Zoom’s AI Companion 3.0 Aims to Cut Through the Noise of Modern Work

Zoom is upgrading its generative AI assistant with the goal of “connecting people to progress.” With AI Companion 3.0, the company is introducing features that span across Zoom Workplace and Zoom Business Services, designed to help users turn conversations into concrete actions. Although announced today, these new capabilities won’t be generally available until later this year under a rolling release.

“Zoom is way more than just a product,” Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Kimberly Storin commented during a press conference last week. “It’s a platform that enables progress, whether that’s for a global enterprise or for a single entrepreneur…What struck me most about Zoom is how we show up differently from other players in our space: Microsoft builds for IT and procurement. Google bundles collaboration into a ‘by the way’ product suite. But Zoom is truly built for the people: for employees, creators, entrepreneurs, and educators. These are all of the people who drive progress forward every single day.”

Formerly known as Zoom IQ, AI Companion formally launched in September 2023. The AI agent was designed to enhance productivity throughout its ecosystem and among those with whom users communicate. AI Companion 2.0 followed up in March 2025 with the introduction of new skills, agents, and models. As Zoom’s Chief Product Officer, Smita Hashim, said at the time, “AI Companion is evolving from a personal assistant to being truly agentic.” It surfaced critical information, prioritized what mattered the most, and turned interactions into action.

In a sign of how fast AI moves, six months later, Zoom is launching AI Companion 3.0. It’s “truly agentic AI that gets you to quality results faster by giving you more insights.” This version is about proactive assistance and driving business outcomes. Like most agentic innovations today, the goal is to free workers from performing administrative, mundane, and time-consuming tasks.

“We continue to see a serious shift in how we work. All of us are experiencing digital overload. There are so many emails, chat messages, tasks, meetings, phone calls—there’s so little room for progress,” Hashim stated.” “Quickbase found that 90 percent of professionals are overwhelmed by the many platforms and tools they need, and 59 percent spend more than 11 hours a week chasing information down.”

What’s New in AI Companion 3.0?

Zoom’s next-generation AI Companion promises to eliminate the friction from modern work. Whether you’re in a corporate office, freelancing from home, or running your own business, chances are your day may involve video calls and/or digital collaboration. But anyone who’s done it knows the real challenge isn’t just showing up to a meeting—it’s keeping track of the endless details, follow-ups, and tasks that pile up around it.

“AI Companion doesn’t just assist you, it coordinates and executes for you, knowing exactly which agents and which skills to deploy for the best possible outcomes,” Hashim proclaimed.

Here are some of what Zoom promises its new AI companion will be able to do once all the features have been rolled out:

Better Insights From Across the Enterprise

Zoom AI can retrieve and analyze data from internal knowledge bases, pulling from meeting and phone call transcripts, chat histories, shared documents, and external sources (e.g., publicly available market research and industry data). It utilizes agentic retrieval to curate data and metadata across Zoom’s platform, along with Google’s and Microsoft’s, if granted permission, compiling the most critical information users need.

Note-Taking Capabilities

This new skill turns agents into virtual meeting notetakers. It operates regardless of the situation, whether via Zoom or an in-person event. Starting September 2025, it will also support meetings through a third-party platform such as Microsoft Teams or Google Meet. WebEx support is expected in October 2025. And while it automatically generates the notes, Hashim emphasized that users can insert their own edits, which AI Companion will then use to optimize the document further.

Calendar Management

Looking for a way to reclaim your schedule? Zoom’s new “Free Up My Time” skill (coming October 2025) optimizes your calendar, flagging meetings worth skipping, distinguishing who should attend or who is optional, blocking off time dedicated to deep work, and reshaping schedules based on work patterns and priorities.

“Don’t be confused. This isn’t just calendar management. It’s intelligent time orchestration that works for you, freeing you up to all that time you need,” Leo Boulton, Zoom’s head of product, solutions, and industry marketing, said.

Another new skill, “Prepare Me For a Meeting,” helps users with meeting prep. When launched in October 2025, it will send out prompts in advance of the meeting, allowing attendees to familiarize themselves with the agenda, review previous action items, and identify key insights needed to make the meeting productive.

New Interfaces

Zoom has redesigned both the web experience (available in November) and the Home tab in Zoom Workplace (launching in 2026) with the goal of providing a unified AI experience regardless of where users are working.

“This isn’t just another interface. It’s your personalized workspace that understands you and how you work,” Boulton explained. “It creates a seamless bridge between all your data, your tools, your presentations, and your conversations on those interactions. It uncovers what matters most from across your digital ecosystem. It optimizes your workflows by streamlining routine tasks, and it uplevels your work with intelligence suggestions exactly when you need them.”

Writing Assistant

AI Companion can now assist you in writing that email, proposal, report, press article, and/or presentation. With the “Writing Assistance” skill, the agent understands your business context and communication objective.

In one example provided by Zoom, you can prompt the “writing assistant” to generate a project kickoff plan based on a recently held strategy meeting. The bot will not only source information from that meeting’s transcript, but also analyze any successful project templates that were previously used to develop a comprehensive plan. It’ll feature an executive summary, the project objectives, deliverables, and other pertinent details—all in your company’s voice and format.

Boulton pointed out that if new information is added, “writing assistant” will factor that in and suggest plan enhancements, including updates to the timeline, new stakeholders to add, and revised objectives.

Zoom has also added deep research capabilities, enabling AI Companion to use internal and external data sources to produce comprehensive data-driven reports and documents.

‘Hey Zoomie’

AI Companion 3.0 introduces a new group assistant called “Zoomie” that is activated by chat or voice (“Hey Zoomie”). Theresa Larkin, Zoom’s head of Workplace and AI product marketing, states it’s “designed to help you get faster automated answers.” Users need only say its name in a team or meeting chat to “improve group transparency and efficiency for the entire team.”

“Zoomie” also works in Zoom Rooms, the company’s hardware and software solution. Without needing to use the controller, attendees can activate it by voice to have it execute tasks, such as checking into the room, controlling the room environments like lights and temperature, assist with screen sharing, or creating a whiteboard.

Users could ask “Zoomie” to provide the latest update on a project or list the team’s action items. It’s worth emphasizing that it’s a group assistant, not a personal one, meaning that the support it provides in meetings, chats, and in-person conversations is for the benefit of attendees and teams.

“Zoomie” is expected to be released in December 2025.

Real-Time Voice Translation

Apple’s not the only one offering real-time voice translation. Zoom is bringing this capability to Meetings, allowing participants to have the meeting speech provided in their preferred language. Unfortunately, the company hasn’t specified which languages it supports initially. Still, when it’s released before the end of this year, it could help reduce the cost for interpreters and lower another communication barrier.

New Photorealistic Avatars

If there are meetings you’d prefer not to be on camera for—Zoom fatigue, anyone?—Zoom has a solution for you in AI Companion 3.0. The service supports more photorealistic avatars that track and mimic the user’s live video feed. These AI-generated avatars are based on a person’s likeness and, according to Larkin, are “professional alternatives to the cartoon avatars, and are suitable for a wider range of business meetings, helping employees stay confident in any meeting and at Zoom.”

You won’t have to wait long to get your own avatar; the feature is expected to launch in December 2025.

Custom AI Companion Updates

Zoom is also updating its Custom AI Companion, an add-on offering first introduced in October 2024. It’s designed to provide advanced, customizable AI capabilities that go beyond the standard Zoom AI Companion features. Starting today, it will feature a custom agent builder. This low-code service lets IT administrators configure knowledge bases, a rich tooling library, and pre-built workflow templates, while also testing the bot’s capabilities before deployment.

Custom AI Companion will soon support the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, allowing bots to communicate with one another without context switching. ServiceNow’s Now Assist agents are the first to integrate with Zoom’s platform, meaning bots could create tickets to manage incidents or search through knowledge bases based on a customer’s conversation.

This all comes more than two months after Zoom rolled out its last enhancements to Custom AI Companion. In that release, the company added connections to 16 third-party apps, including Glean, Amazon Q, Jira, Box, Asana, Zendesk, Notion, Workday, and Google Drive. The add-on also expanded to online customers.

Expanding AI Companion Beyond Zoom

“One of the biggest requests that we’ve heard from customers is to make AI Companion available where their teams are already working,” Randel Maestre, Zoom’s head of AI, developer ecosystem and industry product and solutions marketing, remarked. “So next month, we’ll be launching a native AI Companion experience inside of Slack, and shortly thereafter, inside of Microsoft Teams, both powered by our Custom AI Companion add-on.”

Naturally, one benefit of this is to eliminate context switching. Why would you need to jump from one app to another to prepare for meetings or ask questions about what’s being discussed? It should be seamless, and Zoom wants to be in the app where it all happens.

In the end, Zoom is betting that AI Companion 3.0 will transform how work gets done by taking on the digital drudgery that clogs up calendars and drains focus. But the real test won’t be in the feature list—it’ll be in whether the assistant actually delivers on its promise of turning conversations into outcomes without adding new layers of complexity.

“Our customers’ most important conversations happen on Zoom, and now those conversations can result in critical insights to fuel real progress, Eric S. Yuan, Zoom’s chief executive, shared in a statement. “With AI Companion 3.0, our agentic AI can understand users’ specific context, priorities, and goals to help them cut through the noise, focus on what matters most, and drive meaningful business outcomes.”

Featured Image: Credit: Zoom