Zoom Unveils AI-Powered Features to Revolutionize Virtual Meetings and Productivity

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.

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 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.