Zoom Communications on Wednesday launched new products at its Zoomtopia conference, including an upgraded AI companion that can work across meeting apps with the ability to add notes, organize meeting schedules and — on the horizon — deploy look-alike avatars. The features are designed to make Zoom more competitive with vertical AI productivity startups. Available as a Zoom Workplace add-on, the Zoom AI Companion 3.0 has upgraded agentic features including for Voice Recorder and Tasks, plus new features for Zoom Meetings, Zoom Team Chat, Zoom Whiteboard, Zoom Revenue Accelerator and more.

Zoom also announced enhanced AI for Zoom Business Services with automated support through Agentic AI Expert Assist for Zoom’s Customer Experience (CX) suite and Zoom Virtual Agent (ZVA), including actionable insights.

On a basic level, while Zoom for some time offered AI transcription for recorded Zoom meetings, progress among “cross-application meeting notetakers like Read AI, Otter, Fireflies, Granola, and Circleback” are pressing the company to add more AI functionality, reports TechCrunch. “To tackle that, Zoom is making its AI companion work with other platforms such as [Google] Meet and Microsoft Teams, along with a feature to take notes during in-person meetings.”

Users can jot notes during meetings that Zoom’s AI Companion will later expand and structure into a more formal communication. Zoom has also added cross-platform search that lets users retrieve information from Google and Microsoft apps.

“Zoom Tasks with AI Companion helps surface, manage, and complete tasks across Zoom Workplace to get more done, and can aggregate tasks all within the centralized task management tab or embed tasks in a Zoom Doc for easy tracking,” Zoom writes in a blog post.

Zoom has deployed its own Small Language Model for translation to English from eight languages (German, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Portuguese-Brazilian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese).

“New calendar-related features are also on the way,” explains TechCrunch. The AI Companion will allow users “to find time slots that work for all attendees,” while a “free up my time” tool suggests meetings you can skip.

“Though there is no shortage of communications tools, Zoom’s differentiator has been and continues to be ease of use,” suggests SiliconANGLE, “especially when it comes to meeting the needs of smaller organizations and solo entrepreneurs in addition to enterprises.”

SiliconANGLE takes a deep dive into Zoom’s new agentic marketing, sales and service team functionalities.

Photorealistic avatars, which Zoom previewed at last year’s Zoomtopia, are “expected to be available to consumers by the end of the year,” writes TechCrunch.

Related:
Zoom Cares Commits $10M to Democratize AI Education and Expand Opportunity, Press Release, 9/17/25
Zoom’s New AI Tool Will Tell You What Meetings to Skip, CNET, 9/17/25
Zoom’s AI Companion 3.0 Wants You to Skip Meetings and Get More Done, Computerworld, 9/17/25