Zoom is making its AI avatars available to users this month, marking a significant step toward its vision of a virtual office. The photorealistic digital representatives, first previewed last year, are designed to mimic a user's appearance and expressions, functioning in both live meetings and recorded messages. The technology learns from a user's typical on-camera behavior to create a convincing stand-in.

Alongside the avatars, Zoom unveiled a broader push into AI productivity tools. A new suite, including AI-powered Docs, Sheets, and Slides applications, enters preview this spring. These tools can generate drafts, spreadsheets, and presentations using data from meetings and connected services. The company also introduced a feature to build custom AI agents using simple language prompts, which can then be summoned in chat to complete tasks.

Security accompanies the new capabilities. Zoom is integrating deepfake detection technology to flag potential audio or video impersonation during meetings.

The company reports strong adoption of its existing AI, noting that monthly active users for its AI Companion more than tripled in the last quarter of fiscal 2026. This assistant is now arriving on the desktop app and will be added to Workvivo, Zoom's employee communication platform. There, it can connect to external services like Slack, Salesforce, and Gmail to answer questions across different systems.

Zoom faces competition in this space from companies like Canva and newer entrants, all racing to build AI-native office software. In response, Zoom is unifying the design of its AI tools across devices and opening its speech, vision, and language APIs for developers to build on-premise or cloud-based solutions. The updates represent a comprehensive effort to embed AI across the platform, from meeting summaries in chat to a new AI voice translator for meetings.

Source: TechCrunch