT manager, HR professional, developer and more.”

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Artificial intelligence was the front and center of this year’s Microsoft Build, its annual flagship event for developers. In his opening keynote, Satya Nadella highlighted five biggest announcements of this year’s conference – all of which revolved around how AI will transform the way people use Microsoft products and platforms. 

The biggest of all was the integration of Bing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Bing thus became the default search engine for ChatGPT, enabling it to give more up-to-date and higher quality answers sourced from the internet. The feature is available to ChatGPT plus users for now and will be extended to free users soon. This marks another key step in the company’s partnership with and its multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI. 

Nadella also announced that the company is bringing Copilot to the biggest canvas of all – the Windows.  “This is going to make every user a power use of Windows,” he added. With Windows Copilot, Windows 11 will be the first PC platform to provide centralized AI assistance to users, taking productivity to the next level. 

Nadella also introduced the Copilot stack making it available to developers to build their own copilot for their applications. “We will have everything from the AI infrastructure to the foundation model to the AI orchestration, all the way up to your copilot and its extensibility.”

This also means that there will be common extensibility across Bing Chat, Microsoft 365 Copilot, ChatGPT and Windows Copilot and the users’ own Copilots. Developers can now use one platform to build plugins that work across both consumer and business surfaces, including ChatGPT, Bing, Dynamics 365 Copilot (in preview) and Microsoft 365 Copilot (in preview).  “This is one of the most powerful things for a developer to be able to write a plug-in and have it reach billions of users,” Nadella said. 

At Build, Microsoft also announced Azure AI studio – a full lifecycle tool chain to be able to build, train and deploy intelligent apps and Copilots. This, according to Microsoft, will enable developers to ground AI models in just a few clicks using structured and unstructured data. 

It comes integrated with a Responsible AI dashboard that helps the developers during the testing phase to ensure that the models are safe. 

The last one in Nadella’s list, Microsoft Fabric, is an end-to-end analytics product, which the company says can address every aspect of an organization’s analytics needs. Fabric comes with capabilities including data movement, data lakes, data engineering, data integration, data science, real-time analytics, and business intelligence. 

Microsoft made 50+ announcements at this year’s Build conference.  

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Zoom announced a strategic partnership with and investment in Anthropic, an AI startup founded by former OpenAI employees, which focuses on constitutional AI methods. 

As part of the collaboration, Anthropic’s AI assistant, Claude, will be integrated with Zoom’s platform (which includes Team Chat, Meetings, Phone, Whiteboard, Zoom IQ), starting with Zoom Contact Center. 

“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,” said Smita Hashim, chief product officer for Zoom. 

The partnership, according to Zoom, is part of its federated approach to AI which leverages its own proprietary AI models, along with those from leading AI companies. 

As the next step in evolving the Zoom Contact Center portfolio, (Zoom Virtual Agent, Zoom Contact Center, Zoom Workforce Management), Zoom plans to incorporate Anthropic AI throughout its suite.

Zoom’s move comes soon after Microsoft’s announcement of the new version of Teams with Copilot-driven AI smarts. Google too announced a number of AI-based upgrades to Google Workspace. Recently, Salesforce introduced Slack GPT with generative-AI capabilities integrated into Slack.

Early this year, Google had made an investment of $300M in Anthropic, which is touted to be an OpenAI rival. 

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