Zoom unveiled its AI Companion 2.0 during the company’s Zoomtopia 2024 event on Wednesday. The AI assistant is incorporated throughout the Zoom Workplace app suite and is promised to “deliver an AI-first work platform for human connection.”
While Zoom got its start as a videoconferencing app, the company has expanded its product ecosystem to become an “open collaboration platform” that includes a variety of communication, productivity, and business services, both online and in physical office spaces. The company’s AI Companion, which debuted last September, is incorporated deeply throughout Zoom Workplace and, like Google’s Gemini or Microsoft’s Copilot, is designed to automate repetitive tasks like transcribing notes and summarizing reports that can take up as much as 62% of a person’s workday.
The AI Companion 2.0 introduces a number of new features and capabilities, including a persistent sidebar interface that can generate both textual and graphical responses to a user’s prompt, allowing for “better information flow across Zoom Workplace,” per the company’s announcement post. The AI is gaining contextual understanding and will be able to provide more tailored answers based on its previous conversations, as well as on what the user is currently looking at in the Workplace app. It can also now access the internet to provide up-to-date answers in real time and pull business data from Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, and Google Calendar, along with uploaded files from Microsoft Office and Google Docs.
Companion 2.0 will also be customizable to each business as part of an optional add-on. It will be fine-tuned and trained on the individual company’s data and able to generate “custom dictionaries, meeting summaries, and knowledge collections,” per Zoom, as well as create meeting agendas and generate notes, summaries, and action items as those meetings take place.
The customized AI is expanding beyond the Workplace ecosystem and can now “orchestrate actions” across third-party apps including Atlassian, Glean, Zendesk, Box, Asana, and Hubspot. For individuals, the new AI can help streamline video production through its custom avatars for Zoom Clips. This feature will generate an AI avatar to recite the user-provided script so they can get the shot in a single take.
AI Companion 2.0 will be available in the coming weeks at no additional cost to Zoom Workplace subscribers. The customization add-on will cost $12 per user per month when it arrives in the first half of 2025.
