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On Tue, 18 Mar, 12:03 AM UTC
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[1]
Zoom's AI will soon help you do busywork, too
Zoom's AI Companion is getting an "agentic" upgrade at the end of this month, allowing it to identify and perform tasks on users' behalf. Workspace users will be able to access the feature within a new Tasks tab in Workspace, where they can have Zoom's AI schedule follow-up meetings, generate documents from meetings, and create video clips. Some other updates are coming to Zoom too, including a new voice recorder for the Zoom Workplace mobile app that will record, transcribe, and summarize in-person meetings when it launches this month. Zoom is also rolling out live notes in May, which will generate real-time summaries during Zoom meetings and phone calls. The app's AI Companion and these new features will be available at no additional cost to Zoom Workspace users.
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Zoom's AI goes agentic - here's what it can do for you now
Zoom has regularly incorporated new artificial intelligence features into its Zoom AI Companion to optimize video call interactions. With its latest features, Zoom introduces AI agents that execute tasks for you. The company is adding other AI features across all its current offerings. Also: OpenAI wants to trade gov't access to AI models for fewer regulations On Monday, Zoom announced agentic functionality for its AI Companion. The functionality combines agents, skills, and models to carry out multi-step actions for users, such as scheduling meetings after identifying a time that works for everyone, generating clips, and writing advanced documents. "AI Companion is evolving from a personal assistant to being truly agentic, which signals a major leap forward in how AI can enhance productivity and collaboration at work," said Smita Hashim, CPO at Zoom. The company is introducing Zoom Tasks, which identifies action items in meeting summaries, chats, and emails and then completes tasks, such as scheduling a follow-up meeting or generating a document, according to the press release. Zoom Tasks is expected to launch at the end of the month and can be embedded into a Zoom doc. Also launching in late March is a new voice recorder feature accessible on the Zoom Workplace mobile app that can transcribe, summarize, and capture in-person conversations so users can revisit the notes later. Also: 5 ways to boost your team's productivity - without relying on generative AI This voice recorder feature seems similar in functionality to existing AI transcription services, such as Otter.ai. Another feature, Meeting Agendas with AI Companion, can help meetings stay on track by allowing hosts to add agenda timers to sections and receive AI-generated live notes during the meetings via the new Live Notes for Meetings and Phone feature. Both features are expected to launch in May. Zoom is also launching an AI Companion for Workspace Reservation to help professionals manage hybrid work experiences. The feature shows users the days their colleagues are expected to be in the office, using this information to suggest days to go in based on scheduled meetings. The feature even books a desk or a Zoom Room for meetings. This feature is expected to launch in May. Also: Worried about DeepSeek? Turns out, Gemini is the biggest data offender Zoom products, such as Zoom Docs, will also have AI Companion-enhanced features, such as Advanced References, which is expected to launch in June. This feature can create a writing plan based on internal and external references and place it in a document. Zoom Docs will also have a data table creation feature in July, where users can ask AI Companion to create data tables from content, including meeting summaries. Zoom is also launching Zoom Drive. The product is expected to launch in May and will house assets across Zoom Workplace. Despite these additions, Zoom AI Companion is still free for users with paid services in their Zoom accounts. For those who may want even more AI assistance, Zoom also introduces a Custom AI Companion add-on feature that allows users to customize the technology to their requirements. The Custom AI Companion add-on includes multiple options. These options include crafting custom meeting templates, creating meeting summary templates, building dictionaries with terms unique to business functions, incorporating internal data and knowledge from third-party applications, and accessing a personal coach. Users can also access Custom Avatars for Zoom Clips, which can create clips using a user-provided script and "a personalized AI-generated avatar". Also: Microsoft is an AGI skeptic, but is there tension with OpenAI? The Custom AI Companion add-on is $12 per user per month and will be available in April. The personal coach feature is expected to be released in June. The add-on uses Zoom's new small language models and third-party large language models. Zoom is also introducing several new AI features across its Zoom Business Services and industry-specific offerings, such as Zoom Workplace for Frontline, Zoom Workplace for Clinicians, Zoom Workplace for Education, Zoom Contact Center, and Zoom Revenue Accelerator. To learn more about those specific use cases, you can visit the Zoom Newsroom.
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Inside Zoom's AI evolution: From basic meeting tools to agentic productivity platform powered by LLMs and SLMs
Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Zoom became a household name during the pandemic as remote work became the norm nearly overnight. While the company was once synonymous only with video conferencing, it has been quietly building a sophisticated AI infrastructure over the last several years with an aim to redefine workplace productivity. While video conferencing is important and remains the cornerstone of Zoom's business, there's a lot more now, too, thanks to AI. Moving from meeting to milestone Everyone knows that Zoom is a technology for meetings. But what is the meeting for? In a business context, certainly there can be meetings that have no purpose, but those should be outliers. Meetings should lead to something, whether that's an action item or some other milestone. "In the agentic AI era, finally technology is reaching the point that we can transform from meeting to milestone," Zoom CTO Xuedong (X.D.) Huang told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. Today, Zoom is announcing an aggressive agentic AI strategy that includes a series of new services. The update introduces agentic capabilities that promise to transform meetings from communication events into action-oriented workflows, alongside a new AI Studio that lets enterprises create customized AI agents. The hidden technical evolution behind Zoom's agentic AI Prior to joining Zoom, Huang spent 30 years at Microsoft, working on speech technologies as well as Microsoft's Azure OpenAI service. He carried forward a lot of lessons learned from that experience when he joined Zoom in 2023. Under Huang's direction, Zoom began quietly building an AI architecture designed to facilitate tasks rather than just summarize conversations. Zoom publicly announced a partnership with Anthropic in May 2023 -- but that's not the only large language model (LLM) used at Zoom. While Microsoft Teams generally relies on OpenAI via the Microsoft OpenAI Azure service, and Google Meet is supported by Google Gemini, Zoom has taken an agnostic approach to LLMs. Huang explained that when Zoom launched the first iteration of its AI companion in 2023, it wasn't based on any one single LLM. Instead, the company started off with a federated approach, using multiple LLMs including its own custom built small language model (SLM). "We've partnered with the best models out there, including OpenAI and Anthropic, but we've also built our own highly customized 2 billion parameter language model," said Huang. Zoom's AI Companion uses a federated approach in which the smaller Zoom model is used in conjunction with larger, industry-leading language models. The smaller model initially evaluates and processes the input, and the partial results are then passed to larger models to produce the final output. This approach allows Zoom to take advantage of the strengths of both the smaller, customized model and the larger, more powerful models, while reducing costs and improving performance. How the small language model is at the center of Zoom's agentic AI journey Perhaps the most technically intriguing aspect of Zoom's AI strategy is its focus on SLMs. Rather than following the industry trend of distilling smaller models from larger ones, Zoom built its 2-billion parameter model entirely from scratch. The technical advantage of this approach becomes apparent when customizing for specific domains. "When you customize, it takes more effort, it's just hard to steer a bigger ship," Huang explained. As it turns out, the ability to customize the small model is a critical component to the development of specific agentic AI workflows. Looking ahead, Zoom envisions its SLMs eventually running directly on user devices, enabling both better privacy and more personalized experiences. AI companion 2.0: Agentic AI transforms meetings to milestones At the heart of Zoom's updates is AI Companion 2.0, which transforms Zoom's AI capabilities from meeting support to fully agentic functions. With 2.0, Zoom is evolving from assistant to agentic AI that is capable of reasoning, memory and task execution. The evolved AI Companion can now execute multi-step actions on behalf of users, orchestrating tasks like scheduling meetings, generating video clips and creating documents. Key updates include: Most features will roll out between March and July 2025. While the standard AI Companion is included at no additional cost for paid users, specialized agents and custom configurations will require additional fees. "The most important aspect for us of agentic AI is really enabling the action-oriented information flow," said Huang. "What that means is that when you have a meeting, the action task will flow into Docs or chat or into other actions you have to take." AI Studio: Building custom agents for enterprises While Zoom is providing a lot of different agentic AI capabilities out-of-the-box for users, Huang recognized that enterprises often need more customized options. That's where AI Studio comes in, allowing companies to create customized AI agents tailored to specific business needs. These can be deeply integrated with company-specific knowledge and workflow processes. As an example, Huang detailed one practical application for human resources policy. Enterprises can use the AI Studio to upload all of their internal HR policy documents. The AI companion will then be trained on this company-specific HR policy information, allowing it to accurately answer employee questions about HR guidelines and procedures. IT administrators can also use the AI Studio to connect the companion to other internal knowledge bases, like IT support documentation. The goal is to enable companies to create AI agents that are deeply integrated with their own processes, data and workflows, transforming the AI companion into a customized and valuable productivity tool. Implications for enterprise AI decision-makers For technical decision-makers evaluating productivity AI solutions, Zoom's approach offers several distinctive considerations compared to alternatives from Microsoft, Google and other vendors. The action-oriented information flow model may better suit organizations where meetings are the primary collaboration medium, and where task completion is hampered by information fragmentation across various tools. Companies with high meeting volumes might find particular value in Zoom's ability to connect conversations to subsequent actions. Additionally, the federated AI approach combining SLMs and LLMs presents an architecture worth studying -- potentially offering better economics while maintaining quality. As AI costs become a growing concern for enterprises scaling their AI implementations, this balanced approach could prove influential. For enterprises looking to lead the way in AI adoption, Zoom's evolution from meeting tool to comprehensive productivity platform offers valuable lessons in how to build on existing strengths rather than simply adding AI to existing workflows. By leveraging its meeting dominance to reimagine the entire productivity experience, Zoom is demonstrating how domain expertise can be combined with AI capabilities to create solutions that address specific business problems rather than generic AI assistants.
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Zoom launches AI Companion 2.0 with a major agent focus
Zoom has announced the next step in its agentic AI strategy with a range of new skills, agents and models coming to Zoom Workplace and Zoom Business Services. The company said the new releases will help its users get on with being more productive and strengthening their relationships with customers with the help of more autonomous AI tools. With the bold claim that over 45 new innovations have made it to Zoom's portfolio, its agentic AI will cover apps like Zoom Meetings, Zoom Phone, Zoom Team Chat, Zoom Docs and Zoom Contact Center. Zoom AI Companion gets an agentic boost The platform's AI Companion, which gets a 2.0 version launch, will continue to serve as the vehicle for Zoom to implement agentic AI across its portfolio, just with helpful enhancements like reasoning and memory for decision-making, problem solving and learning. Zoom CPO Smita Hashim summarized: "AI Companion is evolving from a personal assistant to being truly agentic." Besides the usual task action and orchestration functionalities of agentic AI, Zoom will also help workers manage their calendars and generate content. Later this spring, users will also be able to create and deploy customizable virtual agents for more contextual customer conversations, but they'll also be able to take action. Third-party agents such as the ServiceNow Now Assist agent and custom agents are also set to be supported "soon." Agentic AI promises major boosts for things like detecting action items in meeting summaries with Zoom Tasks and extracting tasks from calls using the Zoom for Microsoft Teams app. Coming later in May, we're also promised agentic AI for creating meeting agendas and also real-time summarization of meetings and phone calls. It's not just worker productivity that's set for improvements, though, because AI Companion for Workspace Reservation will recommend which days employees should go to the office based on scheduled meetings and teammates' scheduled in-office days, with the agentic portion of Zoom's AI proactively booking desks or Zoom Rooms. "We're delivering value for our customers through AI agents and agentic skills that solve real customer problems, helping them connect, collaborate, and get more done, all within the Zoom platform our users trust and love," Hashim added.
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Zoom introduces new AI capabilities and agents with major release - SiliconANGLE
Zoom introduces new AI capabilities and agents with major release Zoom Video Communications Inc. is upgrading its platform today with agentic artificial intelligence capabilities and skills for its Zoom AI Companion to assist with video call interactions. The company announced AI enhancements to its products including Zoom Meetings, Phone, Team Chat, Docs and Contact Center that will allow AI agents to take complex actions and orchestrate task execution for customers. "AI Companion is evolving from a personal assistant to being truly agentic, which signals a major leap forward in how AI can enhance productivity and collaboration at work," said Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom. Zoom AI Companion is a generative AI assistant available across the entire Zoom platform that offers capabilities such as meeting summaries, note-taking capabilities and email writing assistance. With the addition of agentic AI capabilities, part of a new trend where AI gains broader reasoning capabilities to make decisions and solve complex problems without the need for human intervention, it can take action and execute long-term tasks. New agentic skills now include managing calendars to schedule meetings, generating clips from lengthy video meetings, and providing writing assistance for advanced document creation, among other features. Zoom has announced that its AI Companion is an open platform, and it will soon be able to interact with third-party agents, including ServiceNow AI agents. Users will also have the ability to create custom agents with specific skill sets to address their unique needs. Customization of the Companion can be achieved through add-ons that tailor it to business requirements. This includes creating custom meeting templates and dictionaries that include industry-specific jargon, incorporating specialized data sources from third-party applications and using AI Studio to expand its knowledge. The customizable AI Companion add-on is expected to roll out in April. The company said its add-on capabilities incorporate AI small language models alongside large language models to provide high-accuracy answers at a low cost. Zoom explained the new SLMs are trained with multilingual data and optimized for complex actions aimed at facilitating multi-agent collaboration. "We've been using Zoom AI Companion since it became available, and I've seen firsthand how it has transformed our academic and administrative operations," said Steven Carroll, chief information officer at Saint Leo University. "This technology isn't just about efficiency; it allows our employees to spend less time on manual tasks and more time on meaningful collaboration..." Continuing the company's lean into AI capabilities, Zoom said it will soon provide deeper purpose-built agentic and AI-based solutions for specific industries such as frontline workers, healthcare and education. Starting in April, Workplace for Frontline, an AI Companion-based mobile solution will provide employees with on-shift communications and work management capabilities. These include push-to-talk, shift swapping, task management and shift summaries. By the end of March, Workplace for Clinicians will launch for doctors, nurses and practitioners, allowing them to spend more time on patient care and offloading documentation and administrative tasks. Finally, Workplace for Education will bring Zoom's AI Companion into the classroom to assist with lecture summaries, class curriculum, research notes, study materials and assignment generation.
[6]
How Zoom's AI will handle your busywork
Zoom is enhancing its AI Companion with an "agentic" upgrade, set to launch at the end of March 2025. This feature will enable the AI to perform tasks on behalf of users, accessible through a new Tasks tab in Zoom Workplace. Zoom's AI Companion upgrade set to simplify work tasks in March 2025 The AI Companion will allow workplace users to schedule follow-up meetings, generate documents summarizing discussions, and create video clips from meetings automatically. This upgrade aims to reduce busywork and improve collaboration efficiency. In addition to the AI Companion updates, Zoom is also launching a new voice recorder for its Workplace mobile app, which will record, transcribe, and summarize in-person meetings. This feature is expected to roll out alongside the AI enhancements in March 2025. Zoom -- the breakout star of COVID-19 -- is now an AI-focused company Further updates include the introduction of live notes in May 2025, which will provide real-time summaries during Zoom meetings and phone calls. All these features will be made available to Zoom Workplace users at no additional cost. Smita Hashim, Zoom's Chief Product Officer, highlighted the integration of AI across all aspects of Zoom products, emphasizing its utility in facilitating work. Hashim stated, "We see AI stretching across every part of every product and interactions in ways that is really helpful and useful so that it can help you do more." For users seeking further AI capabilities, Zoom will also launch a $12 per month Custom AI Companion add-on next month, featuring an AI-generated avatar to represent users in team communications. This add-on will include customizable avatar templates at no additional cost. The rollout of these features signifies Zoom's commitment to embedding AI as a fundamental element of its platform, allowing users to focus more on essential tasks instead of administrative work.
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Zoom AI Companion Will Soon Offer New Agentic AI Features
AI Companion will soon offer live notes to hosts during meetings Zoom unveiled multiple new artificial intelligence (AI) features for its AI Companion on Monday. The company's AI-powered assistant is now getting agentic capabilities with new skills, agent integration, and models. The company says that the AI Companion will soon be able to execute tasks on behalf of the user and manage multi-step actions using reasoning and memory-based capabilities. These new features will soon be added across the company's platforms including Zoom Meetings, Team Chat, Zoom Phone, Contact Center, as well as Zoom Business solutions. In a press release, the company detailed several new AI features that will be available across its platforms in the coming months. One such feature is Zoom Tasks with AI Companion which can detect, complete, and manage tasks across its Workplace platform. For instance, it can detect action items in meeting summaries, chats, and emails and then it can complete relevant tasks such as scheduling follow-up meetings or generating documents. This agentic feature is expected to launch by the end of March. Zoom also unveiled Meeting agendas with AI Companion which is aimed at helping participants stay on the topic. Meeting hosts can set an agenda timer to sections, and receive AI-generated live notes during the meeting. Other action items will be shared by the assistant at the end of the meeting. It is expected to launch in May. This live notes feature will also be available for Zoom Phone and provide real-time summaries during a phone call to help users catch up, stay on track, and focus on agenda-related topics. The platform is also getting a voicemail summaries feature and support for Microsoft Teams app. In late March, a new voice recorder will be added to the Zoom Workplace mobile app which can transcribe, summarise, and capture action items from in-person conversations via AI Companion. Another interesting feature is the AI Companion for Workspace Reservation. Aimed at professionals working in a hybrid setting, the feature can organise work-from-office issues such as showing them when they're expected to be in the office, recommending days to go to the office based on meetings, and booking a desk or Zoom Room using the assistant. This is expected to arrive in May. The company is also adding new AI features to Zoom products. Zoom Docs can now create better-quality content, create writing plans based on text prompts, search internal databases and external sources for information, and generate documents. This is expected to be released in June. AI Companion is also being upgraded with the ability to automatically create data tables from meeting summaries. The tool will label the columns to help users quickly go through the information. This feature is expected to arrive in July. Zoom also announced Zoom Drive, a central repository for meeting and productivity assets such as Zoom Docs, that will make it easier to find and access assets across Zoom Workplace. This will arrive in May. Agentic functions are also coming to the Zoom Contact Centre. The platform is getting a new agent dubbed Zoom Virtual Agent that comes with natural language processing and can handle complex queries and execute tasks on behalf of users. The agent will support both voice and text as input. Apart from this, the platform is getting several other agents for quality management as well as an agent router that can make a real-time intent analysis of customers to send them to the most suited agent. Finally, for those who prefer customised AI tools, Zoom is introducing a custom AI Companion add-on that will allow granular control over the assistant. Users will get access to the AI Studio that can fine-tune the assistant as per the organisation's needs. With this, they can add vocabulary unique to the business, integrate internal data sources, as well as add third-party applications. The Zoom AI Companion will also come with custom avatars for Zoom Clips that will help users scale video clip creation by letting the agent handle the process. It can generate clips using a script. The custom AI Companion add-on will be available for purchase in April and is priced at $12 (roughly Rs. 1,038) a month. The end-user-focused AI Companion across Zoom platforms will be available for free to users with paid services in their Zoom accounts.
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Zoom Introduces Customizable AI Companion With New Add-Ons For Businesses - Zoom Communications (NASDAQ:ZM)
Join Nic Chahine live on Wednesday, March 19, at 6 PM ET for a step-by-step breakdown of how to to capitalize on post-Fed volatility and manage risk in this fast-moving market. Register for this free strategy session today. On Monday, Zoom Communications, Inc. ZM disclosed the new agentic AI Companion capabilities, expanded AI Companion skills and AI enhancements across its platform. These updates span Zoom Meetings, Team Chat, Docs, Phone, Whiteboard, Contact Center, industry solutions and more. Zoom also introduced Zoom Drive, a centralized hub for storing meeting and productivity assets, including Zoom Docs, to streamline access across Zoom Workplace. The feature is set to launch in May. Zoom AI Companion remains available at no extra cost for customers with paid Zoom user accounts. The company added that advanced AI Companion features, custom agent setups and third-party agent integrations may come with additional fees or separate pricing. Zoom is enhancing its AI Companion with advanced skills and agents to boost productivity, with new features including calendar management, clip generation and writing assistance. Also, Zoom's open platform will soon support third-party and custom agents for tasks like sales RFPs and IT service requests, with AI Companion orchestrating the execution. Zoom's Custom AI Companion add-on allows organizations to tailor the AI Companion to their specific needs using AI Studio. Businesses can create custom meeting templates, dictionaries and integrate their own data, including third-party apps. The add-on includes a personal AI coach, custom meeting summary templates, and Custom Avatars for video clips and will be available for purchase in April for $12 per user per month, with the personal coach launching in June. Steven Carroll, chief information officer at Saint Leo University said, "This technology isn't just about efficiency; it allows our employees to spend less time on manual tasks and more time on meaningful collaboration, and focus on what matters most: supporting our students' educational journey." Investors can gain exposure to the stock via Global X Cloud Computing ETF CLOU and StockSnips AI-Powered Sentiment US All Cap ETF NEWZ. Price Action: ZM shares are up 0.67% at $74.70 premarket at the last check Monday. Read Next: Zoom Eyes AI-Powered Growth, Analyst Highlights Innovation Momentum, Revenue Challenges Photo: Shutterstock ZMZoom Communications Inc$74.930.98%Stock Score Locked: Want to See it? Benzinga Rankings give you vital metrics on any stock - anytime. Reveal Full ScoreEdge RankingsMomentum78.37Growth94.03Quality73.49Value57.82Price TrendShortMediumLongOverviewCLOUGlobal X Cloud Computing ETF$21.981.01%NEWZStockSnips AI-Powered Sentiment US All Cap ETF$27.240.74%Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs
[9]
Zoom Adds More AI Agents Across Platform | PYMNTS.com
"AI Companion is evolving from a personal assistant to being truly agentic, which signals a major leap forward in how AI can enhance productivity and collaboration at work," Zoom Chief Product Officer Smita Hashim said in the release. AI Companion's newest agentic skills include helping schedule meetings and find a time that works for everyone, generating clips and providing writing assistance for advanced document creation, according to the release. In Zoom Business Services, AI Companion now offers a virtual agent for customer self-service. In the coming months, it will add the ability to create and deploy customizable virtual agents and aid sales with automated insights, personalized outreach, and enhanced prospecting, the release said. Another feature that the company said is coming soon for AI Companion is the ability to work with third-party and custom agents so that it can perform tasks like streamlining sales requests for proposals (RFPs) or information technology (IT) and human resources (HR) service requests, per the release. "We're delivering value for our customers through AI agents and agentic skills that solve real customer problems, helping them connect, collaborate and get more done, all within the Zoom platform our users trust and love," Hashim said in the release. Zoom executives said in May that the company's focus on AI has enabled it to expand its offerings, compete in new markets like the contact center space, and differentiate itself from competitors, PYMNTS reported.
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Zoom Introduces Agentic AI Skills and Agents to Enhance Productivity Across Its Platform
Additional new agentic skills include calendar management to help schedule meetings and find a time that works for everyone, clip generation for fast clip creation, writing assistance for advanced document creation, and more. AI Companion will also extend to specialized agents that power Zoom Business Services. For customer self-service, Zoom Virtual Agent leverages memory and reasoning skills to deliver empathetic and contextual conversations and task action to resolve complex issues from start to finish. With AI Studio, users can effortlessly create and deploy customizable virtual agents (available in beta later this spring). Zoom Revenue Accelerator users will also be able to benefit from a specialized agent for sales in the coming months to help increase revenue through automated insights, personalized outreach and enhanced prospecting. Coming soon, with Zoom's open platform, users will be able to interact with third-party agents such as ServiceNow AI Agents and create their own custom agents with specific skill sets to address unique needs, such as streamlining sales RFPs or IT and HR service requests. AI Companion will know when to work with third-party and custom agents to take action and complete tasks.
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Zoom expands AI Companion with agentic skills and more
Zoom Communications today announced a major update, unveiling new AI Companion capabilities, skills, and enhancements across its platform, including Zoom Meetings, Zoom Team Chat, Zoom Docs, Zoom Phone, Zoom Whiteboard, Zoom Contact Center, and tailored industry solutions. Zoom's AI Companion now uses advanced agentic skills and specialized agents to deliver smarter results. It acts on users' behalf, managing multi-step tasks with reasoning and memory to solve complex problems and adapt over time. The system orchestrates actions like scheduling or document creation seamlessly. Zoom introduced the Custom AI Companion add-on, available in April for $12 per user per month. This lets organizations tailor the AI with AI Studio, adding custom meeting templates, dictionaries with business-specific vocabulary, and data from compatible third-party apps. It also includes a digital personal AI coach (out in June) and custom meeting summary templates for use cases like one-on-one meetings or brainstorming. Zoom highlighted its federated AI approach, combining Small Language Models (SLMs) with third-party Large Language Models (LLMs) for top performance and cost-effectiveness. SLMs, trained on vast multilingual data, excel at specific tasks and multi-agent collaboration. AI Companion's new skills cut manual work across Zoom Workplace, helping users focus on what matters. Zoom Docs gains AI-powered upgrades for better content creation. Zoom noted that AI Companion remains free with paid accounts, though specialized capabilities, custom agents, or third-party integrations may carry additional fees. Zoom Business Services, spanning marketing, customer care, and sales, integrates AI-first solutions with Zoom Workplace to improve customer relationships. The company cautioned that some features may vary by region or industry vertical. Zoom expects these updates to empower users, enhance workflows, and meet diverse needs with AI-driven precision. Speaking about the updates, Smita Hashim, Chief Product Officer at Zoom, said,
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Zoom introduces a major upgrade to its AI Companion, incorporating agentic AI capabilities to enhance productivity and streamline workflows across its platform.
Zoom, the video conferencing giant that became a household name during the pandemic, is taking a significant leap forward in artificial intelligence integration. The company has announced a major update to its AI Companion, introducing agentic AI capabilities that promise to transform the way users interact with the platform and manage their work 1.
Agentic AI refers to artificial intelligence systems capable of reasoning, memory, and autonomous task execution. Zoom's AI Companion 2.0 is designed to go beyond simple meeting assistance, evolving into a comprehensive productivity tool that can perform complex, multi-step actions on behalf of users 2.
Zoom Tasks: Identifies action items from meeting summaries, chats, and emails, then completes tasks such as scheduling follow-up meetings or generating documents 2.
Voice Recorder: A new feature in the Zoom Workplace mobile app that can transcribe, summarize, and capture in-person conversations 2.
Meeting Agendas with AI Companion: Helps keep meetings on track with agenda timers and AI-generated live notes 2.
AI Companion for Workspace Reservation: Assists in managing hybrid work experiences by suggesting optimal office days based on colleagues' schedules and booking necessary resources 2.
Zoom's approach to AI implementation is unique in its use of both large language models (LLMs) and small language models (SLMs). The company has developed a custom 2-billion parameter SLM, which works in conjunction with larger models from partners like OpenAI and Anthropic 3.
This federated approach allows Zoom to leverage the strengths of both smaller, customized models and larger, more powerful ones, potentially improving performance and reducing costs 3.
Zoom is also introducing AI Studio, allowing enterprises to create customized AI agents tailored to specific business needs. This feature enables deep integration with company-specific knowledge and workflow processes 3.
A Custom AI Companion add-on, priced at $12 per user per month, will offer advanced customization options, including personalized meeting templates, custom dictionaries, and even AI-generated avatars for Zoom Clips 2.
Zoom is developing purpose-built AI solutions for specific industries:
Workplace for Frontline: An AI Companion-based mobile solution for on-shift communications and work management 5.
Workplace for Clinicians: Designed to help healthcare professionals focus more on patient care by handling documentation and administrative tasks 5.
Workplace for Education: Bringing AI assistance into classrooms for lecture summaries, curriculum planning, and assignment generation 5.
The introduction of agentic AI capabilities in Zoom's platform represents a significant shift from simple meeting tools to a comprehensive productivity ecosystem. By automating routine tasks and providing intelligent assistance across various aspects of work, Zoom aims to help users focus on more meaningful collaboration and decision-making 4.
As these new features roll out between March and July 2025, users can expect a more integrated and intelligent workspace experience, potentially redefining how remote and hybrid teams collaborate in the AI era.
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Zoom introduces AI-generated avatars and upgrades its AI Companion, aiming to revolutionize remote work and communication with advanced AI features.
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