Zoom bets big on AI, rolls out major update with new features and improvements

Zoom, just like many other big tech companies, has jumped in the AI bandwagon. The communication company kicked off Zoomtopia 2024 earlier this week and announced its new “AI-first work platform innovations” for Zoom Workplace and Zoom Business Services, which are supposed to improve team communication and productivity.

The first thing on the list of new features revealed by Zoom is its new AI Companion. The so-called Zoom AI Companion 2.0 comes with new capabilities allowing users to engage with it in more convenient ways.

For example, the new AI companion will remain on the Zoom Workplace window in a special side panel. Also, it has gained advanced contextual understanding based on what the user is looking at in the Zoom Workplace app and on previous conversations. That means that users will get more intelligent suggestions and responses.

Another interesting new capability added to the new AI Companion is the ability to 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 users summarize content and interactions.

Furthermore, AI Companion 2.0 will be able to detect, track, and complete actions across different workloads in Zoom Workplace. It will also be able to answer user questions and look up information from the web in real time.

According to Zoom, the new AI Companion 2.0 will be available for download starting next month, and it won’t cost anything if you already pay for a Zoom Workplace account.

Besides AI Companion 2.0, Zoom also unveiled a new optional add-on that allows for customized and personalized AI Companion experience for individual customers. This new experience promises to offer expanded data access to apps beyond Microsoft and Google email and calendar services and additional company data sources to expand its knowledge, allow customization with company glossaries, as well as enhanced search capabilities.

Zoom also announced Tasks, a new feature that users AI Companion to help detect, recommend, and complete tasks for a user based on conversations from across Zoom Workplace.

Finally, the company unveiled AI Companion for in-person meetings, a new feature that offers users meeting summaries and action items via the Zoom Workplace app on a mobile device.