Zoom Video Communications has announced new AI-first work platform innovations for Zoom Workplace and Zoom Business Services at Zoomtopia 2024, designed to transform team communication, collaboration, and productivity.
This includes 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.
Zoom founder and CEO, Eric S. Yuan said, “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. With AI Companion already enhancing productivity, we’re 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 is continuously improving AI Companion, giving customers access to its most up-to-date and high-quality AI tools for a more seamless and productive user experience.
New capabilities of AI Companion 2.0 will include:
- Persistent: Users can now engage with AI Companion via a 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 Zoom Workplace.
- Expanded 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.
- Advanced 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 summarise content and interactions.
- Connected to the web: AI Companion can answer user questions and look up information from the web in real-time.
- Takes action: AI Companion can detect, track, and complete actions across different workloads in Zoom Workplace to help users get more done.
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 provides expanded data access to apps beyond Microsoft and Google email and calendar services and additional company data sources to expand knowledge, allow customisation with company glossaries, offer enhanced search capabilities, and to take action on the user’s behalf.
The personalisation capabilities help improve AI Companion’s performance on the customer’s account and empower them to scale staff development efforts with a personalised coach and help save time and resources with custom avatar clips.
Key components of the new add-on include:
- Customised experience with AI Studio: Organisations can tailor the AI Companion experience to unique business needs with custom dictionaries, meeting summaries, and knowledge collections.
- Connected third-party apps: Get comprehensive insights with the option to connect third-party data sources that integrate with Zoom’s AI capabilities including Atlassian (Jira & Confluence), Glean, Workday, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Box, Asana, Hubspot, and more.
- Personalisation: Individuals can grow their skills with personal coachingcapabilities and save time and production costs with custom avatars for Zoom Clips, which help users scale video clip creation and avoid multiple takes by using a personalised AI-generated avatar.
Custom AI Companion add-on, set to launch in the first half of 2025, will be available for $12 per user per month.