Zoom Video Communications Inc. is upgrading its platform today with agentic artificial intelligence capabilities and skills for its Zoom AI Companion to assist with video call interactions.

The company announced AI enhancements to its products including Zoom Meetings, Phone, Team Chat, Docs and Contact Center that will allow AI agents to take complex actions and orchestrate task execution for customers.

“AI Companion is evolving from a personal assistant to being truly agentic, which signals a major leap forward in how AI can enhance productivity and collaboration at work,” said Chief Product Officer Smita Hashim.

Zoom AI Companion is a generative AI assistant available across the entire Zoom platform that offers capabilities such as meeting summaries, note-taking capabilities and email writing assistance. With the addition of agentic AI capabilities, part of a new trend where AI gains broader reasoning capabilities to make decisions and solve complex problems without the need for human intervention, it can take action and execute long-term tasks.

New agentic skills now include managing calendars to schedule meetings, generating clips from lengthy video meetings, and providing writing assistance for advanced document creation, among other features.

Zoom has announced that its AI Companion is an open platform, and it will soon be able to interact with third-party agents, including ServiceNow AI agents. Users will also have the ability to create custom agents with specific skill sets to address their unique needs.

Customization of the Companion can be achieved through add-ons that tailor it to business requirements. This includes creating custom meeting templates and dictionaries that include industry-specific jargon, incorporating specialized data sources from third-party applications and using AI Studio to expand its knowledge.

The customizable AI Companion add-on is expected to roll out in April.

The company said its add-on capabilities incorporate AI small language models alongside large language models to provide high-accuracy answers at a low cost. Zoom explained the new SLMs are trained with multilingual data and optimized for complex actions aimed at facilitating multi-agent collaboration.

“We’ve been using Zoom AI Companion since it became available, and I’ve seen firsthand how it has transformed our academic and administrative operations,” said Steven Carroll, chief information officer at Saint Leo University. “This technology isn’t just about efficiency; it allows our employees to spend less time on manual tasks and more time on meaningful collaboration.”

Continuing the company’s lean into AI capabilities, Zoom said it will soon provide deeper purpose-built agentic and conventional AI-based solutions for specific industries such as frontline workers, healthcare and education.

Starting in April, Workplace for Frontline, an AI Companion-based mobile solution will provide employees with on-shift communications and work management capabilities. They include push-to-talk, shift swapping, task management and shift summaries.

By the end of March, Workplace for Clinicians will launch for doctors, nurses and practitioners, allowing them to spend more time on patient care and offloading documentation and administrative tasks. Finally, Workplace for Education will bring Zoom’s AI Companion into the classroom to assist with lecture summaries, class curriculum, research notes, study materials and assignment generation.

Image: Zoom