Zoom Elevates Collaboration with Agentic AI: Introducing Custom AI Companion, Zoom Tasks, and More

The world of digital collaboration is rapidly evolving, moving beyond simple communication tools towards integrated platforms powered by intelligent systems. Artificial Intelligence is no longer just a background process; it’s becoming a proactive partner. Zoom, a major player in this space, is embracing this shift by significantly enhancing its Zoom Workplace platform with sophisticated AI capabilities. These new developments center around making its Zoom AI Companion more “agentic” – enabling it to understand context, anticipate user needs, plan multi-step actions, and execute tasks with greater autonomy.

Zoom’s AI strategy envisions the AI Companion not merely as an assistant performing requested actions like summarizing meetings, but as an intelligent agent deeply woven into the user’s workflow. This enhanced agency is underpinned by developing core AI skills: the capacity for reasoning, the retention of memory from past interactions, the ability to take direct action on tasks, and the power of orchestration to manage complex processes. This framework allows the AI to operate more like a digital team member, understanding intent and acting upon it across the Zoom ecosystem.

Recent updates from Zoom showcase this agentic philosophy in action, introducing powerful features designed to streamline workflows and boost user productivity.

Zoom Tasks: Transforming Action Items into Automated Actions

A standout innovation is Zoom Tasks, a feature designed to address the common struggle of tracking follow-up items scattered across various communications. Embedded within Zoom Workplace, Tasks leverages the intelligence of AI Companion to offer more than just a manual checklist.

Its agentic nature shines through in several key aspects:

1. Proactive Task Discovery: Instead of relying solely on users to remember and input tasks, AI Companion actively analyzes content sources like meeting summaries, conversations within Zoom Team Chat, Zoom Mail interactions*, and even Zoom Docs* to identify potential action items.
2. Contextual Assignment Suggestions: Based on its understanding of the discussion, the AI can propose who should be responsible for a newly identified task, simplifying delegation.
3. Facilitating Task Completion: Beyond mere identification, AI Companion aims to help users advance their tasks. It offers relevant insights and suggests concrete next steps – such as initiating a follow-up meeting, drafting a preliminary document, or composing a pertinent chat message – prompting the user to take action directly from the task interface.
4. Unified Task Hub: All identified and manually created tasks converge in a central “Tasks” tab within Zoom Workplace. This dashboard provides a consolidated view for reviewing assignments, accepting responsibility, delegating, and monitoring progress. Furthermore, tasks can be linked or embedded within Zoom Docs for better project context.
5. Enhanced Team Alignment: The system promotes transparency and accountability by providing a shared view of tasks (where appropriate) and using AI to summarize task lists or progress updates.

While the core Zoom Tasks functionality offers a valuable organization tool within Zoom Workplace plans, its full potential for automated discovery and execution assistance is unlocked through the AI Companion capabilities available in eligible paid plans.

The Power of Personalization: Custom AI Companion

Zoom acknowledges that generic AI assistance has limitations. Different organizations possess unique operational nuances, specialized vocabularies, and distinct workflows. To address this, Zoom offers the Custom AI Companion add-on. This premium service (priced around $12 per user monthly as of April 2025) provides the tools to significantly tailor the AI’s behavior and knowledge, making it a more precise and effective asset.

Administrators utilize Zoom AI Studio, described as a low-code, drag-and-drop environment, to configure these customizations:

1. Tailored Knowledge Integration: Organizations can feed the AI Companion information from their specific internal data repositories and connect it to approved third-party applications (early examples include Amazon Q Business, Glean, Jira*, with future expansion planned). This allows the AI to access and utilize company-specific context for more relevant responses and task assistance, potentially using Bring Your Own Index (BYOI) strategies.
2. Domain-Specific Language: Businesses can build custom dictionaries containing their internal acronyms, project names, technical terms, or industry jargon. This refinement helps AI Companion understand and communicate using the organization’s specific language accurately.
3. Bespoke Summary Formats: Define unique templates for meeting summaries tailored to various meeting objectives (e.g., client briefings, internal brainstorms, project updates), ensuring the output consistently captures the most critical information in the preferred structure.
4. Workflow-Specific AI Agents: Within AI Studio, organizations can construct custom AI agents programmed with specific skills to automate internal processes or handle tasks unique to their operational model.
5. Inter-Agent Communication: The platform is designed to support integration with external AI agents through standard protocols (like those developed by Anthropic and Google), enabling AI Companion to potentially coordinate actions across multiple AI systems.
6. Personalized Video Messaging: The Custom Avatars feature for Zoom Clips allows users to generate short video messages featuring an AI representation of themselves delivering a provided script. This capability, built with authenticity safeguards, offers a scalable way to create multilingual announcements or training content.

This deep customization potential elevates AI Companion from a one-size-fits-all tool to a highly specialized digital assistant molded to the specific needs and context of an individual business.

Expanding Agentic Capabilities Across the Platform

Zoom’s push towards more autonomous AI isn’t limited to Tasks and customization. Other notable advancements include:

• Intelligent Meeting Scheduling: Users can instruct AI Companion (accessible via the Zoom Workplace side panel) to arrange meetings with multiple attendees. The AI analyzes schedules across the platform, identifies mutually available times, proposes options, finalizes the booking, generates the meeting link, and can even draft a relevant agenda.
• Capturing In-Person Insights: The AI Companion Voice Recorder on the mobile app bridges the gap between physical and digital interactions. It enables users to record face-to-face discussions, automatically generating transcripts, summaries, and action items, ensuring valuable insights aren’t lost.
• Smarter Communication: Zoom Team Chat benefits from improved real-time translations powered by Zoom’s proprietary Small Language Model (SLM). Enhancements to AI-assisted chat and email composition also help users craft messages more efficiently.
• Enhanced Collaboration Tools: AI Companion extends its capabilities to summarize content within Zoom Whiteboard, facilitating easier understanding of visual collaboration sessions.
• Sales & Revenue Acceleration: Tools like Zoom Revenue Accelerator leverage AI to analyze sales interactions via natural language queries, extracting key insights and automating playbook adherence to streamline the sales cycle.

The Agentic Advantage: Boosting Efficiency and Focus

This comprehensive expansion of agentic AI within Zoom Workplace represents a significant evolution. By empowering AI to proactively identify tasks, suggest intelligent next steps, draw upon customized knowledge, and automate routine processes like scheduling, Zoom aims to significantly reduce the cognitive load and administrative burden on users. The goal is to liberate human potential, allowing employees to dedicate more energy to critical thinking, creative endeavors, and building stronger collaborative relationships.

While the broader tech landscape sees similar AI integrations from competitors, Zoom’s strategy of deeply integrating these agentic functions into its widely adopted communication hub, combined with the extensive customization offered through AI Studio, presents a compelling vision for the future of work.

In Conclusion

Zoom’s recent AI enhancements, spearheaded by the Custom AI Companion add-on and the automated capabilities of Zoom Tasks, signal a clear move towards a more proactive, intelligent collaboration platform. These agentic features are designed not just to assist users but to actively partner with them, automating workflows, personalizing interactions, and ultimately aiming to unlock new levels of productivity and efficiency within the digital workplace. This evolution suggests a future where our work tools become increasingly capable collaborators in achieving our professional goals.