Promising Platform Security, Zoom Doesn't Train AI Companion With User Data

Zoom discusses AI Companion (photo: Rana/VOI)

JAKARTA AI Companion is a Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot developed by Zoom Communications Inc to support workers' activities at the Zoom Workplace platform.

Once continuously developed, the platform is getting better in responding to its users' commands. AI Companion can create transcripts automatically, create a summary of the meetings it attends, and even make documents.

Basically, AI Companion can access all worker data because this platform is not only available in the meeting feature, but also in the conversation feature and others. Although integrated with various features, Zoom promises the security of its user data.

Sheena Sacdalan, Solutions Engineer Zoom, explained that they will not take user data to train their AI. The reason is, the communication company only uses publicly available data or buys data from a number of parties.

"We don't use customer data for training. We take advantage of publicly available data. We also buy data to be able to use it for training. And sometimes we also make data to train it," Sheena explained at the Zoom Day Indonesia event on Thursday, February 27.

To provide guarantees, Sheena said that it had published a white paper on AI security and privacy on the Zoom Workplace platform. They also comply with strict requirements to be in compliance with the financial services industry (FSI).

With the sophistication of AI Companion already almost like ChatGPT, questions also arise about whether the platform will be present in standalone app mode. Asia's Head of Zoom, Lucas Lu, said they had no such plans.

Although quite sophisticated, AI Companion is designed to support worker productivity on Zoom's communication platform. Instead of presenting independent applications, Zoom is more interested in in integrating AI with Zoom into third-party applications.

"The way we see AI is not as an independent product. We use AI with Zoom to be able to talk to other applications. So, even today for example, we can work with Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Workday, and so on," Lucas said.