Raise a glass to simplicity with couch + cork and Zoom AI Companion

When Nancy Koziol first envisioned a business around wine tasting, she didn't plan to have a primary location for people to come to. Instead, she imagined going in person to share her knowledge and love of wine with different groups to their homes or their places of business. After a few trial runs, she had the opportunity to start presenting wine tastings virtually, and now couch + cork does 2-4 virtual tastings per week, with both casual and corporate clients around the world, including large tech and e-commerce companies, social media platforms, and medical brands.

She and her team create a fun, comforting atmosphere where learning about wine is easy and not pretentious in the slightest. Hosting up to 90% of their tastings virtually on Zoom, they provide personalized and exceptional service tailored specifically for each group. But as they found themselves wanting to grow, they needed ways to get creative with how to improve their processes and workflows.

The work for a virtual wine tasting begins long before everyone signs on and ends long after the last glass is emptied. Nancy and her team were spending up to two hours per client going over their notes, the chat transcript, and any questions or discussion points from the session.

No stranger to new technology, when AI began to go mainstream, Nancy tried a few different products to see how she could make it work for her business. She tried various AI products like ChatGPT and Meta AI for smaller tasks here and there. It wasn't until she was actually on a tasting with some folks from Zoom who told her about AI Companion. She liked the idea of an AI tool built directly into her preferred platform, so she put it to work, starting with using meeting summaries to help her cut down on the post-tasting work.

There was a particular standout session where she had mixed up two different fruits — she kept saying "pineapple" instead of "pomegranate" — until she remarked that she was mistaken and it was supposed to be "pomegranate" all along. In the AI Companion summary and notes, there was no mention of "pineapple" at all. Just "pomegranate," as if she'd never made a mistake.

"That was really when we knew it understands what it needs to understand. Since then, we've been all in with AI Companion," Nancy said. AI Companion has saved Nancy and her staff quite of a bit of work and time:

With the time they save on after-tasting notes and tasks, they've been able to do more tastings per week and focus on improving and building the business while regaining time to devote to her wine studies. Nancy is currently enrolled in Wine & Spirit Education Trust Diploma in Wines. The time they've saved with AI Companion leads directly to offer more and better service to their customers. AI Companion is helping with the type of work that gives her the bandwidth to explore and expand in ways that she wasn't able to before. "As a woman founder of a small business, it's really important for me to be able to keep my shoestring budget and operate in a way that is efficient," she said.

And it makes her team stronger, giving them new ways to work together. "Meeting summaries with AI Companion gives us insight into each other's work, such as our individual style or what we do differently," she said. "It's interesting to see in the tasting notes how one of us sold this really well, or used a great anecdote no one else has thought of."

Since integrating AI Companion into their work, they've since discovered other ways that they could replace other tools she's not happy with using existing products already in Zoom Workplace. Streamlining multiple tools into a single, trusted platform is a great way to reduce costs and administrative work even more.

"We are looking at moving more of our work to Zoom Workplace, prioritizing what saves us the most time and energy," she said. So far, she's considering migrating to from Motion to Zoom Scheduler for clients to select times, Zoom Team Chat to keep chats with her employees organized, and Zoom Phone to replace her current phone system. "Zoom Phone would be super helpful because we do a lot of work over text...what we have right now with Google Voice is very clunky."

Her use of AI Companion has directly had a positive effect on her business goals. "We've set a lofty goal of increasing revenue by 33% this year directly tied to AI and efficiency, and we are on track to hit those goals with the help of AI Companion," she said. Additionally, she aims to hire an additional full-time employee by the end of the year. More tastings mean more business, which means more work and people she can afford to hire. AI Companion is helping her add new jobs to her small business, not replace them.

From the beginning, Nancy has preferred Zoom Meetings as a platform. "Everything is where it should be. It's just very intuitive and the audio and video is better than other platforms." Even if a client asked to use a different platform like Google Meet or FaceTime, she would require Zoom Meetings. For her, Zoom is a more reliable, higher quality, and more professional platform.

When hosting a tasting up to 100 people, she appreciates how easy it is to securely manage such a large group. "It's still very easy to go through and make sure we're not letting in people we don't know." As she was growing her business, Zoom Meetings was and remains the best way to get her customers connected, organized, and eagerly participating in the tasting. Since she's started using AI Companion, she's even had people ask in-meeting questions to AI Companion to clarify something they may have missed.

The time savings and efficiency gains from AI Companion have allowed couch + cork to focus on what matters most — creating delightful wine education experiences that bring people together virtually. "Having this tool to be able to have another moment to kind of excite people has been really fun for us," Nancy said. "We always want to make people smile. We want to teach people something new, and we do that through wine."