With AI the name of the game this year at Zoomtopia 2024, here are the major product announcements and enhancements revealed at the event that should be on partners’ radars.

Artificial intelligence was on full display this year at Zoom Video Communications’ Zoomtopia 2024.

The videoconferencing giant, led by CEO Eric Yuan, unveiled the next generation of its AI Companion that will help pull in data from more sources to help users get work done. There’s also the custom AI Companion add-on, and a slew of updates to the flagship Zoom Workplace platform.

On the Zoom Business Services front, the company is continuing its AI-forward trend with a series of industry-specific Workplace tools, such as Zoom Workplace for Frontline, Healthcare, and Education.

Business through the channel for the San Jose, Calif.-based company sits at around 30 percent globally and Zoom wants to engage more partners through its AI-first collaboration tools. With that in mind, here are the major product announcements and enhancements revealed at Zoomtopia 2024 that should be on partners’ radars.

AI Companion 2.0

Zoom took to its annual event to reveal AI Companion 2.0, the company’s virtual personal assistant technology that’s been improved and updated with the most up-to-date AI tools at users’ disposal. The updated Companion is now available via a persistent side panel with availability throughout the Zoom Workplace that gives end users a more integrated experience so they can take quicker action with a better flow of information. The tool also is now benefitting from expanded context, which gives Companion advanced contextual understanding of what the user is looking at within the Zoom Workplace app and previous conversations to provide intelligent suggestions and responses that come with citations to help users stay current. AI Companion can now also pull in interactions from across Zoom Workplace, and, when connected, information from Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Google Calendar, and uploaded files from Microsoft Office and Google Docs. It’s also now connected to the web, which will allow Companion to answer user questions and look up information from the web in real time.

AI Companion 2.0 will be available in the coming weeks at no additional cost with paid services in Zoom Workplace accounts, according to the company.

Custom AI Companion Add-On

Custom add-on for AI Companion is a new, optional feature that lets users customize and personalize their AI Companion experience for individual customers. The add-on will give users expanded data access to apps beyond Microsoft and Google email and calendar services and additional company data sources to expand Companion’s knowledge, allow customization with company glossaries, offer enhanced search capabilities, and even take action on the user’s behalf. The personalization capabilities will help improve AI Companion’s performance on the customer’s account, Zoom said.

Key components of the new add-on include the ability to customize experience to their unique business needs with custom dictionaries, meeting summaries, and knowledge collections by connecting to company data sources, the ability to connect to third-party apps: such as Atlassian, Glean, Workday, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Box, Asana and Hubspot, among others.

Custom AI Companion add-on will be available for $12 per user per month and is planned to launch in the first half of 2025, according to the company.

Zoom Workplace Improvements

The flagship Zoom Workplace collaboration platform is getting a refresh with a handful of new features. These include Zoom Tasks, a new feature that will use AI Companion to help detect, recommend, and complete tasks for a user based on conversations from across Zoom Workplace.

Zoom Phone is also getting an AI injection with real-time queries, which will provide summaries of Zoom Phone calls as they happen and Zoom Phone voicemail generation that a user can set up so AI Companion can automatically create personalized voicemail greetings that are tailored to the user’s calendar events, such as travel schedules.

Zoom Docs is offering new sharing and permission options, new templates, updated views for Data Tables, APIs and workflow automations, and AI Companion skills to help users write and create content by tapping into additional data sources.

The Zoom Workplace enhancements are included at no added cost with the paid services in Zoom Workplace accounts, Zoom said.

Zoom Customer Experience

On the Zoom Business Services side, Zoom Customer Services enhancements include improved self-service solutions and agent and management support feature.

Zoom’s self-service chatbot, Zoom Virtual Agent, now includes multi-intent detection to handle more complex customer issues. It can process several problems within a single engagement and automatically update customer intents based on learnings from active trends or common queries. Zoom is also launching an AI virtual voice agent to bring Zoom Virtual Agent’s capabilities into self-service voice calls, the company said.

New Auto Quality Management will grant supervisors insights into agent performance and automatically score customer interactions. New AI Expert Assist capabilities include dynamic agent guides, which can analyze the conversation context, identify steps the agent has already taken, and guide them to the relevant next step.

Industry-Specific Zoom Offerings

Zoom has unveiled a handful of new offerings tailored to specific industries and packed with AI.

Zoom Workplace for Frontline gives its users a mobile-first experience that includes AI Companion-generated shift summaries, on-shift communications, work management and insights, among other features.

Zoom Workplace for Healthcare will include AI Companion 2.0. Healthcare customers will also be able to purchase a custom AI Companion for Healthcare add-on to provide customization and personalization capabilities with healthcare dictionaries and access to third-party data sources like electronic healthcare records.

Zoom Workplace for Clinicians helps these professionals save time by automating clinical workflow via clinical notes, which will use specialized healthcare AI to help reduce documentation overhead and improve doctor-patient interactions.

Lastly, Zoom Workplace for Education will include AI Companion 2.0, along with education-specific enhancements such as lesson planning, lecture summaries, and personalized feedback and in-class student engagement, as well as capabilities for students, such as AI Companion-generated live notes and Zoom Docs. A custom AI Companion for Education add-on will provide additional access to third-party data sources such as student information systems, Learning Management Systems, and other institutional content, according to Zoom.