Continuing its lean into agentic artificial intelligence, Zoom Communications Inc. today introduced the next generation of its AI Companion and its virtual workspace.

AI Companion 3.0 designed to help users deliver high-quality work by providing insights and intelligent assistance. It includes a number of AI skill updates that enhance its AI agent capabilities with new custom agents, a new low-code builder platform and lifelike AI avatars.

“AI Companion can proactively assist you in the right place and at the right time with capabilities that help you prepare, synthesize key information, gain customer insights and even more across your workflows,” said Leo Boulton, head of product and solutions at Zoom. “Pretty much reducing all that administrative overhead while accelerating those meaningful results that you need.”

Zoom reported that its AI Companion is seeing strong traction, with usage climbing fourfold year-over-year. Today, millions of users are relying on it for meeting summaries, conversation recollection, content creation and workflow automation.

The new AI Companion is embedded in Zoom Workplace, the company’s AI-enhanced collaboration platform, and extends capabilities released earlier this year. Zoom also plans to expand the assistant’s reach across other platforms, with upcoming availability in Slack and Microsoft Teams.

New note-taking features will allow users to bring AI Companion into in-person meetings and into meetings hosted on Teams and Google Meet. Support for Cisco Webex is expected later. Users will be able to take their own notes, with the platform organizing and expanding on key takeaways as needed.

If a user can’t attend a meeting, the AI agent can go in their place to take notes, extract action items and provide updates according to preferences.

“Zoom’s agentic AI is built on memory,” said Chief Product Officer Smita Hashim. “It knows who you are, it knows your preferences, your interests and uses that information to improve your outcomes.”

The AI Companion can also organize the workday, scheduling meetings by analyzing attendee availability and workloads. Ahead of meetings, it can generate suggested questions, agendas and notes based on past action items and conversation insights. For in-person meetings, the agent can resolve conflicts and suggest meeting rooms based on size and location.

“AI Companion doesn’t just assist you, it coordinates and executes for you, knowing exactly which agents and which skills to deploy,” added Hashim.

For users on the go, Zoom is updating its Virtual Agent extension to Zoom Phone, where it acts as a voice-enabled AI receptionist with industry-specific support for sectors such as healthcare and finance. Businesses can also customize the Virtual Agent with unique voices by uploading a short sample to create a tailored experience.

For virtual meetings, Zoom added photorealistic AI avatars that replicate users when they are in less-than-ideal environments or prefer not to appear on video. These avatars mimic the live feed to create a lifelike presentation. Meeting hosts can also customize the waiting room experience with a mix of Zoom Clips and AI avatars to share agenda details or instructions.

Developers, both technical and nontechnical, gain a more intuitive agent-building experience with a custom builder. The tool lets anyone build AI agents that connect to multiple data sources and use the Agent2Agent protocol. Zoom said the first A2A connector will be for ServiceNow AI Agents, expected in December. Agents created in the builder will also support plug-and-play configuration and third-party integrations through Model Context Protocol.

The company said the core AI Companion will be available at no additional cost to businesses with paid services in Zoom Workplace accounts.

Image: Zoom