Even in the digital era, most of our communication at work remains text-based. We exchange documents and emails, we message each other and we chat to our AI agents. But what if we want to communicate and develop ideas that are best expressed visually? A new app called Vani, created by developers at Zoho, aims to cater to those of us -- often in younger, more creative teams -- that want to break out of the constraints of the written word. Aarthi Elizabeth Anbu, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Vani, explains:
I think that's where the world is moving. It's new. It's fresh for some of us, but that's the way people want to start. They want the visual-first angle to it now, just like how we used to do content and how we used to have conversations as the center of discussion and collaboration, now it's moving visual. And that's an interesting way -- it's fun. It's fun to look at it. It's fun to work that way. It's fun to get started that way. And with AI being a big part of it, it definitely adds so much more value and substance to discussing things visually.
Vani brings three separate elements together into its visual collaboration space. Of course, there's a whiteboard-style canvas for brainstorming, diagrams and mind maps. Various forms of collaboration are supported in the shared workspace, such as adding comments, reactions and voice notes, or launching into video calls. The third element is the ability to move from discussion to action, with support for structured workflows, integrations to other applications, and database tables. Templates and kits help teams get started with common scenarios.
All of this adds up to more than a conventional digital whiteboard offering, says Anbu:
How it differs from a whiteboard is that, with Vani, we have this space and zone model. You have a single space that looks like your typical whiteboard, but you can create multiple sub-spaces within it. We call it zones. So the idea is you can have independent teams work on different projects together, while having an overall bird's-eye view of the company's entire goal.
So we don't say whiteboard, but we say visual collaboration -- and we say platform because you can bring in documents and files and information from Dropbox, from Microsoft, from Workdrive, which is Zoho's file storage platform. You can take Vani, take these canvases, and discuss it on your MS teams. You can take some of this information out, and discuss it on Cliq, which is Zoho's communication tool. So the idea is to be able to integrate across the board. You can add this to your email.
So it's not just a whiteboard, it's more of bringing some kind of information in. Where we are moving towards is eventually you're going to be able to connect or integrate with, let's say, Asana, or Confluence, or Salesforce or CRM, and you're going to be able to pull in your data. So with CRM, it's going to be leads and your prospects, or if it's going to be projects, you're going to be able to pull in the information and visualize it on Vani. And anytime you change data here, it's going to reflect back into your project management tool or your CRM tool.
We're looking at it definitely much, much bigger than a whiteboard tool, and more into a whole visual collaboration platform angle.
AI capabilities are built into the product. A user can ask the AI assistant to create a mind map or flow chart for a specific purpose, or to generate content or images. It can also summarize the contents of a workspace, and later on it will also be able to produce transcripts and summaries of live discussions recorded in the app. The goal is to automate the processes that surround ideation and teamwork so that users can focus on collaborative creativity. Anbu says:
We hope one day we should be able to just tell Vani what we want, and it's going to have to create it for you and then give you back the insights to make decisions. I mean, that's how you work. So you don't waste time on putting things together, but rather focusing on bringing that idea to life.
As a Zoho product, Vani integrates natively with the full range of other Zoho products and platform capabilities. Anbu sees this as another differentiation from conventional whiteboard products. She explains:
They still have to go integrate with a third party application for all the other business needs, whereas when it comes to Vani, it's going to be well integrated within the Zoho app space, and we're going to be able to easily move data across the board, and I think that is our biggest strength.
But unlike most other apps in the Zoho family, Vani is being marketed as a standalone product -- Vani by Zoho -- rather than being just another product that sits within existing collections such as Zoho One and Zoho Workplace. The company believes this gives the Vani team more freedom to develop the product with its target user base in mind, and to market it in a way that stands apart from how the existing products are presented and perceived. Anbu says:
There is this whole new generation of workers who have started joining organizations, the Gen-Zs. They work very differently. They work more visually, and they want to work visually and collaboratively at the same time. So the reason it's a brand 'by Zoho' is so that it doesn't really cut into the other space of, say, a Workplace or Workdrive or a typical Office setup, where you have things done a certain way.
We wanted to make sure that we also target the younger crowd, people who work better visually. This way, it gives us a lot of freedom in terms of the marketing sense as well. The go-to-market is a little different. It's the whole huge, big company, and if you're going to launch it as part of the Workplace, then we're going to lose our way in a traditional office culture, or a workplace. So that's the reason we launched outside, to cater to a completely different set of an audience.
Early adopters have come from a range of industries, including manufacturing as well as software teams, marketing and creative agencies. Ambu adds:
It's for cross-functional teams, teams who work across multiple geographies. The reason we say 'young' is because they are the ones who adopt it much faster... This is a bottom-up approach. We want smaller teams, younger teams, to start adopting this faster, to understand how it is to work visually, and then it moves up the ladder. That's what we're looking at -- across industries, for any team that is creative, that brainstorms.
There's a new wave of much more visual apps hitting the market, with Canva and Figma as the leading exemplars. These visual apps cut across traditional, more document-centric, application categories and integrate AI natively. The decision to launch Vani as an app that stands apart from Zoho's existing products is an interesting choice but one that makes a lot of sense given the different mindset that drives this new category of apps. It gives Vani's developers the freedom to think differently rather than be forced to do things a certain way simply because they've always been done that way. Conversely, it allows Zoho to try out new approaches and figure out what works best before introducing potentially disruptive changes to its established apps.
The wider picture here is the evolution of how we interact with computers beyond the traditional, text-based channels that we were restricted to by the limitations of earlier generations of technology. Generative AI opens up the potential to express ourselves to our digital assistants in many different ways, and the apps that work best in this multi-modal future will look quite different from those we've been used to. It's time to start exploring this new world.
