Artificial intelligence (AI) assistants are gate-crashing boardrooms and Zoom calls, offering to streamline corporate America while threatening to short-circuit human collaboration in the workplace.
Zoom’s new AI assistant exemplifies a wave of AI tools poised to transform business operations, potentially redefining how companies communicate, collaborate, and manage workflows across industries and time zones.
The tool, AI Companion 2.0, aims to solve scheduling conflicts and time zone issues for global teams. However, it also raises questions about human interaction in business and potential disparities between companies that adopt the technology and those that don’t.
“Zoom’s AI avatars could be a real game-changer for productivity,” Michael Walker, CMO at the AI company SmythOS, told PYMNTS. “Imagine having an AI that can attend routine meetings, take notes, and even send follow-up emails — all while you focus on more important tasks. It’s like having an extra team member always on top of things.”
AI Companion 2.0 offers features like a side panel across Zoom Workplace, context from various data sources, task generation from meeting summaries, and web search capabilities. It can summarize unread messages in Team Chat channels and recap email threads in Zoom Mail.
The technology extends beyond just boosting efficiency. It could fundamentally alter how companies approach remote work and team dynamics.
“AI avatars have the promise to extend communication, since employees will be able to attend video meetings or respond to trivial messages although unable to be there or speak physically,” Cache Merrill, founder of Zibtek, told PYMNTS.
“In industries such as IT, consulting and global commerce, where an individual is likely to find colleagues in different time zones and working hours, AI avatars will be able to fill in the gaps.”
Merrill added, “Companies may be less inclined to rely on real-time communication and more inclined to use communication with the help of AI. This can result in ‘asynchronous’ working, whereby employees depend on AI for low-level or touch activities so that they concentrate on high-level or hit tasks.”
Introducing AI avatars like the one from Zoom in business communication raises security issues. “Businesses will have to think about how they store, process, and secure sensitive information that is shared during AI-driven meetings,” Merrill said. He added that impersonation of avatars or unauthorized use of recorded data could pose risks.
Walker said, “With AI avatars attending meetings and handling communication, businesses need to ensure that sensitive data isn’t being improperly recorded or stored.”
Zoom has announced a custom add-on for AI Companion, priced at $12 per user per month. This add-on allows organizations to tailor the AI experience to their specific needs, including integrations with third-party apps like Atlassian, Glean, Workday, and Zendesk.
The company is also introducing features like custom avatars for Zoom Clips, which use AI-generated avatars to create video clips with transcripts. Built-in safeguards aim to protect against misuse for deepfake creation.
Notable features of AI Companion 2.0 include a side panel accessible across Zoom Workplace for prompt suggestions and answer generation, expanded context from data across Zoom Workplace and connected services, automatic generation of next steps from meeting summaries, summarization of unread messages within Zoom Team Chat channels, real-time web search capabilities, and content generation and document summarization features.
Some experts are concerned about the impact of AI avatar technology on workplace culture and human interaction. Merrill cautioned, “This may raise some issues with respect to human touch in meetings as it will be harder to do so when there are digital-only connections and team dynamics in virtual environments.”
Companies adopting AI Companion will need to balance increased productivity and maintaining meaningful human collaboration. Walker believes the impact will be particularly significant in time-sensitive industries: “In industries where time is money, like tech, consulting and finance, this could mean faster decision-making, fewer missed details, and less meeting fatigue.”
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