Zoom revamps its AI arsenal with AI Companion and new chatbot features

Zoom is trying to clean up its reputation with a fresh coat of paint and some new bots.

The videoconferencing giant announced a major rebranding of its generative AI suite. The in-meeting helper previously known as Zoom IQ is now called AI Companion, while its sales assistant, Zoom IQ for Sales, has been redubbed Zoom Revenue Accelerator.

The makeover follows a brutal public relations headache. Zoom recently faced massive backlash over terms of service changes that suggested it could use customer call videos to train its AI. The Software Freedom Conservancy even urged open-source developers to abandon the app entirely. Zoom quickly amended its terms in August to promise customer communications would stay out of training sets, but the branding had already taken a hit.

A chatbot in the side panel

Under the hood, AI Companion relies on the same hybrid stack as before, combining Zoom's internal models with third-party systems from Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

The scope, however, is much wider. By spring 2024, Zoom will add a conversational interface that looks and feels like ChatGPT in a side panel. Users will be able to query the assistant about ongoing projects, asking it to pull context across past meetings, chats, whiteboards, emails, and third-party documents.

During live calls, the bot can catch you up if you join late, file support tickets, and draft follow-up notes. Starting next spring, it will even offer real-time feedback on your speaking pace and presentation habits. Zoom made sure to mention that administrators can turn this coaching feature off if it feels too intrusive.

Meanwhile, Revenue Accelerator is distancing itself from past controversies. After more than two dozen rights groups called out its earlier sentiment analysis features for being inaccurate and risky, Zoom shifted the tool toward standard sales workflows. The rebranded version now features a virtual coach to roleplay sales pitches, rule-based alerts for stalled deals, and monthly reports tracking mentions of rivals.

Why it matters

For paying teams, the assistant handles the busywork that makes remote meetings exhausting. Catching up on missed context without interrupting a speaker or generating automatic summaries across notes and chats delivers immediate utility. The catch is that free users will not get access to these tools.

For Zoom, the overhaul is about survival in a brutal post-lockdown market. The company posted its first quarterly loss since 2018 at the end of fiscal 2023, losing 108 million dollars, and cut 15% of its workforce back in February. While it slightly bumped its full-year revenue projection to around 4.48 billion dollars, competition from Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex is not letting up.

We think dropping flawed gimmicks like sentiment analysis in favor of practical automation was the only sensible move. Hooking into multiple model providers also keeps Zoom nimble instead of burning capital trying to match frontier labs.

Still, skepticism runs deep. Convincing enterprise IT departments to let an AI parse meetings, chats, and internal files right after a major terms-of-service uproar will be an uphill climb. Rebranding is easy, but winning back organizational trust is going to take a lot longer.