Zoom Communications has previously stated that artificial intelligence (AI) will be the key to opening the door of prosperity, and in the latest part of its AI-first strategy, the company has launched agentic AI Companion capabilities, new Zoom AI Companion skills and AI updates across its entire platform.
Specific properties to have the added capability include Zoom Meetings, Zoom Team Chat, Zoom Docs, Zoom Phone, Zoom Whiteboard, Zoom Contact Centre and industry solutions.
Perhaps the standout in the move is Zoom elevating AI Companion across its entire platform through AI agentic skills, agents and models with the stated aim of delivering “high-quality” results and helping users improve productivity and strengthen relationships. The updated AI Companion will aim to help users get more done by executing on their behalf and managing multi-step actions with the knowledge of which agents and skills to tap into using reasoning and memory to make decisions, solve complex problems and learn over time, along with task action and orchestration to execute and complete tasks.
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, and writing assistance for advanced document creation. AI Companion will also now extend to specialised agents that power Zoom Business Services.
For customer self-service, Zoom Virtual Agent will use memory and reasoning skills to deliver “empathetic and contextual” conversations and task action to resolve complex issues from start to finish. Zoom Revenue Accelerator users will also benefit from a specialised agent for sales in the coming months to help increase revenue through automated insights, personalised outreach and enhanced prospecting.
Soon to be available in beta, AI Studio will allow users to create and deploy customisable virtual agents. Also to be launched in the same time period, Zoom’s open platform will enable users to interact with third-party agents, such as ServiceNow AI agents, and create their own custom agents with specific skillsets to address unique needs, such as streamlining sales RFPs or IT and HR service requests. Zoom assured that AI Companion will know when to work with third-party and custom agents to take action and complete tasks.
The custom AI Companion add-on will allow organisations to customise AI Companion with AI Studio by tailoring it to address their unique needs, with the intended benefit of driving efficiency. Organisations will be able to create custom meeting templates and custom dictionaries with vocabulary unique to their business or industry, incorporate information from their own data sources, including compatible third-party applications, and use AI Studio to expand AI Companion’s knowledge and skills to help drive decisions and actions, and complete tasks.
As part of Zoom’s federated approach to AI, the Custom AI Companion add-on will incorporate small language models (SLMs) alongside Zoom’s third-party large language models (LLMs) to deliver industry-leading performance and cost-effectiveness for modern businesses. Zoom’s new SLMs are trained with extensive multilingual data, optimised for specific tasks to perform complex actions, and well-positioned to facilitate multi-agent collaboration.
Users will also have access to a digital personal AI coach and custom meeting summary templates that will allow users to structure meeting summaries for specific industry verticals or use cases. Users will also have access to Custom Avatars for Zoom Clips to help scale video clip creation and avoid multiple takes by using a personalised AI-generated avatar to create clips with a user-provided script.
Zoom Docs will have enhanced AI Companion capabilities with advanced references and queries that will be able to help a user create a writing plan based on the context, search internal and external information for references, and aggregate them into a high-quality business document based on user instructions. Advanced references and queries are expected to launch in June.
Commenting on the enhancements and the intended effect, Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom, said: “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. 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.”
