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Zoom’s AI assistant just got another agentic upgrade.
The company announced Wednesday that its AI Companion, unveiled close to two years ago, can now connect with 16 third-party apps — all without forcing the user to leave Zoom.
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The AI Companion can now more seamlessly assist sales and customer service professionals, for example, by connecting directly with apps like Salesforce and Zendesk. It can also help to streamline the process of drafting and editing documents by quickly retrieving materials across workplace collaboration platforms like Google Drive, Coda, and Confluence.
While Zoom’s AI Companion was previously able to automatically record and summarize meeting notes from Zoom calls, the new agentic upgrade now gives it the same ability across Microsoft Teams and Google Meet (capabilities for Cisco Webex will be added soon, according to Zoom).
Like many other AI agents — an often more capable and autonomous assistant, compared to a chatbot — Zoom’s newly upgraded AI Companion is being promoted to businesses and working professionals as a tool that can help streamline day-to-day work routines. The agent received a similar upgrade in March.
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“With Zoom AI Companion’s agentic skills, users will see a significant productivity boost to help them get more done — not just in Zoom, but across business-essential apps like ServiceNow, Jira, Salesforce, Asana, Box, and more,” Zoom chief product officer Smita Hashim said in a statement.
Zoom is just one of a legion of tech companies trying to sell AI agents to enterprise customers, insisting that this new wave of tools will help to bolster workplace productivity by taking over the more mundane aspects of human workers’ jobs. Box and Workday, for example, have both recently unveiled their own proprietary agents for customers.
Many business leaders and individual workers have been embracing agents and other AI tools, but this has come with some mental health costs. New research from freelance hiring platform Upwork, for example, has shown that the full-time employees who use agents and other AI tools the most also report feeling higher levels of loneliness and alienation from their fellow workers.
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Elsewhere, AI agent adoption remains patchy. Developers are faced with a bit of an ethical dilemma: How do they ensure that this new wave of automation delivers on the promise of enhanced productivity without harming employees’ sense of meaning and engagement with their work? More broadly, how will increased adoption of these agents impact the economy at large?
At the same time, facing increased pressure to adopt AI across an ever-growing number of their operations, employers will have to figure out how to strike a healthy balance in achieving human-AI collaboration.
