Zoom Unveils AI-Powered Features: Photorealistic Avatars, Cross-Platform Integration, and Intelligent Meeting Management

Zoom launches a cross application AI notetaker, AI avatars and more in its latest update | TechCrunch

Zoom on Wednesday launched new products at its Zoomtopia conference, including an upgraded AI companion that can work across meeting apps, as well as the ability to add your own notes, AI-powered meeting scheduling, and AI avatars that resemble users. With these features, the company aims to compete with verticalized meeting startups and productivity suites. The company has long offered an AI bot that can record and transcribe Zoom meetings. However, cross-application meeting notetakers like Read AI, Otter, Fireflies, Granola, and Circleback have made great progress. To tackle that, Zoom is making its AI companion work with other platforms such as Meet and Microsoft Teams, along with a feature to take notes during in-person meetings. The company is taking a page out of Granola's book to let users jot down their own notes during meetings, then have AI expand and structure them later. Zoom is also adding cross-platform search so users can retrieve information from across Google and Microsoft's platforms. New calendar-related features are also on the way. Through its AI Companion, the company will allow users to find time slots that work for all attendees. Plus, it can suggest meetings you can skip through a new "free up my time" request. (Notably, calendar tool Clokcwise launched a similar tool last year to resolve meeting conflicts.) The company is also rolling out proactive meeting recommendations, such as suggested tasks and agenda items for meeting prep, and a group AI assistant for a group. Zoom will introduce photorealistic avatars to its platforms, too -- something it's talked about for some time. Earlier this year, the company's CEO, Eric Yuan, used one during its quarterly call. The avatars will mime your actions on video and are useful when you are not "camera-ready," Zoom said. However, there are deepfake risks involved with the misuse of personas that could see corporate IT departments scrambling to turn them off. The feature is expected to be available to consumers by the end of the year. The update will introduce the ability for hosts to use Zoom Clips, its asynchronous video tool, and AI avatars to greet people in waiting rooms and to explain the purpose of the meeting. AI will also aid in new live translation features. What's more, Zoom is launching an upgraded web interface to feature its AI companion more prominently, and other AI-powered features like a writing assistant to draft emails and documents, and a deep research feature, are being added. Plus, Zoom will allow for the creation of custom AI agents with support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), support for higher bit rate and 60fps for Zoom meetings, and a new Zoom video management tool to manage video assets.

Zoom's New AI Tool Will Tell You What Meetings to Skip

The next time your boss asks you why you skipped a meeting, you could blame it on Zoom. The video conferencing company unveiled a host of new AI upgrades on Wednesday, all aimed at improving its AI to do tasks for you. Zoom introduced its AI companion two years ago, letting people use it to take notes, transcribe meetings or ask its chatbot follow-up questions after a meeting is over. Now, Zoom is upgrading it to what it calls AI Companion 3.0. The tool will be more agentic, meaning it is built to handle tasks without human oversight. You can expect to see these updates available this November. The most exciting new feature is called "free up my time." Like the name implies, the AI will suggest ways to lighten your meeting load -- including meetings on your calendar you should skip. It also identifies meeting invitees who could be moved to optional. It can recommend blocking off meeting-free periods in your calendar for dedicated focus time. You'll still need to give final approval before Zoom's AI makes any changes to your calendar. Don't miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source. Other AI updates coming this fall include a note-taking feature that can take your manually typed meeting notes and expand upon them using a meeting's insights. You'll also be able to turn meeting slides into short video clips and create new avatars if you don't want to turn your camera on during meetings. A new live translation feature should help users speaking different languages communicate more smoothly in real-time. Businesses can also create custom AI agents via Zoom for an extra $12 per month. All of this comes with a redesigned Zoom Workplace home screen. Agentic AI is the latest wave of generative AI technology. It builds upon large language models and uses advanced reasoning capabilities and knowledge of your previous actions (called memory) to complete tasks independently. Agentic AI has been popping up in a lot of places online, including our web browsers and individual chatbots like ChatGPT and, possibly soon, DeepSeek. One recent report estimates that a third of all organic search traffic is from AI agents, highlighting the growing role agents are playing in how we interact online. Many business leaders see agentic AI as a way to automate administrative tasks and aid (or use as a rationale to replace) lower-level employees. While agentic AI and other upgraded AI models are becoming more capable of completing certain tasks, there are a lot of reasons why AI won't be able to wholly replace workers.

You can soon attend Zoom meetings as your AI avatar

Zoom's vision of filling meetings with AI clones has nearly arrived. On Wednesday, the video conferencing app announced that you'll soon be able to create a "photorealistic" avatar of yourself in case you aren't "camera-ready." That means your AI avatar can appear polished if you've just crawled out of bed. Zoom plans on launching this feature to Workplace users in December, allowing you to generate an AI lookalike based on a photo of yourself that you upload or capture directly in the app. Once Zoom generates your avatar, you'll be able to "dress" it in different professional outfits. It will track your movement during the meeting as you talk or move around your screen in real life. While Zoom started letting users deliver prerecorded messages with an AI avatar last year, this takes things further by allowing you to pose as an AI clone in meetings. During an interview on Decoder in June 2024, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan hinted at a future where everyone has a "digital twin," or an AI agent that uses your likeness to perform tasks and make decisions on your behalf, like attending meetings and automatically answering emails. Zoom may not be quite there yet, but it's getting closer. Zoom plans on rolling out some safeguards with its photorealistic avatars feature, which means you shouldn't be able to attend your meetings as Keanu Reeves. Smita Hashim, Zoom's chief product officer, tells The Verge that the platform will use "live camera authentication" to ensure that you're the person in the image you've uploaded. Zoom will also include "in-meeting tile notices" that indicate you're using an AI avatar. "This feature remains in development, and specific enrollment and authentication processes may change before general availability," Hashim said. Along with photorealistic AI avatars, Zoom is launching some other updates to the platform, including real-time voice translation. When the update is released in December, it will use AI to translate what a speaker is saying in real time, allowing participants to hear the speaker talk in the language of their choice. The feature currently supports English, German, Chinese, French, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, Portuguese, and Italian. Zoom is also releasing a new version of its AI assistant, which can do things like schedule meetings for you and create video clips. This month, Zoom will give users the ability to "bring" the assistant to in-person meetings and conferences on other platforms like Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, where it can take notes.

Bad hair day? Zoom is adding photorealistic avatars to its roadmap

Zoom Meetings are just one facet of the productivity company Zoom aspires to be. If you've ever wanted to call in sick and let an AI take over on your next Zoom meeting -- well, that future isn't quite here yet. But Zoom is adding "photorealistic avatars" to Zoom Workplace in addition to smoother video and live voice translation. That doesn't mean you'll be able to play hooky -- although a version of you will appear on the screen, moving in time to your motions. This will make it appear as if you are present and engaged, even if you didn't have time to make yourself presentable for the camera. Unfortunately, the simple Zoom app that connected people during the epidemic has evolved into a full-fledged workspace like Microsoft Teams. It now includes multiple levels of AI (say hello to Zoomie!) with agentic services, whiteboards, chat, and more. But the core experience, now known as Workplace, is also improving in measurable ways, the company said at its Zoomtopia developer conference. It didn't provide examples of how each feature will work. However, company's Workspace roadmap looks intriguing. For years, users have been able to turn their cameras off, which doesn't necessarily indicate that the user is paying attention. Its solution is a "photorealistic avatar" that will "track and mimic their live video feed," described as a "lifelike AI-generated avatar." Since that feature is scheduled to roll out in December, we won't know whether that avatar is simply an animated photo of you or something different. Zoom is also adding a feature that rivals are adding: real-time voice translations, which Microsoft has demonstrated (as announced for Microsoft Edge, and then later demonstrated) as has Google with real-time voice translations for Google Meet. The problem here has been the difficulty in doing so. Microsoft's demos have only been in English, Spanish, and Korean, while Google Meet has been limited to just Spanish. Zoom isn't saying how many languages it'll deliver, though the feature is expected to roll out in December. And yes, the basic Zoom Meetings app is getting an upgrade, too. One of the challenges in buying a top-notch webcam is that some of the basic 1080p webcams attached to a laptop don't quite deliver the visual quality you're used to seeing on YouTube. Zoom doesn't support streaming in 1440p, let alone 4K, and it still won't. However, you'll now be able to share content in 4K, and Zoom is upgrading its infrastructure to allow 1080p cameras at 60Hz. Most webcams stream at just 30Hz, which can look a little jittery; 60Hz is the refresh rate of TV and most streaming services, so using a 60Hz webcam will subconsciously deliver a "TV-like" experience. This, too, is expected in December. Zoom is also using AI to help users find and book meetings. A new "Zoomie" group assistant can be used to check into a room, check on action items or updates, and more. Zoomie appears to be one part of the AI Companion, which helps track down free meeting times by examining participants' schedules and digs up relevant documents so you're prepared. These features will be available in the coming months, Zoom said. One of the features some IT managers worry about is Zoom's ability to "sit in" on a meeting and record and take notes. Zoom is branching out: soon users will be able to bring the AI Companion to Microsoft Teams and Google Meet later this month, with support for WebEx at a later date. And, of course, there's more traditional AI, too: this November, Zoom will add "writing assistance" that's tuned to a user's style, along with "deep research" that will be added the month before. All that will be enabled in a new work "surface" that Zoom will launch in November for the Web.

Zoom is working on realistic avatars - and its AI companion will finally now work with Microsoft Teams and Google Meet

Its AI note-taking tool will also finally work across Google Meet and Microsoft Teams Zoom introduced AI Companion 3.0, the latest evolution of its AI tools platform designed to speed up tedious tasks, and offering a host of personalization options. The company saus AI Companion's main capabilities center around turning conversations into actions, gaining context from meetings, chats, calls and emails. But for the first time, Zoom's AI agents will also work across other video conferencing tools such as Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and WebEx, aiming to make them even more useful. A big thumbs up for the interoperability police, Zoom's AI tools are set to work across Teams and Google Meet as early as September 2025, with WebEx support expected at a later date. Note-taking will also work in in-person meetings, and users can leverage agentic retrieval to find organizational information more quickly to add further context. "With AI Companion 3.0, our agentic AI can understand users' specific context, priorities, and goals to help them cut through the noise, focus on what matters most, and drive meaningful business outcomes," CEO Eric S Yuan said. Among the long list of other improvements being made to Zoom's AI ecosystem were a series of upgrades to video conferencing, so you'll no longer have an excuse not to turn up to those pesky meetings. Zoom described its upcoming AI-generated photorealistic avatars as "lifelike" and the perfect solution for calls when participants might not quite be "camera-ready." This comes as companies are set to unlock 60fps frame rates and support for multiple simultaneous HD streams. Zoom Rooms with wired HDMI connections will build on this with 1080p/60fps and 4K content sharing beginning December 2025.

Zoom unveils AI Companion 3.0, betting on agentic AI to drive enterprise growth

Zoom has announced AI Companion 3.0 at its annual Zoomtopia conference, marking what the company describes as its transition to "truly agentic AI" - though whether this latest evolution can reignite growth for the collaboration platform remains an open question. The vendor's aggressive push into Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes as it continues to face sluggish revenue growth and intense competition from Microsoft Teams in the enterprise market. At the core of the announcements is AI Companion 3.0, which Zoom claims moves beyond basic assistance to become an intelligent agent capable of taking autonomous action on behalf of users. According to Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom, the new iteration is built on four core capabilities: memory (knowing user preferences and interests), reasoning (analyzing complex situations), task actions (understanding which tools and skills to deploy), and orchestration (managing multiple agents to achieve objectives). Hashim explains during the pre-briefing: AI Companion doesn't just assist you, it coordinates and executes for you, knowing exactly which agents and which skills to deploy for the best possible outcomes. The practical applications of these agentic capabilities span several areas. A new AI note-taking feature can capture notes across multiple platforms - not just Zoom meetings - but also Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Cisco WebEx sessions, as well as in-person meetings. The system can join meetings when users can't attend and capture action items automatically. Intriguingly, Zoom is also introducing what it calls "free up my time" - an agentic skill that analyzes calendars and makes recommendations about which meetings to skip, identifies optional versus mandatory attendees, and can automatically carve out focus time in users' schedules. As Leo Boulton, who leads product solutions and industry marketing at Zoom, describes it: This isn't just calendar management, it's intelligent time orchestration that works for you. The company is also launching new work surfaces - a web experience coming in November and an enhanced Home tab in Zoom Workplace next year - that aim to create what Bolton calls a "personalized workspace that understands you and how you work." These interfaces are designed to bridge data, tools, presentations, and conversations, automatically surfacing relevant information from previous meetings and prioritizing tasks based on discussions. Zoom's ambitions extend well beyond its traditional collaboration tools - a recognition that for growth it needs to capture more of the work being done by employees. The company announces significant enhancements to its Business Services portfolio, including Customer Experience (CX) and sales enablement capabilities. Michelle Couture, who leads product marketing for Zoom CX, highlights new agentic prospecting capabilities in Zoom Revenue Accelerator that can automatically identify high-potential leads, initiate personalized outreach, and manage follow-ups until meetings are booked. Couture says: Sales teams are going to be able to stay in front of prospects while they're the most engaged, and they're going to get back hours so that they can focus on building relationships and truly driving revenue. For customer service teams, new CX Insights allows leaders to ask questions in plain language to uncover trends and coach teams without waiting on analysts or digging through complex dashboards. The system also provides what Zoom calls "prescriptive guidance" to help reduce churn and improve customer satisfaction. Randel Maestre, who leads product marketing for industry lines of business, outlines Zoom's vertical market strategy. The company is expanding its Workplace for Clinicians offering to include custom templates, ambient listening for both in-person and telehealth visits, and plans to extend clinical note capabilities to Zoom Phone and contact center - making it "the only platform that provides clinical note access for meetings, phone as well as contact center," according to Maestre. A new video management solution, aimed at education customers, addresses the growing challenge of managing video content libraries. The solution includes automatic transcription, smart chapters, content summarization, and intelligent recommendations powered by AI. Notably, Zoom is also bringing AI Companion to where users already work. The company will launch a native AI Companion experience inside Slack next month and Microsoft Teams shortly after, both powered by its Custom AI Companion add-on. This move acknowledges the reality that many enterprise users are already embedded in other collaboration platforms. While product announcements ensue, Zoom faces significant headwinds in translating AI innovation into revenue growth. Recent financial results show total revenue growth of just 2.9 percent year-over-year, with enterprise revenue up 5.9% but online revenue declining 1.2%. The company's net dollar expansion rate sits at 98%, indicating existing customers aren't significantly expanding their spending. Kim Storin, Zoom's chief marketing officer, attempts to position the company differently from competitors during the briefing: Microsoft builds for IT and procurement. Google bundles collaboration into a by-the-way product suite, but Zoom, zoom is truly built for the people, for the employees, the creators, the entrepreneurs, the educators. This positioning is crucial as Zoom attempts to differentiate itself in an increasingly crowded market. The company claims AI Companion monthly active users have increased 4x year-over-year, with "millions of users" leveraging the capability across various functions. A Fortune 200 tech company with 60,000 employees recently deployed AI Companion enterprise-wide, according to Hashim. Zoom is also making bold claims about the quality of its AI capabilities. The company says it tested its real-time translated captions against Microsoft Teams and Google Meet using industry standard metrics and found itself "consistently 11 to 28 percent more accurate across English to French, Spanish, Japanese translations." The vendor's federated approach to AI, leveraging multiple models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and its own small language models, is positioned as a quality differentiator. Hashim states: We know that good enough does not work. Teams need the best tools, the best quality for global communication. Importantly for enterprise buyers concerned about data privacy, Zoom emphasizes that it does not use customer content to train its AI models or third-party AI models. The core AI Companion capabilities are included at no additional cost with paid services in Zoom Workplace accounts, though premium features like Custom AI Companion require an additional 12 dollars per user per month. Despite the ambitious product roadmap, Zoom faces fundamental challenges in the enterprise market. Microsoft's aggressive bundling of Teams with its Office suite creates significant switching costs that Zoom must overcome. The company's attempt to position itself as the platform "built for the people" rather than IT departments is arguably a novel strategy in enterprise sales, where IT and procurement often hold the purchasing power. However, it is true that employee demand can influence purchasing decisions. Zoom's AI Companion 3.0 represents a significant technical shift in the company's capabilities and demonstrates the vendor's commitment to evolving beyond its video conferencing roots. The breadth of announcements - from autonomous scheduling to industry-specific solutions - shows Zoom's ambition. However, the ultimate test won't be technical releases but whether these capabilities can drive meaningful revenue growth and help Zoom break free from its post-pandemic plateau. With growth remaining sluggish despite previous AI announcements, the company needs to prove that agentic AI can deliver tangible business value that justifies switching costs and overcomes the convenience of incumbent solutions.

Zoom is betting big on agentic AI with its new AI Companion 3.0

The phrase "Let's hop on a Zoom call" has become part of everyday language, shorthand for virtual meetings that defined an era, from remote classrooms to boardrooms. Zoom rose to household-name status by keeping the world connected during the pandemic, but being synonymous with meetings has always been both a triumph and a trap. For years, the company has worked to shake the perception that it begins and ends in the virtual conference room. At Zoomtopia 2025, its annual flagship conference, the company made its boldest move yet to redefine that identity. It announced the launch of AI Companion 3.0, a major upgrade aimed at positioning Zoom as a full-scale agentic AI workplace. Instead of merely summarizing discussions, AI Companion can interpret intent, decide on next steps, and execute them across a wide array of applications and workflows, all powered by an agentic AI architecture. Zoom describes the shift as a move away from passive assistants toward true collaborators -- systems designed not just to respond to requests but to anticipate needs, make decisions, and carry out tasks, much like a colleague would. Xuedong Huang, Zoom's chief technology officer, tells Fast Company that the latest upgrade moves beyond simple assistance by giving AI the ability to reason, remember, and take action. "The leap from a passive assistant to a proactive agent in AI Companion 3.0 is made possible through the integration of agentic skills, including reasoning, memory, task action, and orchestration," he says. Under the hood, Zoom relies on a federated system that can pull from its own models as well as those from OpenAI and Anthropic, ensuring conversations reach resolution.

It's an AI bonanza at Zoomtopia 2025 - SiliconANGLE

Zoom Communications Inc. has a variety of products, including meetings, contact center, front-line worker applications and others, but this week there's a single theme that cut across the fully virtual Zoomtopia event: artificial intelligence. In fact, with that emphasis on how AI is expanding and enhancing Zoom's conferencing and related services, they could have called the event ZoomtopAI. Though there is no shortage of communications tools, Zoom's differentiator has been and continues to be ease of use. On a prebriefing, Chief Marketing Officer Kim Storin emphasized this point. "Zoom is built for the people," she said. "That can be for employees, creators, entrepreneurs or educators. These are the folks that are driving progress forward every single day in their organizations." Zoom is clearly working to stand apart from Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC, its chief rivals, especially when it comes to meeting the needs of smaller organizations and solo entrepreneurs in addition to enterprises. The Zoomtopia theme -- How Zoom Empowers People -- was reflected in the new features and capabilities the company announced. Foremost among them was AI Companion 3.0, which Chief Product Officer Smita Hashim called "truly agentic AI that gets you to quality results faster by giving you more insights. And thanks to powerful agentic skills and proactive assistance, it allows you to be more effective with your time and uplevel your work. Our goal is to turn every conversation into action to drive business outcome." Hashim answered the question: Why Zoom for AI? She cited three reasons: Every unified communications as-a-service and contact center as-a-service provider has AI today and it's difficult to say whose is better than any others. Most of the vendors use the same models and that makes the data used to train the system a differentiator -- and that's where Zoom should have an advantage. Over the last few years, Zoom has added contact center, e-mail, docs and other capabilities, many of which left industry watchers scratching their heads as to why Zoom would want to enter those markets. The answer is the data. Now that Zoom can see across customer information, employee meetings, e-mail and other forms of work, it should have the most complete view of work and this should give it an advantage in AI. Hashim noted monthly active users for Zoom AI Companion grew fourfold year over year, with the growth coming from all capabilities: meeting summaries, conversation synthesis, content generation and workflow automation. Hashim drilled down into the four capabilities Zoom's agentic AI provides to customers: The combination of these capabilities, she said, enables Zoom AI Companion to "effectively act on your behalf when you ask it to or even proactively, always with your approval." Hashim said the skills layer in version 3.0 of AI Companion is advancing and now includes "new platform-wide capabilities like agentic retrieval and generation assistance, all of which leverage memory, reasoning, task actions and orchestration." Core AI Companion capabilities are included with paid services in Zoom Workplace accounts at no additional charge. "Our customers' most important conversations happen on Zoom, and now those conversations can result in critical insights to fuel real progress," said Eric S. Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom (pictured). "With AI Companion 3.0, our agentic AI can understand users' specific context, priorities and goals to help them cut through the noise, focus on what matters most, and drive meaningful business outcomes." Leo Boulton, head of product, solutions and industry marketing for Zoom, said AI Companion 3.0 operates through three core capabilities to put "every conversation into action, and these are going to be personalized to how you work, wherever you work." Those core capabilities are: Uncover: Broadening context for relevance. Rather than focus solely on deliverables such as polished documents or reports, AI Companion 3.0 understands what happens in between those outputs. Boulton explained, Zoom captures and adds content from in-meeting chat threads, cascading support conversations between contact center agents and customers, and other communications occurring across multiple channels that "typically get lost and don't translate into the structured format an AI model typically needs." Optimize: AI Companion 3.0 helps people reclaim and optimize time by preparing and synthesizing key information to get the insights from customer calls or anything across work. While AI can help in many ways, this can have the most bang for the buck as it gives people that precious commodity of time. My research has found that workers spend 40% of their time managing work and AI Companion can knock a big chunk off this number. Uplevel: Helping users produce higher-quality work faster by gathering information from different tools in the technology stack and channeling it through an AI system. This includes the ability to reorganize schedules, create materials, and guide customer interactions. For example, an employee preparing for a client call can augment historical interaction or meeting data with structured data, such as a financial analyst report. AI Companion 3.0 is adding agentic enhancements to the Prepare Me for a Meeting feature. "It's providing a proactive, timely nudge before my meeting, recommending what assets I should prepare, what insights I should know, and giving me a full picture of previous conversations," said Theresa Larkin, head of Zoom Workplace and AI marketing. A new assistant, called Zoomie, is designed to help participants in group meetings. "I could say 'at Zoomie' to get faster questions, clarity, and automated answers to really bring transparency and scalability to the different teams," explained Larkin. "In a Zoom Room, I can use it to enhance the meeting experience. I could use my voice for things like controlling the room and environment, the lights, or the temperature. I could also use it to activate screen sharing or creating a whiteboard so we can focus on group collaboration and not working on the technology or the room settings." Other new AI Companion 3.0 features for Workplace include photorealistic avatars for participants in place of playful cartoons or animals to "look a bit more professional," said Larkin. "This new photorealistic meeting avatar will allow me to maintain a professional appearance in a meeting, and I don't have to worry about the distraction if I'm moving around or eating." Zoom is adding its Ask AI Companion feature to webinars. "Now, if someone joins a webinar late or they simply want to catch up or missed something, they can easily ask AI Companion to generate instant summaries and additional context so they can get caught up without putting any incremental work on the host," said Michelle Couture, global product marketing lead for Zoom CX solutions. For sales, Zoom is working to make prospecting easier and less resource-intensive by bringing agentic prospecting to Zoom Revenue Accelerator. Couture said sales reps just have to assign it to leads, and it will do all the work. "It's going to automatically enrich with webinar engagement data or data from a CRM. It's going to prioritize and then begin personalized outreach to these leads, and it even handles the back-and-forth until the meetings are booked." CX Insights will democratize data access and stitch together a complete view of what's happening across the contact center. "Leaders, supervisors and frontline managers can all access and utilize natural language to help drill into performance trends and uncover root causes across all Zoom CX channels," Couture said. "And by connecting this data across the contact center, CX Insights can provide prescriptive recommendations for things like staffing adjustments for upcoming peak hours or flagging recurring self-service issues that are driving up call volumes." The goal is to improve operations, help control costs and raise customer satisfaction scores. Zoom is continuing to add vertical-specific offerings, including a new video management solution. The company is expanding its Workplace for Clinicians into a comprehensive clinical workflow solution. It's also adding custom templates to its AI-based clinical notes feature and providing support for ambient listening, telehealth visits and more, according to Randy Maestre, head of industry, line of business and ecosystem marketing. "Moving forward, we will be adding pre-visit prep in meeting assist, leveraging AI companion post-visit follow-up capabilities, and we'll be expanding Workplace for Clinicians to Zoom Phone and Zoom Contact Center, making Zoom the only platform that can provide clinical notes capabilities across meetings, phone, as well as contact center," said Maestre. The focus on industries, particularly frontline workers is important as this has been a long-ignored audience for communications tools. Most of the meeting and collaboration tools are built for the knowledge worker, yet the number of frontline workers is four times the number of knowledge workers. Historically, knowledge workers either didn't have access to modern communication tools or used consumer apps. Zoom has been focused on bringing its ease of use and knowledge of workflows to front line workers. This includes integrating Zoom into industry specific applications so worker can stay in the applications they are already using. Zoomtopia 2025 was an excellent showcase for the company's innovation across all the parts of work it touches. A challenge for the industry has been ensuring that customers can consume the features at the rate they are being rolled out. With so many new features, customers are having a difficult time in understand what's new. This is where Zoom's focus on ease of use should pay dividends. What made the company a household name during the pandemic was that anyone could use it as the interface was intuitive. Maintaining the philosophy should help it in the race for AI adoption.

Zoom announces AI Companion 3.0 at Zoomtopia

Zoom unveiled AI Companion 3.0 and a suite of other AI-powered features at its Zoomtopia conference on September 18, 2025. The updates are designed to enhance worker productivity and help the company compete in the crowded video communication and enterprise software markets. The new tools use "agentic AI" to analyze communications and provide users with timely, actionable insights. The centerpiece of the announcement is AI Companion 3.0, an upgraded version of Zoom's AI assistant. The new version uses agentic AI to process multiple data sources -- including recorded meetings, chat histories, and shared documents -- to deliver critical information when users need it most. This builds on existing features like AI-powered notetaking and transcription by adding more interactive and contextual support. In her presentation, Zoom's Chief Product Officer, Smita Hashim, explained the goal of the new technology. "Around the world, millions of people are using Zoom to connect with their colleagues and customers, but they could be getting so much more out of those conversations with the help of AI. AI Companion 3.0 will provide deeper insights from those conversations to help users accomplish more at work and achieve better business outcomes." The AI Companion will introduce several new tools to help users manage their work more effectively: Zoom also announced several updates to its core video conferencing platform, including: The expansion of AI note-taking tools comes at a time of increased scrutiny over data privacy. A lawsuit filed in August against Otter.ai, for example, alleges that the service recorded and used private conversations without proper consent. Zoom's new features will operate within this landscape, where data security and user consent are major concerns. The new features also arrive as U.S. workplaces increasingly adopt AI to improve efficiency. Data from the Economic Policy Institute shows that while worker productivity has risen 87% since the late 1970s, wage growth has not kept pace. The rollout of AI Companion 3.0 is set to begin in November for accounts subscribed to Zoom Workplace. Businesses will also have the option to purchase a paid add-on to develop customized AI agents tailored to their specific needs.

Zoom's New AI Features Go Way Beyond Videoconferencing

Videoconferencing and communications platform Zoom has announced a slate of AI-powered features. The new tools, announced on Wednesday at the Zoomtopia conference, are intended to amp up the productivity of workers and businesses, as well as help Zoom keep up with rising competition from challengers in video communication and enterprise productivity. "Around the world, millions of people are using Zoom to connect with their colleagues and customers, but they could be getting so much more out of those conversations with the help of AI," Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom, said in a statement. "AI Companion 3.0 will provide deeper insights from their conversations to help them get more done at work and drive better business outcomes, regardless of whether they're working in Zoom Workplace, in person, or across compatible apps and integrations." Perhaps the buzziest announcement Zoom made Wednesday is, as Hashim mentioned, a major upgrade to its AI Companion. Called AI Companion 3.0, it leverages agentic AI for a number of productivity-enhancing purposes. It can analyze recorded meetings and calls, chat history, documents shared in Zoom and even publicly available external information to "deliver critical information at the right time," according to a press release. Although Zoom already allows AI notetaking and transcription, users with enterprise Zoom Workplace accounts will be able to use the AI Companion to enhance and organize their own typed out notes, using insights from a meeting (which is something that TechCrunch noted third-party option Granola already allows). The functionality will be available in Zoom as well as on other platforms like Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and eventually WebEx. This cross-platform functionality is another feature tools like Otter, Granola and Circleback already offer, according to TechCrunch. It's worth noting that AI notetakers have come under fire for concerns about privacy and consent. A lawsuit filed in August against Otter alleges it did not have the proper consent to record, access and use private conversations, according to JD Supra. Another purported benefit of Zoom's agentic AI tool is helping users manage busy work through "outcome-focused prompts" that the company says will help workers keep track of meetings, emails, calls and other administrative tasks. The tool's "free up my time" capability can even suggest meetings users can potentially skip, or periods of time to allocate only to work (not meetings). CNET reported that Zoom's AI will require human approval before making any of those changes. When it comes to more intensive work, AI Companion 3.0 has what Zoom is calling a "new work surface" in its app or on the web that helps people quickly deliver "comprehensive, data-driven reports and polished documents" through writing and deep research assistance. It pulls on context from recent conversations and projects to turn "scattered information into actionable intelligence." Finally, Zoom created some new features for Zoom Workplace, including lifelike avatars, video clip generation, and real-time voice translation in meetings for participants speaking different languages. The avatars can reportedly mimic actions during meetings in case people don't want to actually be seen on camera, The Verge reported. Zoom's AI Companion 3.0 updates services are expected to be available starting in November to Zoom Workplace accounts, with an additional paid add-on should businesses want to create customized AI agents. These updates come as workers across the U.S. are being encouraged -- or in some cases required -- to incorporate AI tools into their work to enhance their productivity even amid looming anxieties about how AI could potentially alter or eliminate jobs. Research shows that U.S. workers are already much more productive than they once were. A September report from the Economic Policy Institute found that the productivity of workers has surged some 87 percent since the late 70s and around 17 percent just in the last decade. But improved productivity doesn't necessarily mean better pay, with EPI research showing a growing disparity between the two over the decades. The extended deadline for the 2025 Inc. Best in Business Awards is this Friday, September 19, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

Zoom unveils AI Companion 3.0 amid other innovations to optimize employee time - SiliconANGLE

Zoom unveils AI Companion 3.0 amid other innovations to optimize employee time Continuing its lean into agentic artificial intelligence, Zoom Communications Inc. today introduced the next generation of its AI Companion and its virtual workspace. AI Companion 3.0 designed to help users deliver high-quality work by providing insights and intelligent assistance. It includes a number of AI skill updates that enhance its AI agent capabilities with new custom agents, a new low-code builder platform and lifelike AI avatars. "AI Companion can proactively assist you in the right place and at the right time with capabilities that help you prepare, synthesize key information, gain customer insights and even more across your workflows," said Leo Boulton, head of product and solutions at Zoom. "Pretty much reducing all that administrative overhead while accelerating those meaningful results that you need." Zoom reported that its AI Companion is seeing strong traction, with usage climbing fourfold year-over-year. Today, millions of users are relying on it for meeting summaries, conversation recollection, content creation and workflow automation. The new AI Companion is embedded in Zoom Workplace, the company's AI-enhanced collaboration platform, and extends capabilities released earlier this year. Zoom also plans to expand the assistant's reach across other platforms, with upcoming availability in Slack and Microsoft Teams. New note-taking features will allow users to bring AI Companion into in-person meetings and into meetings hosted on Teams and Google Meet. Support for Cisco Webex is expected later. Users will be able to take their own notes, with the platform organizing and expanding on key takeaways as needed. If a user can't attend a meeting, the AI agent can go in their place to take notes, extract action items and provide updates according to preferences. "Zoom's agentic AI is built on memory," said Chief Product Officer Smita Hashim. "It knows who you are, it knows your preferences, your interests and uses that information to improve your outcomes." The AI Companion can also organize the workday, scheduling meetings by analyzing attendee availability and workloads. Ahead of meetings, it can generate suggested questions, agendas and notes based on past action items and conversation insights. For in-person meetings, the agent can resolve conflicts and suggest meeting rooms based on size and location. "AI Companion doesn't just assist you, it coordinates and executes for you, knowing exactly which agents and which skills to deploy," added Hashim. For users on the go, Zoom is updating its Virtual Agent extension to Zoom Phone, where it acts as a voice-enabled AI receptionist with industry-specific support for sectors such as healthcare and finance. Businesses can also customize the Virtual Agent with unique voices by uploading a short sample to create a tailored experience. For virtual meetings, Zoom added photorealistic AI avatars that replicate users when they are in less-than-ideal environments or prefer not to appear on video. These avatars mimic the live feed to create a lifelike presentation. Meeting hosts can also customize the waiting room experience with a mix of Zoom Clips and AI avatars to share agenda details or instructions. Developers, both technical and nontechnical, gain a more intuitive agent-building experience with a custom builder. The tool lets anyone build AI agents that connect to multiple data sources and use the Agent2Agent protocol. Zoom said the first A2A connector will be for ServiceNow AI Agents, expected in December. Agents created in the builder will also support plug-and-play configuration and third-party integrations through Model Context Protocol. The company said the core AI Companion will be available at no additional cost to businesses with paid services in Zoom Workplace accounts.

Zoomtopia 2025: The Agentic AI-Fueled Tools And Updates Revealed

As the videoconferencing giant plans to aggressively grow business through the channel, here are the major agentic AI-driven product announcements and enhancements that were revealed at Zoomtopia 2025. Agentic AI took center stage this year at Zoom Communications' annual event, Zoomtopia 2025, as the company shared its vision for agentic AI-first collaboration. The videoconferencing giant, led by CEO Eric Yuan, kicked off the event by unveiling the next generation of its AI Companion that will help pull in data from more sources to help users get work done. On the Zoom Business Services front, the company is building on its industry-specific Workplace tools with the advancement of Zoom Customer Experience, Zoom Revenue Accelerator and Zoom Events and Webinars. Business through the channel for the San Jose, Calif.-based company sits comfortably at around 30 percent globally. But Zoom wants to engage more partners through its AI-first collaboration tools, with the goal of raising the percentage of business done through the channel to 50 percent by the end of FY 2026, the company's channel chief Nick Tidd told CRN in May. With that in mind, here are the major product announcements and enhancements revealed at Zoomtopia 2025 that should be on partners' radars. AI Companion 3.0 A Zoomtopia tradition, the company took to its annual event to launch the latest version of AI Companion, this time, 3.0, the company's virtual personal assistant technology that's been improved and updated with agentic AI capabilities, the company said. AI Companion, which works across the Zoom platform and is also compatible with third-party products, now includes agentic AI capabilities to enhance productivity and efficiency. For example, AI Companion now uses agentic AI to retrieve and synthesize internal enterprise knowledge, such as information from meeting and phone call transcripts, chat history, and shared documents, with external insights, such as publicly available market research and industry data. AI Companion also has new AI note-taking capabilities so that users with paid Zoom Workplace accounts can improve their manual notes in all of their Zoom meetings, and also for in-person meetings and meetings that take place outside of Zoom, such as on Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and soon, Cisco Webex, the company said. Users of AI Companion increased 4x year over year and its customers include a Fortune 200 tech company with more than 60,000 global employees, said Smita Hashim, Zoom's chief product officer, during the company's press conference ahead of Zoomtopia. AI Companion 3.0 capabilities are expected to be generally available in November 2025, at no additional cost with the paid services in Zoom Workplace accounts. Zoomie Group Assistant To better support group collaboration across meetings, chats, and in-person conversations, the company is introducing Zoomie Group Assistant, a feature that can take action and answer questions on behalf of the group. For example, a user could ask, "@Zoomie What is the latest update on the project?" For hybrid environments, users will be able to say, "Hey, Zoomie," in a Zoom Room to get support such as help checking into a room, controlling meeting room environments, including lights and temperature, and helping users share their screens, Zoom said. Zoomie Group Assistant is expected to become available in December 2025. Photorealistic Avatars Within Zoom Workplace, users will soon be able to use photorealistic avatars that will track and mimic their live video feed. Zoom said that for the moments that require a polished presence without being "camera-ready," participants will be able to use a lifelike AI-generated avatar based on their likeness. Availability of the photorealistic avatars are expected in December 2025. Additionally, hosts will be able to customize their waiting room experience through personalized messages for attendees created with Zoom Clips + AI avatars. This new feature is expected to roll out in October 2025. Zoom Business Services Update Zoom has injected more AI into its business services portfolio, with advancements for Zoom Customer Experience (Zoom CX), Zoom Revenue Accelerator (ZRA), and Zoom Events and Webinars. Also, the company's virtual agent has been extended into industry-specific offerings, the company announced. CX Insights, coming December 2025, will let businesses use customer interactions to fuel business improvement. With natural-language queries, leaders can ask questions about trending topics, receive AI-generated suggestions for improvement, and democratize decision-making without relying on technical analysts, the company said. Zoom Revenue Accelerator gives sales teams AI tools that can automate prospecting, cut repetitive tasks, and surface insights so reps can focus on relationships and closing deals. The tool's agentic prospecting capability will research leads from events and other sources, use agentic reasoning to surface top prospects, and initiate outreach across email, SMS, and more, the company said. Zoom Revenue Accelerator is slated to launch in January 2026. Zoom Events and Webinars are also benefiting from new AI and production capabilities. Lastly, the new Zoom Virtual Agent for Healthcare will use industry-specific AI agent templates, custom medical dictionaries, and EHR integrations to help providers build virtual agents tailored to clinical and administrative workflows, such as patient intake, scheduling, insurance verification, and post-visit follow-ups. Virtual Agent for Healthcare is expected to be available in January 2026, the company said.