Working On Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

This article originally appeared on No Jitter.

"Companies force a return to office" reliably grabs headlines (as does "companies quietly back down on forcing workers to return to the office") but when the company in question is the one that made remote work possible for all others, the story is especially attention-grabbing.

However, as a recent BBC interview with Zoom chief product officer Smita Hashim demonstrated, there's more to the Zoom story than "Ha-ha, the company that makes a collaborative workspace platform is centering in-person collaboration by requiring people to come into the office two days a week!"

In the interview, Hashim says:

Let's set AI aside -- a big ask in 2024, I know -- and focus on the rest of what Hashim is saying: Zoom is a collaborative workspace platform that is meant to handle mundane, rote tasks in the background while providing a shared space for people to communicate and execute task flows together.

Related:The Promise – and Perils – of AI Meeting Recaps

The idea of the "digital canvas" is not new -- Metrigy's Irwin Lazar has been covering this for No Jitter for years and he pegged the evolution of the collaborative UI as something to watch in 2024 with "the collaboration UI is set to undergo another transformation into contextual active connected workspaces that integrate chat and meetings with content." The word contextual is important here -- it indicates the continued shift of an employee's workflow away from the desktop-and-apps model where a user switches between several different applications in one space to. And it points toward a new work model, one in which the workflows may be defined or augmented by AI-assisted automation. In other words, the way people think about their work would no longer be, "open Excel, find the relevant rows, copy them to my clipboard, open PowerPoint, find the new slide, paste the rows." It would be the end user just clicking on things within their canvas -- whether that's Teams, Slack, Zoom, etc. -- or typing into a prompt box "Send monthly analytics report" and having a background process run the report and send it to designated recipients.

Zoom's positioning of its product as the nexus for this kind of work -- and for furthering in-person work with its AI tools meant to foster in-office collaboration -- points to a reframing of "the new world of work" conversation. It's not about working online or offline, in-person or remotely. It's doing it all, all at once, in the collaborative canvas of your enterprise's choice.