Zoom Communications Inc. has a variety of products, including meetings, contact center, front-line worker applications and others, but this week there’s a single theme that cut across the fully virtual Zoomtopia event: artificial intelligence. In fact, with that emphasis on how AI is expanding and enhancing Zoom’s conferencing and related services, they could have called the event ZoomtopAI.

Though there is no shortage of communications tools, Zoom’s differentiator has been and continues to be ease of use. On a prebriefing, Chief Marketing Officer Kim Storin emphasized this point. “Zoom is built for the people,” she said. “That can be for employees, creators, entrepreneurs or educators. These are the folks that are driving progress forward every single day in their organizations.”

Zoom is clearly working to stand apart from Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC, its chief rivals, especially when it comes to meeting the needs of smaller organizations and solo entrepreneurs in addition to enterprises.

Empowering people

The Zoomtopia theme — How Zoom Empowers People — was reflected in the new features and capabilities the company announced. Foremost among them was AI Companion 3.0, which Chief Product Officer Smita Hashim called “truly agentic AI that gets you to quality results faster by giving you more insights. And thanks to powerful agentic skills and proactive assistance, it allows you to be more effective with your time and uplevel your work. Our goal is to turn every conversation into action to drive business outcome.”

Hashim answered the question: Why Zoom for AI? She cited three reasons:

• Zoom facilitates rich conversations, from Fortune 100 board meetings to startups. Hashim also noted that Zoom has “approximately 36% market share in telehealth.”
• Zoom provides an all-in-one platform that “spans employee and customer insights.” Hashim said, “The really business-critical decision moments across your entire organization need those conversations.”
• Zoom’s open platform integrations “provide seamless workflows” including the “ability to use E-Mail, Calendar and Drive from Google and Microsoft,” and “getting information from CRM systems… so you can use it right then and there,” she said.

Every unified communications as-a-service and contact center as-a-service provider has AI today and it’s difficult to say whose is better than any others. Most of the vendors use the same models and that makes the data used to train the system a differentiator — and that’s where Zoom should have an advantage. Over the last few years, Zoom has added contact center, e-mail, docs and other capabilities, many of which left industry watchers scratching their heads as to why Zoom would want to enter those markets.

The answer is the data. Now that Zoom can see across customer information, employee meetings, e-mail and other forms of work, it should have the most complete view of work and this should give it an advantage in AI.

AI Companion growth

Hashim noted monthly active users for Zoom AI Companion grew fourfold year over year, with the growth coming from all capabilities: meeting summaries, conversation synthesis, content generation and workflow automation.

Hashim drilled down into the four capabilities Zoom’s agentic AI provides to customers:

• Built on memory: “It knows who you are, your preference, your role, your interests, and uses that information to improve your outcomes.”
• Reasoning: “It can analyze complex situations, make informed choices, such as what data sources to use, and iterate on the results.”
• Task actions: “Agentic is not just about getting the information, it’s about getting the job done. So it understands what tools and skills to use based on your intent.”
• Orchestration: “It manages multiple skills and even other agents to achieve your objectives.”

The combination of these capabilities, she said, enables Zoom AI Companion to “effectively act on your behalf when you ask it to or even proactively, always with your approval.”

AI Companion 3.0 advancements

Hashim said the skills layer in version 3.0 of AI Companion is advancing and now includes “new platform-wide capabilities like agentic retrieval and generation assistance, all of which leverage memory, reasoning, task actions and orchestration.”

Core AI Companion capabilities are included with paid services in Zoom Workplace accounts at no additional charge.

“Our customers’ most important conversations happen on Zoom, and now those conversations can result in critical insights to fuel real progress,” said Eric S. Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom (pictured). “With AI Companion 3.0, our agentic AI can understand users’ specific context, priorities and goals to help them cut through the noise, focus on what matters most, and drive meaningful business outcomes.”

Leo Boulton, head of product, solutions and industry marketing for Zoom, said AI Companion 3.0 operates through three core capabilities to put “every conversation into action, and these are going to be personalized to how you work, wherever you work.” Those core capabilities are:

Uncover: Broadening context for relevance. Rather than focus solely on deliverables such as polished documents or reports, AI Companion 3.0 understands what happens in between those outputs. Boulton explained, Zoom captures and adds content from in-meeting chat threads, cascading support conversations between contact center agents and customers, and other communications occurring across multiple channels that “typically get lost and don’t translate into the structured format an AI model typically needs.”

Optimize: AI Companion 3.0 helps people reclaim and optimize time by preparing and synthesizing key information to get the insights from customer calls or anything across work. While AI can help in many ways, this can have the most bang for the buck as it gives people that precious commodity of time. My research has found that workers spend 40% of their time managing work and AI Companion can knock a big chunk off this number.

Uplevel: Helping users produce higher-quality work faster by gathering information from different tools in the technology stack and channeling it through an AI system. This includes the ability to reorganize schedules, create materials, and guide customer interactions. For example, an employee preparing for a client call can augment historical interaction or meeting data with structured data, such as a financial analyst report.

New features for Zoom Workplace

AI Companion 3.0 is adding agentic enhancements to the Prepare Me for a Meeting feature. “It’s providing a proactive, timely nudge before my meeting, recommending what assets I should prepare, what insights I should know, and giving me a full picture of previous conversations,” said Theresa Larkin, head of Zoom Workplace and AI marketing.

A new assistant, called Zoomie, is designed to help participants in group meetings. “I could say ‘at Zoomie’ to get faster questions, clarity, and automated answers to really bring transparency and scalability to the different teams,” explained Larkin. “In a Zoom Room, I can use it to enhance the meeting experience. I could use my voice for things like controlling the room and environment, the lights, or the temperature. I could also use it to activate screen sharing or creating a whiteboard so we can focus on group collaboration and not working on the technology or the room settings.”

Other new AI Companion 3.0 features for Workplace include photorealistic avatars for participants in place of playful cartoons or animals to “look a bit more professional,” said Larkin. “This new photorealistic meeting avatar will allow me to maintain a professional appearance in a meeting, and I don’t have to worry about the distraction if I’m moving around or eating.”

Innovations for marketing, sales and service teams

Zoom is adding its Ask AI Companion feature to webinars. “Now, if someone joins a webinar late or they simply want to catch up or missed something, they can easily ask AI Companion to generate instant summaries and additional context so they can get caught up without putting any incremental work on the host,” said Michelle Couture, global product marketing lead for Zoom CX solutions.

For sales, Zoom is working to make prospecting easier and less resource-intensive by bringing agentic prospecting to Zoom Revenue Accelerator. Couture said sales reps just have to assign it to leads, and it will do all the work. “It’s going to automatically enrich with webinar engagement data or data from a CRM. It’s going to prioritize and then begin personalized outreach to these leads, and it even handles the back-and-forth until the meetings are booked.”

CX Insights will democratize data access and stitch together a complete view of what’s happening across the contact center. “Leaders, supervisors and frontline managers can all access and utilize natural language to help drill into performance trends and uncover root causes across all Zoom CX channels,” Couture said. “And by connecting this data across the contact center, CX Insights can provide prescriptive recommendations for things like staffing adjustments for upcoming peak hours or flagging recurring self-service issues that are driving up call volumes.” The goal is to improve operations, help control costs and raise customer satisfaction scores.

Industry and ecosystem innovation

Zoom is continuing to add vertical-specific offerings, including a new video management solution. The company is expanding its Workplace for Clinicians into a comprehensive clinical workflow solution. It’s also adding custom templates to its AI-based clinical notes feature and providing support for ambient listening, telehealth visits and more, according to Randy Maestre, head of industry, line of business and ecosystem marketing.

“Moving forward, we will be adding pre-visit prep in meeting assist, leveraging AI companion post-visit follow-up capabilities, and we’ll be expanding Workplace for Clinicians to Zoom Phone and Zoom Contact Center, making Zoom the only platform that can provide clinical notes capabilities across meetings, phone, as well as contact center,” said Maestre.

The focus on industries, particularly frontline workers is important as this has been a long-ignored audience for communications tools. Most of the meeting and collaboration tools are built for the knowledge worker, yet the number of frontline workers is four times the number of knowledge workers.

Historically, knowledge workers either didn’t have access to modern communication tools or used consumer apps. Zoom has been focused on bringing its ease of use and knowledge of workflows to front line workers. This includes integrating Zoom into industry specific applications so worker can stay in the applications they are already using.

Final thoughts

Zoomtopia 2025 was an excellent showcase for the company’s innovation across all the parts of work it touches. A challenge for the industry has been ensuring that customers can consume the features at the rate they are being rolled out. With so many new features, customers are having a difficult time in understand what’s new.

This is where Zoom’s focus on ease of use should pay dividends. What made the company a household name during the pandemic was that anyone could use it as the interface was intuitive. Maintaining the philosophy should help it in the race for AI adoption.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

Photo: Zeus Kerravala