Zoom changes plan to use private data for AI; Amazon pushes new feature

Zoom and Amazon are just two of the companies attempting to navigate a business landscape that is growing in its reliance on artificial intelligence (AI). The former has gotten caught up in a controversy regarding the use of customer content in training generative AI.

Zoom announced on Friday, Aug. 11, it has changed its terms of service to say the company won’t use any customer content to train its AI models.

The announcement comes after some people in Hollywood and the tech world raised an alarm about a change in the terms of service that appeared to grant Zoom royalty-free rights in perpetuity for private video calls and presentations.

“Following feedback received regarding Zoom’s recently updated terms of service, particularly related to our new generative artificial intelligence features, Zoom has updated our terms of service and the below blog post to make it clear that Zoom does not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen-sharing, attachments or other communications like customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions) to train Zoom’s or third-party artificial intelligence models,” Zoom said in a statement Friday.

According to the new terms of service, Zoom still owns the rights to things like product-usage and diagnostic data. The company recently rolled out two AI features that offer automated meeting summaries and AI-powered chat composition.

While Zoom addresses a concern with AI, it appears Amazon is embracing the technology. The company announced on Monday, Aug. 14, it is launching a new feature that summarizes product reviews for customers.

“The new AI-powered feature provides a short paragraph right on the product detail page that highlights the product features and customer sentiment frequently mentioned across written reviews to help customers determine at a glance whether a product is right for them,” Amazon Director of Community Shopping Vaughn Schermerhorn said in a blog post. “The AI-generated review highlights also feature key product insights and allow customers to more easily surface reviews that mention certain product attributes. For example, a customer looking to understand whether a product is easy to use can easily surface reviews mentioning ‘ease of use’ by tapping on that product attribute under the review highlights.”

Schermerhorn said the reviews are available only to some mobile shoppers for some products. He added the feature may be expanded to more shoppers and more products in the coming months.