Zoom releases AI Companion 3.0 – with agentic capabilities

AI agents take on tasks independently. This will also apply to Zoom's AI Companion in the future. With the update, the assistant can help users of the Zoom platform itself as well as be used in customer service, for example. For example, agents can respond if an angry customer is denied access to their gym even though they are a member. Or they can help people set up a new password for a service. All without human help and manpower – of course, only as long as everything runs smoothly.

And, of course, an AI agent like this has to be set up first. This is quite self-explanatory with Zoom. You choose a name, give the agent access to documents and a self-created or selected knowledge base, describe a problem, when the agent should react and give it a solution path. Depending on the scope of a issue or the size of your portfolio, it is not entirely trivial to use AI agents. They need to be created and supported.

Nevertheless, whether Zoom, Microsoft or Salesforce, they all rely on AI support in customer contact.

Zoom uses models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Llama and more

The Zoomis, as the employees call themselves, call Zoom: It just works. It just works. And so the new AI skills should benefit everyone who uses the platform, Workplace or Business Services. "With AI Companion 3.0, our agent-based AI can understand the specific context, priorities and goals of users to help them eliminate distractions, focus on the essentials and achieve meaningful business outcomes," says Eric S. Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom at the Zoomtopia event.

AI should fit into the environment and work processes as unobtrusively as possible. The AI Companion is compatible with numerous third-party services. It can also summarize meetings or a chat history and search for information from different sources. Chat-based AI functions have been integrated for a long time anyway. What the AI Companion outputs can also always be edited.

What Zoom also always emphasizes is that no user or customer data is used to train AI models. Zoom always works with models from other providers. Proprietary models such as OpenAI's GPT-5 and Anthropic's Claude are integrated, as well as Meta's Llama and specialized small language models based on it. In order to always find the right model for a task, Zoom offers an orchestration of the models. This is also referred to as a federation. Functions such as memory or reasoning come with the models anyway.

As Zoom is not a manufacturer in the true sense of the word, the company considers itself immune to regulatory requirements. The AI Act, for example, holds providers responsible for their models, but also users of the models as soon as they make changes.

Zoom supports the Model Context Protocol, which should offer customers the opportunity to create their own tools based on the agents. The AI Companion 3.0 will be available in November.

There will be no additional costs for existing Zoom customers for the integrated agent. A custom AI Companion costs 12 US dollars per month.

For Zoom Business Services, it will then also be possible to give a speaking AI agent a selected voice and to create the customer service agents described above. The agent can then also be reached via WhatsApp, for example, if required.

Transparency notice: The author was invited to Zoomtopia to see the innovations in advance. There were no specifications regarding the nature and scope of our reporting.

(emw)