Zoho’s Vijaykumar Rajendran on Workplace Collaboration Trends

I spoke with Vijay Rajendran, Head of Product for Zoho, about the evolving technology of workplace collaboration software, including the role of artificial intelligence in improving content flow across the enterprise.
See below for a video and podcast version of the interview.
Some key quotes from the interview:
Why Integrated Apps Are Gaining Over ‘Best of Breed’ Apps
“All of these best of breed apps that you use are for a specific purpose, but now the trend is moving toward an integrated suite of apps.
“The reason is that when you start using these best of breed apps in a typical hybrid setup, adding users, making sure the licensing cost is right, monitoring your business content, how do you make sure the business content flows through these apps effectively? How do you ensure that the roles and permissions are properly set in all of these apps?
“Then you need to buy another app that does this. So maybe you need to look at an app like Okta to do this syncing for you, user syncing for you across these apps, so your licensing cost adds up. Which is why the trend is now moving toward an integrated suite of apps, which is where Zoho plays a role.”
Future of Content Collaboration
“The future of content collaboration involves: how do you automate your business workflows? There is a lot of business content you put into content collaboration platforms, into your communication platforms. How do you automate this process?
“There is a lot of unstructured data that you put in. How do you create structure for it? Let’s say you’re putting in an insurance document, a car insurance premium document into your content collaboration platform. Can your collaboration platform automatically detect that what you’re putting in is a car insurance premium? Zoho WorkDrive has a feature called data templates that basically provides structure to your unstructured content.”
AI and Content Collaboration
“[It’s important] to add an artificial intelligence layer on top of that automation engine. So the AI layer should automatically classify documents as if you have sensitive content in it. That is, you have a spreadsheet, and your spreadsheet has credit card data in it. There are some registration patterns to find. But what if the AI engine, the AI layer, automatically finds it for you? What if the AI layer contextually understands your business content so effectively that it shows you the right set of documents to look at?
“So the AI layer will sit on top of the automation engine and make the automation engine much more powerful. So here is where companies like Zoho are playing a huge role in storing a lot for our business customers, the content of our business customers. It is important to add a responsible, secure AI layer on top of it. And this is the place we’re in right now – this is the right time for us to innovate in this area.”
Video and Podcast of the Interview
Listen to the podcast:

Also available on Apple Podcasts
Watch the video with Zoho’s Vijaykumar Rajendran: 

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