Zoom: Expanding Zoom Contact Center with “Agentic” AI and Everywhere Productivity
Zoom came to Enterprise Connect with a massive bundle of updates – over 45 new innovations across its platform – underscoring its commitment to AI-driven collaboration and customer experience.
Announcements – Zoom came to Enterprise Connect with a massive bundle of updates – over 45 new innovations across its platform – underscoring its commitment to AI-driven collaboration and customer experience. Focusing on CCaaS and AI highlights:
Zoom AI Companion Gets “Truly Agentic”: Zoom’s AI Companion (formerly Zoom IQ) was expanded with new agentic AI skills and agents across the entire Zoom suitenews.zoom.com. “Agentic” in Zoom’s terms means the AI can use reasoning and memory to not just assist but take actions on behalf of usersnews.zoom.com. For example, AI Companion can now help schedule meetings based on participants’ calendars, generate video clips from recordings automatically, and draft content in Zoom Docs with greater autonomycrn.comcrn.com. These aren’t contact-center specific, but indicate Zoom’s broad AI push to handle routine tasks. Zoom’s CPO Smita Hashim framed it as AI Companion evolving from a personal assistant to being “truly agentic,” executing complex tasks to help users get more donenews.zoom.com.
Zoom Contact Center Enhancements: On the customer experience side, Zoom announced next-gen upgrades to its Zoom Virtual Agent (the chatbot it gained from the Solvvy acquisition) and introduced Zoom Virtual Agent for Voice, bringing conversational AI to voice callscrn.comnews.zoom.com. This means Zoom Contact Center now has a voicebot capability (in addition to chat) for self-service – an important catch-up feature to compete with others. They also rolled out AI-based intent routing, which uses AI to understand a customer’s request and route it to the right agent or resource without relying purely on IVR menuscrn.com. Another notable addition is Advanced Quality Management for Zoom Contact Centernews.zoom.com, presumably using AI to analyze interactions and assist supervisors with quality scoring. These CX enhancements aim to make Zoom Contact Center more intelligent and efficient: customers get faster resolution through AI deflection and accurate routing, and supervisors get better oversight tools.
45+ Innovations, Unified Platform: Zoom’s plethora of announcements also included AI features in Zoom Meetings, Team Chat, Phone, Email (yes, Zoom now has email/calendar in beta), and Whiteboard. Notably, Zoom Docs (a new collaboration document product) got AI writing assistance, and Zoom Team Chat can summarize long chat threads. While these are outside CCaaS, they feed into Zoom’s strategy of a unified communications + CX platform. For instance, an agent working via Zoom Contact Center could use Zoom Team Chat’s AI to quickly summarize an internal discussion or use Zoom Docs AI to draft a knowledge base article. Zoom is clearly positioning itself as an all-in-one platform for work, with AI embedded at every level to boost productivity and service.
Strategic Direction – Zoom’s strategy is about convergence of collaboration and customer service, powered by AI as the great enabler. They recognize that many mid-market enterprises prefer fewer platforms, so having the contact center integrated with the same app employees use for video meetings and chat is a selling point. The innovations at EC2025 show Zoom executing on two fronts: employee productivity (meeting summaries, email drafting, etc.) and customer experience (virtual agents, AI routing, quality management). The common thread is Zoom’s concept of agentic AI Companion that can orchestrate tasks across different appsnews.zoom.com. Interestingly, Zoom outlined “four skills” of agentic AI: reasoning, memory, task action, and orchestrationbcstrategies.com (citing from an analyst’s discussion of Zoom’s definition). In practice, Zoom is leveraging its AI (some of which likely comes from OpenAI models) to create a consistent assistant that knows your context whether you’re in a Zoom Meeting or handling a support call.
For Zoom Contact Center specifically, the strategy seems to be rapidly closing feature gaps and differentiating on ease-of-use. Launched in 2022, Zoom Contact Center initially targeted Zoom’s existing video customers needing a simple contact center. Now in 2025, by adding voice IVR bots, AI routing, and quality management, Zoom is signaling that its CCaaS is becoming more “enterprise-ready”. Zoom also emphasizes integration within Zoom’s One platform – e.g., using Zoom’s telephony (Zoom Phone) for the contact center, or having an agent seamlessly start a Zoom Meeting with a customer if needed. And because AI Companion spans all these, Zoom can do things like automatically log meeting outcomes into the contact center or vice versa. Strategically, Zoom is also likely appealing to cost-sensitive buyers: many of these AI features (like AI Companion) have been included in existing licenses so far, and bundling multiple capabilities could offer a better TCO than piecemeal solutions.
Analysis – Zoom’s flurry of AI announcements shows impressive momentum, but enterprise buyers should scrutinize the depth and maturity of these features. On paper, Zoom Contact Center now checks many boxes: IVR with conversational AI, chatbot and voicebot, intelligent routing, workforce optimization (Quality Management), and analytics. The question is how these perform at scale. For instance, Zoom Virtual Agent (chat) had been a strong offering via Solvvy; extending it to voice is new – likely it’s functional but it may not have the proven nuance of, say, Google Dialogflow or Amazon Lex in complex speech recognition. Enterprises should pilot the Zoom voice virtual agent on a subset of calls to evaluate recognition accuracy and integration ease with backend systems. The AI intent routing sounds great (fewer phone menu presses), but it will only be as good as the underlying language model. If a customer rambles, will Zoom’s AI reliably categorize the intent? This will need testing, and likely some training with your specific customer utterances.
That said, Zoom has a knack for user-friendly design. Setting up an intent routing flow in Zoom might be simpler through a nice UI compared to older IVR design interfaces. The Advanced QM with AI could also be a boon for supervisors – presumably it auto-scores calls or flags coaching moments, similar to what others (NICE, Genesys) have done. We’ll need details, but if it’s integrated into the Zoom admin portal, it can benefit resource-strapped QA teams without deploying a separate analytics product.
From a buyer perspective, Zoom’s value proposition is a unified environment: If you already use Zoom for meetings, phones, and chat, adding the contact center is frictionless. Agents and supervisors operate in a familiar UI. The AI Companion working across the platform means an agent could use the same AI to summarize a support call (in Contact Center) and to summarize an internal meeting (in Zoom Meetings). Over time, one could imagine Zoom’s AI sharing context: e.g., knowing from sales meetings what commitments were made to a customer and assisting the support agent with that info. That synergy is powerful, if Zoom can execute on it.
One area of skepticism is “45 new AI innovations” – that’s a lot to digest, and not all will be fully polished at launch. Zoom’s rapid development can sometimes mean features roll out in beta. Enterprise buyers should identify which of those innovations matter most to them and probe Zoom for specifics. For example, Zoom announced “custom AI agent creation”news.zoom.com – presumably allowing organizations to create their own AI personas or workflows. How easy is that to actually use? Is it like Talkdesk’s one-prompt agent (perhaps not yet), or does it require some coding? Details will determine the real-world impact.
Zoom also has been notably including AI features at no additional cost (at least through 2023). If that continues, it could mean Zoom Contact Center offers a lot of AI functionality bundled in its per-seat price, potentially undercutting others who charge add-ons. However, we should watch if Zoom introduces new tiers or usage fees as these capabilities mature. For now, Zoom’s aggressive addition of features is good for customers, but some might find it a bit overwhelming – ensuring your team can actually adopt and make use of these tools is key. A cool AI feature unused is no ROI at all.
In summary, Zoom is rapidly iterating to become an AI-infused CCaaS contender that appeals to those who want a single platform for all communications. For mid-market buyers, Zoom Contact Center with AI could deliver quick wins (easy deployment, agents can handle multiple channels in one app, AI assisting along the way). For larger enterprises, Zoom still has to prove it can handle very large scale operations and complex integrations (e.g., high-volume call centers, sophisticated CRM workflows). The signs are positive – Zoom has strong engineering and a track record of scaling video for the world – but contact centers have unique demands. The prudent approach is to conduct proofs-of-concept: try out Zoom’s voice bot on a known call type, use AI Companion in a pilot group for meeting and call summaries, and measure results (deflection rate, agent satisfaction, etc.). Many will find Zoom’s innovations do deliver value, but some may discover they need more customization than Zoom allows as a newer CC platform.
Ultimately, Zoom’s EC2025 showing demonstrates it’s not resting on its pandemic-era laurels. It’s all-in on AI to transform both how your employees work and how you serve your customers. The benefit for buyers is a steady stream of new capabilities – just be prepared to sift through which ones are truly production-ready for your needs versus which are experimental. Zoom’s vision of “agentic AI everywhere” is inspiring, but, as with others, it will take careful implementation to turn that into tangible improvements in customer experience.