In the not-so-distant future, you won’t attend Zoom meetings–your digital clone will. Or at least, that’s the dream of Zoom’s CEO Eric Yuan, who recently outlined his vision of a world where AI clones attend your meetings while you focus on “real work.”
“Think about it: What if AI could free up a whole day every week?” he said during his presentation at Zoom's annual Zoomtopia conference yesterday, comparing the rise of AI to the invention of the assembly line. “(Zoom AI) could attend meetings or even assist in contract negotiations. All of us would customize our digital assistant, which again, over time, could evolve into this concept of a digital tool.”
To get there, Zoom is first taking baby robot steps.
Yesterday, it described how the company is using AI to “revolutionize” the way we work.
“This is more than an evolution; it’s a complete overhaul of how we get things done in the digital age,” Yuan said.
To that end, the company introduced AI Companion 2.0, which is supposed to evolve into user-customizable avatars next year. These new digital personas will be fully animated and skinned based on your photo; they will be able to nod, gesture, and lip-sync to whatever users provide as script or prompt.
The digital likeness aims to help workers save time and increase efficiency, especially in remote work settings.
AI clones will rely on Zoom Clips, a tool that allows users to create video clips with a script, providing an AI-generated avatar to convey messages. It’s not like you’ll have a Zoom meeting with a bunch of AIs talking to each other. Instead, the idea is that users can prompt their avatars to give a perfect presentation or deliver a lifelike video message so they can go to the doctor, hang out at the beach, or whatever.
“Now, with the enhanced capabilities in AI Companion 2.0, users can get more done and focus on what’s most important," Smita Hashim, Zoom's chief product officer, said in the company’s official post.
She pitched the avatars as a time-saving miracle for the chronically camera-shy.
Zoom’s AI companion suite will offer real-time suggestions and insights, integration with third-party apps, and Retrieval Augmented Generation (being able to pull information from texts using contextual AI instead of simply keyword search). The suite will also be able to drum up email thread analysis and integration with state-of-the-art models like Claude, ChatGPT, or Perplexity—for $12 a month.
Zoom’s push for AI avatars comes at a time when other companies are also advancing in the digital clone space. Microsoft released a similar technology back in 2023 without making a lot of noise. Apple also has a similar feature for users of its Apple Vision Pro VR headsets. Meanwhile, a startup called Tavus is already playing in the virtual persona sandbox, while another, Colossyan, offers AI cloning services.
If this feels a lot like back to the future, it is. Remember the days when the metaverse was a trillion-dollar idea that every tech company wanted to exploit?
Maybe that’s where the 2.0 comes in.
While these avatars promise improved productivity, they also raise concerns over potential misuse, particularly now that AI can generate highly convincing replicas.
“We will continue to review and add safeguards as needed in the future,” Hashim said, noting that the custom avatar feature will come with advanced authentication and watermarking to deter potential misuse. We can’t wait to see how our human officemates put it through the gauntlet!
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair and Josh Quittner