Zoom's New AI Tool Will Tell You What Meetings to Skip

The next time your boss asks you why you skipped a meeting, you could blame it on Zoom. The video conferencing company unveiled a host of new AI upgrades on Wednesday, all aimed at improving its AI to do tasks for you.

Zoom introduced its AI companion two years ago, letting people use it to take notes, transcribe meetings or ask its chatbot follow-up questions after a meeting is over. Now, Zoom is upgrading it to what it calls AI Companion 3.0. The tool will be more agentic, meaning it is built to handle tasks without human oversight. You can expect to see these updates available this November.

The most exciting new feature is called "free up my time." Like the name implies, the AI will suggest ways to lighten your meeting load -- including meetings on your calendar you should skip. It also identifies meeting invitees who could be moved to optional. It can recommend blocking off meeting-free periods in your calendar for dedicated focus time. You'll still need to give final approval before Zoom's AI makes any changes to your calendar. 

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Other AI updates coming this fall include a note-taking feature that can take your manually typed meeting notes and expand upon them using a meeting's insights. You'll also be able to turn meeting slides into short video clips and create new avatars if you don't want to turn your camera on during meetings. A new live translation feature should help users speaking different languages communicate more smoothly in real-time. Businesses can also create custom AI agents via Zoom for an extra $12 per month. All of this comes with a redesigned Zoom Workplace home screen.

This is what the new live translation panel will look like in meetings.

Zoom

Agentic AI is the latest wave of generative AI technology. It builds upon large language models and uses advanced reasoning capabilities and knowledge of your previous actions (called memory) to complete tasks independently. Agentic AI has been popping up in a lot of places online, including our web browsers and individual chatbots like ChatGPT and, possibly soon, DeepSeek. One recent report estimates that a third of all organic search traffic is from AI agents, highlighting the growing role agents are playing in how we interact online.

Many business leaders see agentic AI as a way to automate administrative tasks and aid (or use as a rationale to replace) lower-level employees. While agentic AI and other upgraded AI models are becoming more capable of completing certain tasks, there are a lot of reasons why AI won't be able to wholly replace workers.

For more, check out the best AI chatbots.