Zoom outlined its roadmap and upcoming products that include AI Companion 2.0 across its platform, a focus on work management for frontline workers and a deeper dive into contact center, education and healthcare markets.
In a briefing, Smita Hashim, Chief Product Officer at Zoom, said the company's AI Companion effort initially revolved around the theme of meet happy by adding tools for engagement, becoming more productive and collaboration. With AI Companion 2.0, Zoom is expanding its view more toward work happy.
"We have expanded our vision to work happy. And what work happy really means for us from our perspective is helping our customers and users have the time to really be what is uniquely human to them," said Hashim, who noted that AI Companion is now activated on more than 4 million accounts and 57% of the Fortune 500. "AI Companion is going to be your personal assistant that can work across Zoom Workplace."
This vision will be outlined at the company's Zoomtopia conference, which will feature CEO Eric Yuan's keynote as well as customer sessions. The upshot with Zoom's product launches and roadmap, which lands in the fourth quarter of 2024 and extends into 2025, is that the company is gunning for Microsoft Teams. The challenge for Zoom will be overcoming AI assistant fatigue--every enterprise application has one--and breaking through the Microsoft Bundle.
Hashim noted that AI agent, companion, copilot fatigue directly.
"Sprawl is a challenge for our users and frankly some of the implementations are confusing. Why do I need an agent just for SharePoint? I don't want hundreds and thousands of agents running around in my user interface. With AI Companion 2.0 we see it as a super-agent that will have skills to connect to Workday, Jira and various workflows to help you get more done."
Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said:
"Zoom has made massive progress in the last year to position itself beyond just synchronous communication, making it more and more an alternative to the omnipresent Teams. The question will be – can Zoom overcome the power of the Microsoft enterprise agreement with innovation? It certainly has some key capabilities here, especially on the AI side – where it makes AI insights and automation easier accessible than other products, as well as offering a single AI assistant with Zoom AI Companion. On the new offering side, the Frontline Worker offering has a lot of potential, Zoom got the capability mix right, now it has to get the price point right. Overall Zoom has the ability to change the future of work – again."
Zoom's announcements at Zoomtopia include:
Zoom AI Companion 2.0, available October 2025. Zoom AI Companion 2.0 works across the Zoom Workplace platform adds context, synthesizes data from meetings, chats and docs as well as Microsoft Outlook, Office, Gmail and other applications, and can take action.
- Takeaway: AI Companion 2.0 is Zoom's horizontal AI and agent play. By connecting to other enterprise data repositories Zoom is betting that it can be the lead AI collaboration tool. The fact that Zoom doesn't charge extra for AI Companion is a big selling point for adoption.
Custom AI Companion add-on for Zoom Workplace, which enables enterprises to customize AI Companion and connect it to business apps and data sets. This customization ability is expected in the first half of 2025 at $12 per user per month. AI Companion is typically included in Zoom Workspace without an add-on fee.
- Takeaway: Hashim said the ability to customize was one of the big customer requests. The move to personalize AI Companion is a natural progression. "Our customers and their organizations are unique. They work across different applications, different data sources. Their employees are unique. They have different goals, they have different ambitions and customers have been asking us how AI companion could expand to address all of those needs," she said.
Zoom AI Studio, which will customize AI Companion with connectors to knowledge bases, fine tuning and AI skills.
- Takeaway: Custom AI Companion add-on and AI Studio will enable AI Companion to move across workflow applications and take actions. This ability will also enable Zoom to provide personal employee coaching and avatars.
Zoom Tasks, which will use AI Companion to detect tasks across Workplace and sync updates.
AI Companion for Workvivo for employee engagement as well as a listening suite to gauge employee sentiment. Will Meta's Workplace shutdown be a boon for Zoom's Workvivo?
Contact center enhancements such as dynamic agent guides, suggested answer and supervisor tools.
- Takeaway: Zoom's latest quarter featured strong contact center adoption and the company will continue to expand in that market against legacy providers. Constellation ShortList™ Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) | Constellation ShortList™ Contact Center Workforce Engagement Management (WEM)
Industry enhancements with AI Companion for Educators including lesson plans, Zoom for Healthcare including Zoom Workplace for Clinicians, and Zoom Workplace for Frontline, which is aimed at workers in the field. Frontline workers were a big focus for Facebook Workspace, which is winding down and moving customers to Zoom Workvivo.
- Takeaway: Zoom's education efforts are notable since they alleviate hybrid learning pain points and connectors to Canvas and other common education applications are a win. In addition, Zoom Workspace Clinicians is a nice way to leverage the platform overall. Zoom's focus on healthcare looks to build its 36% telemedicine market share. Zoom said more than 140,000 healthcare institutions use Zoom. Zoom Workplace for Frontline is also an area with a lot of white space for the company.
