Zoom sees human conversation as its edge in the agentic AI era

AI agents in the workplace are increasingly able to retrieve information, coordinate tasks, and even act on a user’s behalf. But important decisions still typically happen through human interaction.

As agentic AI threatens to disrupt the SaaS market, Zoom sees an advantage in its ability to capture interactions across video, phone, and in-person meetings — and put its own AI tools to work on that information. 

“When we look at what AI can do for us within Zoom and to transform work, it’s taking that engagement and turning it into action,” Jeff Smith, interim chief product officer, said in an interview. 

Zoom rose to prominence in the early 2020s by connecting remote workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has since expanded beyond video and voice calls, morphing into a broader workplace platform that spans productivity, workplace management and employee engagement tools — the latter through its 2023 acquisition of Workvivo. 

Zoom has also embedded AI functionality across its products with its AI Companion; the assistant is built into meetings, chat, and other tools, where it can summarize conversations, take notes and suggest actions. Zoom said that monthly active users of AI Companion have tripled in a year, though it did not provide specific numbers. 

AI Companion 3.0

The AI assistant is now on its third iteration, with the 3.0 version announced in December.  Zoom also unveiled several feature updates earlier this month that expand the company’s ambitions around AI agents under the guise of its Custom AI Companion — an add-on that costs $20 per user —  with a new no-code agent builder that makes it easier for workers to create their own agentic workflows.

Custom agents help to “personalize the way that AI Companion interacts with me and automates the things that I want,” said Smith. Among other things, the companion can scan messages, highlight trending topics and flag out-standing work commitments.

It’s also possible to connect Zoom’s Custom AI Companion agents to third-party apps, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, Google Drive, OneDrive, and others. The agents can then retrieve information, automate tasks and orchestrate workflows across apps, Zoom said.

The big challenge for office workers today lies in “siloed data and multiple AI copilots/virtual assistants,” said Irwin Lazar, president and principal analyst at Metrigy. Zoom’s growing ability to “pull in data from third-party sources such as CRM and document repositories increases the usefulness of AI Companion,” he said. 

To help capture and retain interactions, Zoom has introduced My Notes, a “universal, cross-platform transcription service,” according to Smith. My Notes records conversations across Zoom and other collaboration apps, as well as in-person meetings. The app then acts as a “second brain,” he said, “with perfect recall for all of my interactions.”

Another addition is a new suite of AI “canvases” called AI Docs, Sheets, and Slides. These are aimed at automating the process of turning meeting conversations into “structured documents, data analysis, and presentation content,” according to Zoom. The tool can help create project plans with deadlines and individual responsibilities.

Ahead of meetings, AI Companion can also generate agenda documents that reflect completed tasks and work that remains unfinished. “The result is we get to have more rich interactions — we do more of the engagement and less of the siloed, individual work,” said Smith.

“I might have a Microsoft or Google document that is the end state for this content, but our strength is going to be in getting the information at least in a transitory format that can be manipulated from there.”

AI agent competition

Zoom has long positioned itself as an open platform that integrates with a wide range of tools, and that approach now extends to AI agents. The company is adopting open protocols such as Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) to connect with external AI systems. With A2A, for instance, it’s possible to schedule Zoom video meetings directly from Google’s Agentspace AI agent, which interacts with Zoom’s AI Companion to coordinate. 

“We’re thinking beyond where a user has to be interacting in a siloed application, but meeting those users where they are, and providing Zoom capabilities in those services,” Smith said. “It’s rapidly evolving, and we’re keeping up with it.”

As AI agents become better at acting autonomously on behalf of users, human  interactions could shift away from applications like Zoom to those agents. In that scenario, collaboration software apps risk becoming the underlying infrastructure rather than the primary interface, a shift that recently prompted concerns about a broader “SaaS-pocalypse” following the launch of AI agent tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Cowork. 

Zoom’s response is to support both models. Users may access its services through third-party agents, but the company is also aiming to remain a primary interface for work. “There are some capabilities that we want users to always have access to,” said Smith, arguing that relying solely on external agents could limit functionality.

Another concern is that as enterprises adopt AI assistants from the likes of Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, the end result could be a more fragmented interface landscape. “Someone could use the Zoom AI Companion UI in a meeting, or when preparing for a meeting, while also using Claude when doing other work,” said Lazar.

But greater interoperability between agents and applications could strengthen Zoom’s position. “This should allow companies like Zoom to continue to provide value by increasing the number of data sources that can be integrated into AI Companion, while also allowing Zoom to share data into its customers’ other models,” he said.