What if your classroom notes could write themselves? Or if a virtual assistant could answer students’ questions before they even emailed you? These are no longer ‘what ifs’, they are some of the ways AI is quietly transforming education through platforms like Zoom. This was reiterated recently in a webinar hosted by Zoom in July this year, titled ‘Transform Education with AI: Live Demo + Expert Insights‘. As educators, we know our time is often stretched thin between teaching, grading, and administration. What struck us in the webinar is how AI could become less of a buzzword and more of a helping hand, quietly lifting some of these burdens so we can focus on what matters most: connecting with our students.

Practical AI Insights from Zoom’s Experts

Ted Brodheim, Zoom’s CIO Advisor for Education believes that the future of education rests upon meaningful human connections between students, faculty, staff and communities and that AI primarily serves to power these connections. Zoom has kept the momentum going over the years, at pace with growing developments and demands from its audience. In its early beginnings in 2011, it functioned mainly as an online platform for meetings, webinars and team chats, and over the years grew its offerings to include the Zoom phone, whiteboard and events. AI integration began in 2022-2023 with the virtual agent, AI Companion and AI Expert Assist, and Zoom is rolling out AI Agents & Skills this year.

Zoom’s global education marketing and strategy lead, Johann Zimmern, drew our attention to a key point of reflection that we sometimes think about AI just as ChatGPT or Gemini and tech space information. In actual fact, AI is at work in everything we do. For instance, AI works in the background image so that one would look presentable for their presentation. Concurrently, it works on the sound reduction, so that any background noise is minimised or is not captured. These may sound like little things, but they have a huge impact on a student’s overall online learning experience – think of how the slightest background noise or blurry screens could pull away their focus from the lesson. He added that AI has flown through all of the efforts that Zoom has taken over the years – now it is going into language, voice and it will continue to make the Zoom experience much more enjoyable for its users. 

Integrating AI in Education: Practical Strategies and Responsible Use

AI is quietly weaving itself into the fabric of classrooms, particularly in the sciences, where AI simulations are helping university students better prepare for bench work. These simulations reduce the need for extensive written preparation, allowing students to engage more directly with practical experiments and feel more confident in the lab. This use of AI enhances learning by giving students hands-on experience in a controlled, virtual environment before they move to physical experimentation.

As AI becomes more integrated into education, concerns about data privacy are also being addressed. For example, Zoom has made a point of not using customer data to train its language models, reassuring users about their privacy. This transparency helps to build trust and demonstrates that AI can be implemented responsibly without compromising user data.

The general perspective on AI in education has shifted from initial hesitation to greater acceptance. Students are already using AI in various educational contexts and AI has gone from being optional to being unavoidable in the learning space, regardless of whether we resist or embrace it. As this technology becomes more embedded, schools and universities are working to establish policies that ensure it’s used ethically and responsibly.

A key concern is training students on the ethical use of AI. While some students may intentionally misuse AI for plagiarism or cheating, others might misuse it unintentionally by not understanding the consequences or how to properly attribute data. To mitigate this, it’s crucial to create an environment where students feel safe to ask questions, clarify doubts, and engage in open discussions about what’s right and wrong. Additionally, AI tools need to be age-appropriate, ensuring that they align with the developmental needs of different student groups.

Zoom for Education Platform

Zoom has steadily expanded its features to better support remote collaboration and communication. Existing tools like breakout rooms, Zoom Phone with built-in privacy protections, and integrated mail and calendar services have made it easier for users to stay connected and organized. In the education space, Zoom has introduced contact center solutions and chatbots designed to assist students more effectively, offering timely support when needed. With the addition of the AI Companion, Zoom continues to enhance its platform by streamlining everyday tasks and improving the overall user experience through smarter, more intuitive AI tools.

1. The Zoom AI Companion in Education

1. Lecture / Class Summaries
   • Automatically generates summaries of lectures for teachers and students
   • Summaries include key points, action items, and often supporting material. Teachers can use this material for creating assignments while students can use it for study/revision. 
2. Study Materials & Assignments Generation
   • From lecture content, the AI Companion helps generate study guides
   • Can help educators prepare quizzes (with answer keys) etc
3. Live Notes / In-Class Engagement Tools
   • Live notes during class: students (and educators) can see live transcripts, highlight, comment, react to content in real time
   • For in-person classes too: voice recorder features that transcribe & summarise spontaneous discussions
4. Side-panel / Real-time Assistance
   • During meetings / lectures, a side panel gives context: you can ask questions like “What topics were covered?” or follow up on things you missed
   • Can fetch up-to-date info from chats, previous meetings, docs etc. to help with prep or clarifications
5. Task & Action Item Tracking
   • After lectures, action items (e.g. assignments, follow-ups) can be automatically identified. Teachers or students can use these to keep track of work.
   • Zoom Tasks: a centralised tab where tasks from meetings, chats, docs are aggregated
6. Customisation & Personalisation
   • Educators / institutions can create custom meeting summary templates, glossaries, knowledge collections etc. so the output is aligned with their curriculum / domain language
   • Custom avatars for Clips: educators can produce video clips with avatars, presumably to help create instructional or supplementary content efficiently
7. Integration & Data-Context
   • It pulls relevant info not just from the live meeting, but from chats, documents, whiteboards, files, sometimes third-party apps (if permissions allow) to give richer context
   • For education, there is support for Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI), so class management / LMS systems can access summaries etc
8. Hardware & Tools Tailored for Education
   • Document cameras added to certified hardware portfolio for education: helps in showing documents/objects in class/virtual classroom
   • Zoom Whiteboard enhancements like templates, image generation, etc

Some of these features would be available under the paid plan or as custom add-ons. In line with Zoom’s commitment to protecting privacy and permissions, users typically have control over the sharing of transcripts, connecting third-party data, etc.

1. Session Demo – Creating a Zoom Virtual Agent Voice Bot 

One of the tools that was introduced during the demonstration showed us how to create a Zoom Virtual Agent Voice Bot that is set up to support the administration processes within a university. The purpose of this tool is to have it assist students with questions that they have regarding the admissions process, including things such as application, acceptance and course registration. It is designed to keep the tone of the bot friendly and professional, but at the same time uses language that prospective students will be comfortable with. The bot will also only answer questions based on the information that is linked to the database provided to it. 

If a student uses the bot to enquire about their status of acceptance, the bot is configured to congratulate the student and let them know that they have been accepted into the course. However, if the bot is unable to answer the student’s question, it will automatically connect them to speak to an agent. 

Further customisation of this tool is also possible. Some of the things that can be customised to make the experience more seamless and pleasant will include things like having personalised greetings, getting the bot to confirm the pronunciation of names and spellings of a student’s name.

Currently, the English mode is available and they are planning to release this feature in other languages in time to come. You are even able to select from different voices to create your preferred persona for this tool. After modifying these settings, you can choose to link the database and include Zoom documents that may contain FAQs that will help the bot in assisting the student with their enquiries. This way, the bot is helpful in reducing the staff’s load because it will be able to take over and filter the first layer of communication by helping to answer basic questions a new student might have when they first enrol. If the question requires a more detailed answer, the bot will then be able to transfer the call to a human agent to assist them. In addition to that, the bot will share the context with the human agent so that the student will not need to repeat themselves or revisit questions that have already been covered by the bot in their previous conversations. 

Apart from using it as a virtual agent voice bot, there are also other ways of exploring the use of it in driving student engagement and building relationships within the class. Some of the classes interweave virtual learning and may require them to participate by answering discussion questions online. Using the bot, teachers can create a chatroom to elicit responses from the students and then use the feature of AI to track and list down the most active contributors within the chatroom and cite an example of their contribution. This helps the teacher to check for participation without spending too much time going through the process. Lastly, the teacher can also use AI to customize a message and add a personal touch to thank them for their contribution which helps to build a rapport with the students.

Aside from classroom usage, you can consider making use of AI to refine tedious processes. One can look at having it collect and deploy information. This will help open up many more channels to complete a task. You can make use of AI to go through websites and have it pull information or work on a policy or complete a procedural manual with the help of it. In all, AI creates an opportunity to learn to do things in a non-traditional manner that may help with efficiency. Overall, AI contributes in such a way that helps to deliver a more premium experience for the users.

Looking Ahead: The Future of Zoom with AI

Zoom AI in the future is focused on deeply integrating artificial intelligence throughout the platform to enhance user experiences, automate tasks, and personalise interactions, especially in education and collaboration settings.

• AI will increasingly assist faculty by providing post-class analytics and coaching
• It will further customise learning prompts and automate various tasks in meetings and educational workflows
• Institutions aiming to utilize Zoom’s custom AI features will require additional licenses, particularly for users handling proprietary or institution-specific data
• Innovations like Zoom Docs and improved whiteboard integrations will ensure that all content – from meetings to supplementary materials remains accessible, cohesive and interactive for both students and teachers
• Zoom’s AI vision aims to enhance collaboration, teaching and learning, making it more interactive and personalized

This approach goes beyond current ChatGPT-style question-answer systems, offering a deeply contextual, multi-modal, agentic experience.

In all, the session reinforced to us that AI on Zoom isn’t about replacing teachers or overcomplicating learning. It’s about taking away some of the busy work, opening new doors for creativity and making space for the human connections that matter most in education. Another takeaway for us from the webinar is that we don’t have to adopt everything at once. Even starting small, trying out features like lecture summaries or live notes, can make a meaningful difference for both teachers and students. We can then scale up our adoption of AI as we grow more confident and realise there are other needs or challenges that can be addressed by this technology. 

The future of AI in education won’t be written by algorithms alone; it will be shaped by the choices we make as educators. Tools such as Zoom’s AI Companion show us that much like its name, technology can be a partner and not a replacement. What excites us most is not the automation itself, but the freedom it creates – freedom for teachers to focus on teaching, and freedom for students to engage more deeply with learning. If we approach AI with openness and responsibility, it has the potential to transform not just how we teach, but how we imagine education itself.