Zoom AI Companion 3.0 supports hybrid collaboration by combining in-person teamwork, AI avatars in meetings, and automatic note-taking and task generation. Image Source: ChatGPT-5
Zoom AI Companion 3.0 Brings Avatars, Agentic AI, and Custom Agents to Meetings
Key Takeaways: Zoom AI Companion 3.0 and Workplace AI Features
Zoom AI Companion 3.0 introduces lifelike AI avatars that can attend meetings for you, along with cross-platform note-taking and proactive agentic AI skills.
The Custom AI Companion add-on enables organizations to build and deploy tailored AI agents through Zoom AI Studio.
Cross-platform support will allow note-taking in Microsoft Teams and Google Meet (September 2025), with WebEx support coming later.
Agentic AI features include scheduling meetings, summarizing skipped sessions, preparing agendas, recommending next steps, and suggesting room bookings.
Zoom Video Management consolidates meeting, event, webinar, and clip content into one platform for enterprise and education use.
AI Companion 3.0: The Next Evolution of Agentic AI
Zoom unveiled AI Companion 3.0, calling it the next generation of its workplace assistant. The release expands on earlier agentic AI capabilities by introducing proactive skills designed to not just automate routine tasks, but to uncover insights, track decisions, and drive meaningful progress from conversations.
“AI Companion 3.0 will provide deeper insights from conversations to help people get more done at work and drive better business outcomes, regardless of whether they’re working in Zoom Workplace, in person, or across compatible apps,” said Smita Hashim, Chief Product Officer at Zoom.
Key upgrades include:
Cross-platform note-taking: Users can now bring the AI Companion beyond Zoom Meetings. Starting in September 2025, it will take notes in Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, with WebEx support coming later. In-person meetings are also covered, allowing participants to capture, expand, and organize insights even when no video call is involved. By October 2025, Zoom will extend this with the ability to highlight action items and expand rough notes into polished summaries.
Agentic retrieval: Arriving in November 2025, this feature will allow users to search across Zoom Workplace, Google, and Microsoft platforms simultaneously. Instead of manually combing through apps, AI Companion will surface relevant information — like a decision from last week’s meeting or a document draft — right when it’s needed.
Writing and research tools: Within Zoom Docs, new skills coming in October and November 2025 will let the AI Companion draft and refine business content to fit the user's style. It can also run “deep research” across company knowledge bases, connected apps, and even external web searches to compile comprehensive documents.
Optimizing Workdays with Proactive Agentic Skills
Much of the modern workday is consumed by administrative tasks — scheduling, preparing for meetings, and catching up on missed conversations. With AI Companion 3.0, Zoom is introducing proactive agentic skills designed to give users back their time and help them focus on higher-value work.
Smart scheduling: Instead of endless back-and-forth emails, the assistant will analyze calendars across time zones, factor in attendees’ scheduled time off, and check existing meetings to suggest the most efficient slots for collaboration. The goal is to reduce friction and speed up coordination.
“Free up my time” prompts: Launching in October 2025, this feature will scan a user’s day and recommend meetings that could be skipped. To prevent missing key insights, users can request AI Companion-generated notes from the host, ensuring they stay informed while reclaiming valuable hours.
Meeting prep briefings: Also arriving in October 2025, this feature delivers agendas, reminders of past action items, and relevant context from earlier conversations — so participants can walk into meetings prepared, without spending time digging through notes and documents.
Proactive meeting recommendations: Beginning in November 2025, the AI will act as a facilitator, nudging teams to stay on track with agendas, capturing key decisions, and suggesting immediate next steps. This helps keep discussions focused and outcomes actionable.
Zoomie Group Assistant: Rolling out in December 2025, this collaborative AI extends Companion’s value to group settings. Teams can ask “@Zoomie” for project updates or action items, and in Zoom Rooms, they can use voice commands to adjust lighting, control screens, or check into meeting spaces — reducing the time spent managing logistics.
In-person meeting room optimization: Expected in December 2025, Companion will proactively nudge users when a meeting room hasn’t been booked while multiple colleagues are in the office. It can also resolve conflicts, such as when participants reserve different rooms for the same meeting, by suggesting the best option based on size and location.
Zoom Tasks: Expected in October 2025, this feature will go beyond simply listing action items. By generating to-do lists and assisting in their completion, Companion aims to move from task tracking into true execution support.
Delivering High-Quality Work Faster
With AI Companion 3.0, Zoom is launching a new agentic AI work surface that reframes its assistant as a true collaboration partner. Debuting in November 2025 on the web and in March 2026 on the Zoom Workplace home tab, the surface will act as a central hub where AI Companion can proactively surface relevant data, provide writing and research support, and help organize workflows end to end.
The work surface will present relevant prompts in context, reducing the need for manual navigation between apps. It will also support:
Context-aware writing assistance that adapts to a user’s style, offering real-time drafting, editing, and polishing help.
Deep research skills that pull from integrated knowledge bases, third-party apps, and the web to build comprehensive reports or project briefs.
Custom AI Agents with AI Companion Add-On
The Custom AI Companion add-on gives organizations and IT teams greater flexibility to tailor Zoom’s AI. By extending control over workflows, data sources, and integrations, the add-on enables companies to design agents that reflect their unique business needs.
Custom agent builder in Zoom AI Studio: Launching in September 2025, this feature will allow administrators to configure knowledge bases, connect tools, and define workflows. IT teams can test their custom AI agents before deployment, ensuring accuracy and compliance. The builder also supports role-specific agents — for example, one designed to answer HR policy questions and another for sales pipeline analysis.
Plug-and-play MCP support: Through Model Context Protocol (MCP), organizations can easily add external tools to their custom agents without complex integration work. This makes it possible to expand capabilities quickly, such as linking a CRM system or analytics platform into the AI Companion’s context.
Agent2Agent (A2A) collaboration: Beginning in December 2025, Zoom will introduce A2A functionality starting with ServiceNow AI Agents. This means multiple AI systems can coordinate tasks together — for example, Zoom Companion could summarize a meeting and then trigger a ServiceNow Agent workflow to open a support ticket.
Expanded enterprise connectors: New integrations with SharePoint and ServiceNow, coming in September 2025, will allow AI Companion to pull in more enterprise data. This ensures responses to queries are enriched with the latest documents, records, or service updates relevant to a company’s operations.
Together, these features transform AI Companion from a single assistant into a platform for building specialized agents, giving enterprises tools that can adapt to diverse roles, workflows, and industry requirements.
Zoom Workplace Upgrades: Avatars, Translation, and More
Alongside the AI Companion upgrade, Zoom is enhancing the Workplace experience with a wave of features aimed at improving presence, accessibility, and collaboration across different working styles.
AI avatars that can attend meetings for you: Launching in December 2025, these photorealistic avatars mirror a user’s expressions and gestures in real time. For moments when participants aren’t “camera-ready” but still need to appear professional, avatars provide a polished alternative without sacrificing engagement. The feature is designed to help employees maintain presence in client-facing or high-visibility meetings while avoiding video fatigue.
Customizable waiting rooms: Rolling out in October 2025, this update will let hosts share personalized pre-meeting information using Zoom Clips and AI avatars. For example, a host could display a video message with the agenda, instructions, or context for attendees as they wait. This makes waiting rooms more useful and sets expectations before discussions begin.
Real-time voice translation: Expected in December 2025, this feature will allow participants to hear speech in their preferred language during a meeting. By reducing reliance on human interpreters, Zoom aims to lower costs for organizations while enabling smoother collaboration across global teams.
Enhanced video and audio quality: Also in December 2025, meetings will benefit from 60fps high frame rate video, higher bitrate streams, and 4K content sharing. Audio improvements include higher bandwidth for simultaneous HD participants, creating clearer, more lifelike communication in large or detail-intensive sessions.
Zoom for Cisco Rooms and immersive experiences: A Zoom for Cisco Rooms beta program begins in September 2025, giving enterprises flexibility to use Zoom on Cisco hardware. Looking ahead to 2026, Zoom will also offer an immersive “true-to-life” option through HP Dimension with Google Beam, aimed at making hybrid meetings feel more natural and interactive.
For asynchronous and hybrid teams
Zoom Team Chat enhancements: Starting in September 2025, users will be able to access apps directly within Team Chat, making it easier to manage and discover Zoom Apps without leaving the channel. This lays the foundation for future AI-first integrations, including Q&A agents that can be @mentioned and respond with context-aware insights. In addition, users will be able to automatically save 1:1 meeting chats and AI-generated post-meeting summaries into their Team Chat direct messages, ensuring critical information is captured and shared without extra steps.
Collaborative whiteboards: Available in September 2025, AI Companion will be able to automatically generate whiteboards from the flow of a live meeting discussion. Teams won’t need to pause and manually transcribe brainstorming sessions — instead, the AI can capture points in real time and translate them into a visual workspace. Users can also begin with a simple text prompt, and the system will instantly create a structured template tailored to the project (for example, a product roadmap, SWOT analysis, or project timeline). This is designed to accelerate group creativity and reduce the friction of starting from a blank page.
Zoom Hub Knowledge Q&A: Launching in November 2025, this feature will let employees query information across Zoom files and integrated third-party data sources without digging through multiple apps. Rather than manually searching for meeting notes or shared documents, users can ask a natural-language question such as “What were the final budget decisions from last quarter’s strategy meeting?” and receive a context-aware response. By consolidating knowledge retrieval into one conversational interface, the tool is intended to cut down on wasted time and improve project alignment.
Zoom Phone integrations and mobility: By September 2025, Zoom Phone will connect directly with Zoom Docs so that insights from calls — such as client updates, commitments, or follow-up needs — are automatically captured into shared documents. In December 2025, an additional integration with Zoom Tasks will link those call outcomes directly to action items, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks. Together, these updates are designed to transform phone conversations from isolated events into actionable, trackable parts of a workflow.
At the same time, Zoom is introducing reimagined mobility features through cellular companion capabilities, starting with T-Mobile at launch. These enhancements will allow users to access Zoom Phone through their native mobile interface and maintain strong call quality even in low-bandwidth conditions — extending enterprise-grade reliability to workers on the go.
Industry Solutions and Video Management
With organizations creating and storing more video than ever before, Zoom is launching Zoom Video Management, a centralized solution designed to reduce content sprawl and make video assets easier to use across the enterprise.
The platform will consolidate Meetings, Events, Webinars, and Clips into a single hub, providing enterprise-grade analytics, publishing tools, discovery features, and secure access controls. Instead of scattering recordings across different folders or platforms, companies will be able to manage their video library in one place, track performance, and ensure compliance with security policies. For teams already relying heavily on Zoom for content creation, this reduces the need for third-party tools and streamlines workflows.
Educational institutions will see particular benefits. Zoom Video Management integrates directly with popular learning management systems (LMS) such as Canvas, Brightspace, Moodle, and Blackboard. This will make it easier for students and faculty to access lecture recordings, training videos, and project materials from within their existing LMS environments. Added features like AI-powered transcription and translation will expand accessibility, while built-in search and analytics will help learners find and review key segments of recorded content.
For frontline industries such as healthcare, retail, and field services, Zoom is also extending support through its hardware certification program. The first certified devices will be Jabra wireless Bluetooth headsets, available in October 2025. These headsets are designed to provide clear, reliable audio for workers in environments where mobility is critical, while still maintaining enterprise-grade compatibility with Zoom. Over time, Zoom expects to broaden this program with additional certified hardware partners to better serve frontline professionals who need durable, flexible communication tools.
Q&A: Zoom AI Companion 3.0
Q: What is Zoom AI Companion 3.0?
A: It’s the latest version of Zoom’s workplace AI assistant, adding agentic AI skills, lifelike avatars that can attend meetings, and custom AI agents.
Q: What new features stand out?
A: Cross-platform note-taking, Zoomie Group Assistant, AI avatars that can attend meetings for you, and real-time translation are among the most notable.
Q: How does the Custom AI Companion add-on work?
A: It allows organizations to create tailored AI agents in Zoom AI Studio with integrations into systems like ServiceNow and SharePoint.
Q: When are these features available?
A: Most launch September 17, 2025, with additional features rolling out from October–December 2025 and into 2026.
Q: Why does this matter for enterprises?
A: The updates expand workflow automation, collaboration, and engagement, making Zoom Workplace more competitive in the enterprise AI space.
What This Means: A New Era of AI-First Collaboration
The launch of Zoom AI Companion 3.0 marks one of the platform’s most significant updates to date. By extending AI beyond meetings into chat, whiteboards, phone calls, and content management, Zoom is positioning itself not just as a video conferencing tool, but as a full collaboration ecosystem.
For users, this means day-to-day work will feel more connected and less fragmented. Instead of relying on third-party services for tasks like AI avatars, note-taking, or knowledge retrieval, those capabilities are now built directly into Zoom Workplace. The result is a single environment where scheduling, collaboration, documentation, and even hardware integration are guided by agentic AI.
For enterprises, the shift promises time savings, consistency, and scalability. Whether it’s a frontline worker using certified hardware, a teacher managing lecture videos, or a global team relying on real-time translation, the update consolidates tools that were once scattered across multiple vendors.
The bigger story is how quickly AI companions are moving from assistants to collaborators. With 3.0, Zoom has signaled that the future of work isn’t just about meetings — it’s about seamless collaboration across every part of the workflow.
Editor’s Note: This article was created by Alicia Shapiro, CMO of AiNews.com, with writing, image, and idea-generation support from ChatGPT, an AI assistant. However, the final perspective and editorial choices are solely Alicia Shapiro’s. Special thanks to ChatGPT for assistance with research and editorial support in crafting this article.