Zoom’s long-term vision: From conversation to task completion

Because workers don’t want to be in meetings all day — especially if they’re unproductive — Zoom is packing more AI features into its software so attendees get more value from conversations and can use agentic AI to finish projects.

“The vision that our CTO has really laid out is this idea of agentic AI task completion,” said Kim Storin, the chief marketing officer at Zoom.

The approach to agentic task completion is designed to integrate smoothly into corporate workflows to take advantage of opportunities before, during and after meetings.

“That’s why we’ve been able to embed it into the platform instead of bolting it on,” Storin said. “It’s truly part of the overall workflow, versus just a side project of AI.”

Zoom took steps toward its conversation-to-completion goal this week by adding more tools to the company’s Custom AI Companion feature; it shows up in the interface as a chatbot where users can pose questions. 

The Custom AI Companion is now widely available to customers — and the chatbot can get answers from the third-party tools. For example, users will be able to pull out sales records from Salesforce during a conversation by querying the chatbot, and then update records, said Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom.

Zoom has also expanded the functionality with integrations with data storage platform Box and project management tools from Asana and Atlassian’s Jira. That means, for instance, users will be able to update Jira tickets or pull information from files in Box.

Users can also connect to services such as AWS’s Q agents, which is a generative AI (genAI) assistant. Q is Amazon’s version of Microsoft’s Copilot, which helps workers complete jobs and get answers.

“Great meetings are when you’re having an engaging, creative conversation, you are brainstorming, people are alert, they’re not fiddling around,” Hashim said.

Zoom’s AI Companion is available to all users, but the customized AI companion had been available only to large organizations. The add-on is now available to more customers, including small businesses, and will cost $12 per user per month, Hashim said.

“The Custom AI Companion can also join your Google Meet meetings or Teams meetings,” Hashim said.

Zoom’s AI features are based on established large language models (LLMs) from the likes of Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta. The company also uses custom and small language models for AI functions within its videoconferencing software.

“These small language models are more specific to a task and those are becoming better. It’s a federated approach that we are using for models,” Hashim said.

Product integrations are commonplace across productivity suites and project management tools, even if from rival providers. The integrations improve user productivity and keep projects on track.  

Zoom wants to “take that conversation and convert it into something which is really actionable” allowing users to complete tasks “as much as we can in the moment,” Hashim said.

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