Zoom unveils AI Companion 2.0 enhancing productivity

Zoom has launched Zoom AI Companion 2.0, an update to its AI-first work platform, which is now available at no additional cost with paid services.

AI Companion 2.0 aims to boost productivity by enhancing meeting experiences, streamlining communication, and supporting content creation. Users can benefit from real-time meeting insights, message summaries, and the ability to draft content using AI.

Jeff Smith, Head of Product, Workplace AI, Meetings, and Spaces at Zoom, remarked, "We're thrilled with AI Companion's ability to help boost productivity throughout the workday. With our new capabilities, AI Companion has the power to help people make the most of their meetings, kickstart documents, get important information at a glance, and transform their workday. And, the substantial added value that we're delivering today is just the beginning. Zoom is hyper-focused on customer experience, and in the coming weeks, we'll support broader queries across Zoom Workplace, improve response times, and enable AI Companion to take more actions for the user."

The updated AI Companion is designed with additional capabilities to enhance users' workflow by providing expanded context, synthesising information, and enabling action-taking across Zoom's platform.

The platform employs a federated approach, unique to Zoom, allowing the provision of AI Companion without additional costs to subscribers, thereby making it accessible organisation-wide.

AI Companion 2.0 can be accessed through a side panel in Zoom Workplace, offering functionalities such as prioritising important information and converting interactions into actionable tasks, which is designed to allow users more time for creative work.

Among its expanded functionalities, AI Companion can now synthesise information from various platforms including Zoom Meetings, Zoom Team Chat, Zoom Docs, Zoom Mail, and more. This feature enables it to provide answers backed by data drawn from integrated services like Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook.

AI Companion's action-taking capability allows users to efficiently track and manage tasks, with future updates expected to integrate features such as Zoom Tasks.

During meetings, AI Companion 2.0 enables participants to ask clarifying questions and provides summaries to keep users informed, even if they miss part of a session. For follow-up, users can query the assistant about discussions or actions taken during meetings.

In addition to meeting support, AI Companion can summarise unread messages in Zoom Team Chat, keeping users updated with priority content and action items across chat channels.

Post-meeting, AI Companion offers functionality to leverage meeting content for productivity enhancement, from sending thank you notes to providing complete meeting summaries.

For content creation, AI Companion can assist users by generating drafts and editing existing documents, as well as helping with the creation of presentations and spreadsheets based on uploaded content.

The platform's document summarisation feature allows users to swiftly find key points within documents, which can be queried directly for information.

Zoom ensures that AI Companion is built on a foundation of responsible and secure AI. It does not utilise customer content to train models, safeguarding user privacy and data integrity.

Account owners and admins have controls to manage data accessibility and integrate third-party services as they see fit. The updated capabilities are incorporated into Zoom Workplace version 6.2.5.