Zoom also announced a customisable AI Companion add-on for a more customisable and personalised experience
Zoom has announced the 2.0 "next generation" version of its AI Companion productivity assistant.
Unveiled at this week's Zoomtopia, the business pitches AI Companion 2.0 as an enhanced version of its AI personal assistant designed to help users stay on top of their day and increase productivity. It will be available across Zoom Workplace in a convenient side panel, allowing users to keep up-to-date on essential conversations, synthesise information for faster and more informed decision-making, and take action efficiently.
Smita Hashim, Chief Product Officer at Zoom, said:
At Zoom, being an AI-first work platform means AI is at the heart of Zoom Workplace to support you throughout your day. Now, with the enhanced capabilities in AI Companion 2.0, users can get more done and focus on what's most important. And, with the new custom add-on for AI Companion, organisations will have the ability to tailor AI Companion to their specific needs and workflows at an affordable price."
The company has also announced a custom add-on for AI Companion. This add-on intends to provide a more customised and personalised experience specifically designed to meet the organisation's unique needs.
AI Companion 2.0 will be available later this month and will continue to be free of additional cost for paying Zoom Workplace subscribers.
Zoom outlines that AI Companion offers a convenient side panel across Zoom Workplace, including Zoom Meetings, Zoom Team Chat, Zoom Docs, Zoom Calendar, and Zoom Mail. This panel allows users to generate answers and receive prompt suggestions directly within their workflow.
The AI Companion also aims to expand the context of information by integrating data from across Zoom Workplace and, when connected, from Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, and Google Calendar, as well as uploaded files from Microsoft Office and Google Docs.
Zoom highlights that AI Companion 2.0 remembers previous conversations and interactions within the side panel, enabling it to generate the next steps from meeting summaries. These next steps can be automatically turned into a new Zoom Tasks solution, encouraging teams to stay aligned and on track to deliver projects on time. Zoom says its Tasks offering is planned to be available in December 2024.
Additionally, AI Companion can summarise unread messages within a Zoom Team Chat channel, making it easier for users to stay updated on team conversations without getting bogged down in unread chats. Within the new home tab, AI Companion will provide users with a list of updates based on unread chats and emails, ensuring they never miss important information.
Finally, AI Companion can recap email threads in Zoom Mail, allowing users to catch up on conversations without having to read every message.
Users can get relevant AI Companion responses with citations and sources, look up information in real time from the web, and improve results by specifying meeting summaries, chat messages, documents, email threads, calendar entries, and local documents. Zoom underlines that this ensures accurate and tailored information.
With real-time web search capabilities, AI Companion provides up-to-date information. Users can get facts during meetings by asking questions like, "What language is spoken in Switzerland?" or finding out what an acronym means. AI Companion aims to help users stay focused and catch up on discussions by answering questions like, "Can you explain the debate about that last topic and turn it into a product spec doc?" or "What was the compiled feedback shared by the team?"
After meetings, users can continue to ask questions about the discussed content or refer back to conversations with AI Companion within the side panel.
Users can generate content drafts directly from the AI Companion side panel by sourcing information from documents, emails, meeting summaries, and the web. This aspires to ensure a well-informed first draft. Users can further tailor their content based on their role; for instance, a technical product manager might ask AI Companion to "Turn a meeting summary into a product brief for my design team."
AI Companion can summarise lengthy documents to highlight key points and action items quickly and then use a template to convert the document into a more shareable format. This summarised content can be shared with colleagues across the Zoom Workplace, including through Zoom Mail and Team Chat. AI Companion works across Zoom Workplace to gather context from multiple sources, such as group chat messages and previous meeting transcripts, to deliver more accurate meeting preparation recommendations.
Users can view source citations to see where responses were generated from, ensuring transparency. Admins are empowered with simplified controls, allowing them to enable or disable AI Companion at any time. With one click, AI Companion can be turned on, and clear indicators across Zoom Workplace show when it is being used.
The custom AI Companion add-on allows organisations to tailor and personalise their Zoom AI Companion experience to meet their business and employees' unique needs. Zoom outlines that by grounding AI Companion with business data from internal and third-party applications, users can accomplish tasks quicker and reduce the time spent searching for answers. Personalisation capabilities enhance performance and scalability with a personalised coach and custom avatar clips.
The custom AI Companion add-on enables better actions and decisions by accessing mission-critical data across Zoom and third-party apps like Atlassian (Jira & Confluence), Glean, Workday, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Box, Asana, and Hubspot. By adding their own knowledge collections, employees reduce the time they spend searching for information.
Third-party integrations allow AI Companion to complete tasks within Zoom products and other solutions like ServiceNow, Zendesk, and Box. Zoom cites an example where users can ask AI Companion to summarise meetings and action items, triggering AI workflows with tasks automatically created and assigned to team members in ServiceNow. AI Companion can also provide summaries for Microsoft Teams and Google Meet calls.
To tailor these experiences, Zoom suggests customers can leverage Zoom AI Studio to add custom dictionaries, meeting summary templates, and knowledge collections, improving response accuracy and expanding context to additional data sources. Organisations can add their own glossary of terms to refine transcripts and create custom meeting summary templates for more tailored content.
Expanding AI Companion's context with diverse company data, such as HR policies and support articles, further enhances its capabilities. Users can also build AI skills in AI Studio to extend AI Companion's functionality into other workloads, completing tasks or filling out service requests based on meeting content.
The custom AI Companion add-on will cost $12 per user per month and will likely be available for purchase in the first half of 2025. A preview version offering select capabilities will be released in the coming months.