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Zoom expands AI Companion capabilities, adds customisation options
Zoom reveals major advancements in AI Companion, including customisation options, personalised avatars and integration across the entire Zoom workplace platform
Zoom is significantly expanding its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities with a range of features designed to boost productivity, streamline communications and enhance user experience.
Centred around AI Companion 2.0, the company’s AI assistant, the upgrades expand Zoom’s AI functionalities across its platform, from team chat and email to Zoom Docs and meetings, enabling users to synthesise information from multiple sources, including Microsoft Outlook or Google Mail and Calendar accounts.
During a press briefing ahead of Zoomtopia 2024 in San Jose, Smita Hashim, Zoom’s chief product officer, noted that AI Companion is part of the company’s efforts to make AI accessible to all users.
“Zoom AI Companion, which we launched a year ago, is included at no additional cost,” she said, adding that over four million accounts have enabled Zoom AI Companion, including 57% of Fortune 500 companies. “We believe all of our customers should be able to benefit from generative AI.”
Addressing concerns about data privacy, Hashim reiterated Zoom’s commitment to responsible AI development. “We do not use customer conversation data for training Zoom models or third-party models,” she said.
Zoom employs a federated AI approach, utilising multiple models including OpenAI, Anthropic and Llama to optimise AI quality and performance.
Hashim claimed this has enabled AI Companion to produce outputs with 36% fewer errors in transcriptions and 15% fewer errors in post-meeting summaries compared with Microsoft Copilot.
Tailoring AI workflows
The company also announced a Custom AI Companion add-on, available in the first half of 2025 for $12 per user per month, allowing organisations to tailor AI workflows to their specific needs.
For example, businesses can connect preferred apps and data sources, empowering AI Companion to act as a “super agent” across multiple platforms. Hashim illustrated this with an example of AI Companion pulling employee data from Workday, creating a service ticket and filing a ticket in Jira – all in Zoom.
The customisation capabilities will be powered by Zoom AI Studio, a new tool that customers can use to add knowledge collections, define vocabulary for fine-tuning models and develop specialised skills for specific meeting types.
The Custom AI Companion add-on also lets organisations deploy a personal coach for employees, analysing data across workloads to provide personalised feedback on focus time, skills and inclusivity.
Additionally, users can build avatars to create personalised digital representations of themselves for asynchronous communications at scale, such as sending out recorded messages. To address potential deepfake concerns, Hashim said Zoom has put in place “advanced authentication, watermarking technology and strict usage policies”.
Read more about AI in APAC
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- The Australian government is experimenting with AI use cases in a safe environment while it figures out ways to harness the technology to benefit citizens and businesses.
- Pure Storage’s global CTO discusses the data and sustainability challenges in AI adoption, which can be addressed by centralising datasets and focusing on data quality and management.
Theresa Larkin, global lead of product marketing for Zoom Workplace and AI, highlighted how AI Companion 2.0 can help to alleviate the workload of employees through capabilities such as Zoom Tasks, an AI-powered offering that detects, recommends and helps complete tasks based on conversations across Zoom Workplace.
Zoom’s AI enhancements extend beyond its core platform. Michelle Couture, Zoom’s global lead of product marketing for customer experience, singled out advancements in Zoom Contact Center including a virtual agent capable of handling complex multi-intent inquiries. New features such as dynamic agent guides and suggested answers will further empower customer service agents, she noted.
Randy Maestre, Zoom’s head of AI, developer ecosystem and industry marketing, announced AI enhancements for education and healthcare, including live notes for students and clinical notes for healthcare professionals, freeing up educators and clinicians to focus on their core responsibilities.
These announcements signal a bold move to turn Zoom into an AI-first work platform, one where AI performs tasks first and humans assist as needed, rather than the other way around, according to the company’s CEO and founder, Eric Yuan.
He acknowledged that despite the breadth of capabilities of the Zoom platform, many customers in Asia-Pacific are not aware that it offers a comprehensive suite of services beyond just video meetings, such as chat, phone and team collaboration features.
“We have a marketing challenge as customers do not know we have a full work platform,” Yuan told Computer Weekly. “That’s one thing we need to communicate well.”
