Zoom just fired back at the army of AI meeting startups with a massive product blitz at Zoomtopia. The video platform unveiled an upgraded AI companion that works across Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, photorealistic avatars that can attend meetings for you, and intelligent meeting scheduling - directly challenging specialized tools like Otter and Fireflies that have been eating into its territory.
Zoom isn't waiting around while AI-powered meeting tools chip away at its dominance. At its Zoomtopia conference Wednesday, the company unleashed a comprehensive AI offensive designed to reclaim ground lost to specialized startups and keep enterprise customers from jumping ship.
The centerpiece is Zoom's upgraded AI companion, which now breaks free from the company's own platform to work with Microsoft Teams and Google Meet. It's a significant strategic shift for a company that's historically kept users locked into its ecosystem. The AI can also take notes during in-person meetings, directly competing with cross-application notetakers like Read AI, Otter, Fireflies, Granola, and Circleback that have made serious inroads in the market.
"The company has long offered an AI bot that can record and transcribe Zoom meetings. However, cross-application meeting notetakers... have made great progress," according to TechCrunch's coverage. Zoom's response shows how quickly the competitive landscape has shifted.
Borrowing directly from Granola's playbook, Zoom now lets users jot down their own notes during meetings, then uses AI to expand and structure them later. It's adding cross-platform search functionality so users can retrieve information from across Google and Microsoft platforms without leaving Zoom's interface.
The calendar intelligence features represent another direct assault on specialized tools. Zoom's AI companion can now find time slots that work for all attendees and suggest meetings you can skip through a "free up my time" request - similar to what calendar optimization tool Clockwise launched last year to resolve meeting conflicts.
