Zoom rolls out AI Companion 3.0 with browser access and agentic automation – News

Zoom Communications Inc. today launched AI Companion 3.0, the latest iteration of its workplace assistant that pushes the platform beyond meeting summaries into agentic workflows, low-code automation and federated AI orchestration across the browser and desktop.

Announced in September, the newest AI Companion weaves together multiple generative AI functions that touch every part of employee knowledge and daily work. It provides intelligent assistance, new skill updates, a low-code agent builder and greater opportunities for interaction.

“We just try to fit with their existing workflow,” Xuedong Huang, chief technology officer of Zoom, told News in an interview. “This is a bigger surface area to help people from conversation to completion.”

Bringing the system into the browser, via ai.zoom.us, he explained, allows the AI Companion to meet users where they work. Browser-enabled AI capabilities are becoming the norm across the industry and expanding beyond the desktop client opens access.

Behind the scenes, the Companion pulls in multiple AI models, including those from commercial vendors and Zoom’s own small language models to understand user intent, orchestrate agentic activities and provide swift answers.

“This ability to federate, to bring the best of the best, to delight our customer, has been going on for two years,” Huang said.

Zoom starts with small language models to apply reflection and break down user personalization and intent. Then the back end escalates to larger models such as GPT-4 when necessary to get heavy lifting done. The company calls this a “federated AI approach” that learns quickly to lower costs while greatly improving quality.

Today’s release of Zoom AI Companion 3.0 is underpinned by the company’s recent results on Humanity’s Last Exam, a full-set proving ground designed to stress advanced reasoning systems. Zoom said its federated AI approach achieved a 48.1% score on the benchmark, a 2.3-point improvement over tool-integrated frontier models such as Google LLC’s Gemini 3 Pro, highlighting the gains from orchestrating multiple models rather than relying on a single system.

“We are really standing on the shoulders of giants,” Huang said. “The frontier models are provided by OpenAI, Google and others…we can easily provide this orchestrated solution.”

Beyond just meetings: a solution for everyday workers

At its core, Zoom provides a client that brings people together in virtual meetings, the AI Companion embraces this core strategy and expands on it by giving users a way to interconnect their communication with every part of their knowledge work.

“The biggest use case is number one: meeting summary,” Huang said.

Summaries remain a dominant usage pattern, followed by customer support automation via the Zoom Virtual Agent and sales tooling via Zoom Revenue Accelerator. Huang noted all three of these capabilities are powered by the same AI Companion platform.

Framed as a conversational work surface, AI Companion now comes with a new AI portal that provides access to everything: meeting conversations and notes, access to insights, the ability to orchestrate day-to-day tasks with proactive agentic-driven actions.

Like other AI chatbots, Companion allows users to ask questions and receive answers. Expanding on that foundation, users can activate “Help Me Write,” a mode that transforms the copilot into a document generator capable of reading meeting transcripts, documents and other assets to craft reports and polished replies.

Using agentic retrieval capabilities, the assistant can locate information across past meetings, notes in Zoom Workplace, as well as connected third-party apps, including Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. Integration with Gmail and Outlook are coming soon.

Users can export documents in multiple formats, including Markdown, PDF, Microsoft Word and Zoom Docs. Coming soon, workers will be able to bring documents directly into Zoom Docs to continue editing and collaborating with teammates while retaining full access to AI Companion features.

Currently in beta mode, users also have access to a low-code “personal workflows” designer. The drag-and-drop interface allows users to build state diagrams of work that include triggers, actions and outcomes as executed by AI agents.

“This is like agentic coding, but for everyone,” said Huang.

For example, a user might create an agentic workflow that captures the transcript and notes from any meeting they are invited to and transform it into a contextualized report that gives them an at-a-glance update on what happened. This would provide easy to understand recollection of past meetings and a way to catch up with meetings an employee had to miss.

AI Companion 3.0 rolls out today and is included with paid Zoom Workplace licenses. It is also available as a standalone product for $10 per user per month, or as a $20 per user per month “Custom Companion” integrated with enterprise knowledge sources. Zoom Basic users receive limited free access — currently capped at around three meetings per month.

Image: Zoom