Zoom Video Communications has unveiled new AI-first work platform innovations for Zoom Workplace and Zoom Business Services that will transform team communication, collaboration, and productivity and help customers get more done.
The announcements include the Zoom AI Companion 2.0, a new add-on option to customise and personalise AI Companion, Zoom Tasks to help users take action across Zoom Workplace, and enhanced employee and customer experience innovations underpinned by AI.
“At Zoom, we’re not just reimagining communication—we’re revolutionising the entire work experience. Our vision is to create an AI-first work platform for human connection that empowers teams to achieve more than ever,” said Eric S. Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom.
“With AI Companion already enhancing productivity, we are helping our customers transform the way they work. This is more than an evolution; it’s a complete overhaul of how we get things done in the digital age.”
Zoom AI Companion 2.0
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| Source: Zoom. Zoom AI Companion 2.0 at work. |
New capabilities include:
Persistence: Users can now engage with AI Companion via a convenient, persistent side panel, with seamless availability throughout Zoom Workplace, delivering an AI-first user interface (UI) that seamlessly integrates graphical and conversation UIs to allow for better information flow across workplace-wide.
More context: AI Companion gains advanced contextual understanding based on what the user is looking at in the Zoom Workplace app and on previous conversations to provide intelligent suggestions and responses that come with citations.
Better synthesis: AI Companion can pull in interactions from across Zoom Workplace, and, when connected, information from Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Google Calendar, and uploaded files from Microsoft Office and Google Docs to help users summarise content and interactions and get caught up fast.
Connected: AI Companion will be able to answer user questions and look up information from the web in real time.
Taking action: AI Companion will be able to detect, track, and complete actions across different workloads in Zoom Workplace to help users get more done.
For example, users can:
- Use prompt suggestions and generate answers from AI Companion via a convenient side panel across Zoom Workplace, including Zoom Meetings, Zoom Team Chat, Zoom Docs, Zoom Calendar, and Zoom Mail.
- Expand the context of information with data from across Zoom Workplace and, when connected, information from Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Google Calendar, and uploaded files from Microsoft Office and Google Docs. AI Companion will remember previous conversations you’ve had within the side panel and interactions from across Zoom Workplace.
- Generate next steps from a meeting summary and AI Companion can automatically turn those next steps into Zoom Tasks to help keep teams aligned and on track to deliver projects on time. Zoom Tasks is planned to be available in December 2024.
- Summarise unread messages within a Zoom Team Chat channel. Within the new home tab, AI Companion will be able to provide users with a list of updates based on unread chats and emails.
AI Companion 2.0 will be available in the coming weeks at no additional cost with paid services in Zoom Workplace accounts.
Custom add-on for AI Companion
A new optional add-on that allows for a customised and personalised AI Companion experience for individual customers will allow customisation with company glossaries, offer enhanced search capabilities, and take action on the user’s behalf. With expanded data access to apps beyond Microsoft and Google email
and calendar services and additional company data sources to expand its
knowledge, the add-on will provide a new level of performance to the experience. Key components of the new add-on include:
Customised experience with AI Studio: Organisations can tailor the AI Companion experience with custom dictionaries, meeting summaries, and knowledge collections, in addition to helping improve response accuracy by connecting to company data sources.
Connected third-party apps: An option to connect third-party data sources that integrate with Zoom's AI capabilities will allow AI Companion to get answers and orchestrate actions across third-party apps like Atlassian (Jira & Confluence), Glean, Workday, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Box, Asana, Hubspot, and more.
Personalisation: With the custom AI Companion add-on, individuals can also grow their skills with personal coaching capabilities and save time and production costs with custom avatars for Zoom Clips. Users can avoid multiple takes by using a personalised, AI-generated avatar to create clips with a user-provided script.
Custom AI Companion add-on will be available for US$12 per user per month and is planned to launch in 1H25.
Zoom Workplace advancements
New Zoom Workplace innovations include an AI-first product, Zoom Tasks, which will use AI Companion to help detect, recommend, and complete tasks for a user based on conversations from across Zoom Workplace; Zoom Phone AI-first enhancements, including real-time queries, which will provide summaries of Zoom Phone calls as they happen and automated Zoom Phone voicemail greetings from the user's voiceprint that are tailored to the user’s calendar events to avoid manual voicemail greeting updates.
Zoom Workplace users will be able to have more productive meetings and collaborate more effectively with AI Companion producing meeting agendas and real-time meeting summaries. A library of pre-selected avatars in Zoom Clips can help them generate professional video content from text; while Zoom Docs will offer new organisation and permission options for finer control, new Data Table views and columns for collaboration on projects, APIs and workflow automation, plus new AI Companion skills to generate content tailored for writing scenarios and additional data sources.
These Zoom Workplace enhancements are included at no added cost with the paid services in Zoom Workplace accounts.
In-person experiences
Zoom further announced AI Companion for in-person meetings, which provides meeting summaries and action items via the Zoom Workplace app on a mobile device. For in-office meetings, AI Companion is expanding within Workspace Reservation to recommend what days employees should go into the office based on when their teammates are there, and recommend rooms based on location and size.
Employee engagement
New AI-first employee engagement solutions that help foster connection include AI Companion for Workvivo, which helps keep employees informed, engaged, and connected by creating content faster, and Workvivo Employee Insights, which helps measure employee engagement, happiness, and performance.
Zoom Customer Experience
Zoom introduced enhancements to self-service solutions and improved agent and management support features to help provide world-class customer experiences.
Zoom’s self-service chatbot, Zoom Virtual Agent, now includes multi-intent detection to handle more complex customer issues. It can process several problems within a single engagement and automatically update customer intents based on learnings from active trends or common queries. Zoom is also launching an AI virtual voice agent to bring Zoom Virtual Agent’s capabilities into self-service voice calls.
The new Auto Quality Management allows supervisors to gain comprehensive insights into agent performance, automatically scoring customer interactions.
New AI Expert Assist capabilities include dynamic agent guides—AI Expert Assist analyses the conversation context, notices which steps the agent has already taken, and then guides them to the relevant next step.
