Zoom Workflow Automation allows you to create automated workflows for common tasks like responding to chat messages, helping your team save time.
7 min read
Updated on February 19, 2025
Published on February 19, 2025
Think of how much time you spend on routine work tasks, like sending a weekly check-in message or duplicating information from one application to another. What may seem like a minute here or there can quickly add up when you have more meaningful projects you’d rather get to. Automated workflows can help you get that valuable time back.
Whether you’re an IT admin juggling help desk requests or an information worker jumping from one application to another, automating simple, common business processes helps you be more efficient — and ultimately, get more done.
Zoom Workflow Automation makes it easy to build powerful workflows that streamline your work across Zoom Workplace and third-party apps. You can also include AI Companion in your workflows, pulling in information and context from the platform to drive action by taking care of those little tasks for you.
We’ll see what that looks like in your workday, but first, here’s an overview of Workflow Automation and how it works.
Workflow automation is the process of using software to automate certain tasks by creating rules or workflows between systems. These rules could be conditional (triggered once certain conditions are met — think “if this, then that”) or sequential (completed in a certain, linear order once a trigger occurs).
With Zoom Workflow Automation, you can create simple workflows with one or two steps, or smarter and more dynamic workflows that combine conditional logic, loops, delays, and switches to guide actions along multiple paths effortlessly. It enables you to automate common workflows in Zoom Workplace and leverage AI Companion capabilities. It also helps reduce context-switching by using third-party integrations or webhook triggers to connect with business apps like Jira, Google, or Microsoft.
Zoom Workflow Automation is easy to use without technical expertise. From the Workflows tab in the Zoom Workplace app, simply start with a pre-built template and customize each step for your specific needs. Or, you can create a workflow from scratch, choosing from a list of available triggers and dragging and dropping steps into the flow as needed.
Read on to see how you can set up workflows to automate common tasks in your workday, tailored to your role.
Meetings can be filled with lots of discussion and ideas, but once the conversation is over, how do you hold yourself and your team accountable to actually follow through? Workflow Automation can automatically create or update a Zoom doc (or a Google or Word doc) from an AI Companion-generated meeting summary after your meeting ends, giving you a dedicated space to revisit discussion topics, expand upon ideas, and tag colleagues with next steps. You can even configure the workflow to automatically share that doc with your teammates in a select chat channel, keeping everyone in the loop.
If you’re in a billion chat channels but only have a handful you need to be directly involved in, create a daily chat briefing to help you get caught up without being overwhelmed with messages. Schedule a workflow to start at a particular time of day, specify which chat channels you want to summarize and the time range (for example, you can pull messages from the last 24 hours), and add the step to summarize these messages with AI Companion. You can choose to have the summarized text appear in a Zoom doc or send it to a colleague or group via Team Chat. After the workflow executes, you can read your chat briefing to get a description of what was talked about, along with links to send you to the original message so you can read or respond.
Chat messages can quickly pile up, especially if you’re in a role where you tend to get the same questions or feedback again and again. You can set up a workflow to assign a customizable response to an emoji reaction.
For instance, if you’re on a product design team, you could set the heart emoji to automatically respond to positive feedback with a thank you message. You could set the glasses emoji to respond to common questions by sharing a link to the product FAQ.
If you’ve ever been waiting for your manager to approve an important document, checking for updates can be both time-consuming and inefficient. Maybe you need to keep switching tabs to see if they commented on the document, check your email for new messages, or peek at your chat channel to see if your message received a thumbs-up reaction.
Create a workflow that allows your manager to easily give their seal of approval and keeps you in the loop. You can do this by assigning emojis to the person you’re seeking approval from (the thumbs-up and thumbs-down emojis, for example). Then, you can create a condition that triggers the next step in the workflow: direct messaging you once the thumbs up is received, or asking for more feedback if the thumbs-down emoji is used.
When something goes wrong, whether it’s an outage or a technical issue, you want your dev ops teams to move quickly to respond. You can set a workflow to trigger from a third-party app to generate a Jira ticket (if you have Jira already) and start a Team Chat channel when an incident report is flagged. Based on the type of incident, your workflow can specify which people to include in the channel, so the right team members get pulled in to resolve the issue.
With the ability to trigger workflows via webhooks and combine conditional and sequential workflows, you can build complex workflows that go far beyond our templates. This allows you to seamlessly integrate with third-party applications to save time and avoid the back-and-forth of creating tickets or documents in different apps. You can customize these workflows to meet the needs of your team and broader organization.
As a manager, you need to keep track of what your team members have on their plates and know the status of projects in progress. Many managers accomplish this with a weekly check-in, where individual contributors share what they’re working on in Zoom Team Chat. But that seemingly routine task can be deceptively time-consuming for you and your direct reports — first, you have to remember to send the reminder message, then your team needs to provide their updates, and you might need to ask follow-up questions to get the level of detail you need.
Automating this weekly check-in using Workflow Automation can help improve everyone’s productivity. You can create a workflow to send a scheduled message at a frequency you choose and add a form to make it easier for your team to respond with the right info. That’s one less item on your weekly to-do list!
You can use AI Companion in a workflow step to summarize a whole week’s worth of chat messages from your team’s channel and add them to a Zoom doc. From there, you can share the doc with your team and ask them which topics they want to add to your weekly team meeting agenda. The summary can help jog their memory about the short conversations they had on a daily basis and see which threads might warrant a deeper discussion.
Approving requests for business travel, time off, and expenses can clutter your email inbox and bog down your day with busy work. Workflow Automation can make that process easy and streamlined so you can review and approve these types of requests directly in Team Chat.
Simply start with the “Time off requests” workflow template, customize it to fit your needs, and post the workflow link in your team’s chat channel (you can even pin it to that channel so everyone can easily find it). When team members need you to approve a request, they can simply fill out the form — it’ll automatically get sent to you for review, and once you sign off, they’ll get a notification back.
New employees joining a hybrid or remote team might have a harder time getting to know their colleagues and feeling a sense of connection. If you have a team-wide or department-wide chat channel, you can set up a workflow to automatically introduce new members. Make it easy by creating a form for them to fill out that includes their key responsibilities, hobbies, and interests.
Once the new hire fills out the form, it’ll trigger a step that sends a message to the team chat channel with a short welcome message and introduction. You can also help new hires feel welcome with an automated message sharing key resources, like a link to the team calendar. As always, you can customize these messages to suit your team culture.
Workflow Automation is now available to paid Zoom users at no additional cost during the free trial period (upgrade your Zoom Workplace app to version 6.3.10 or higher). Admins and account owners, you can bring the benefits of automation to your workforce by enabling Workflow Automation in your admin portal. Check out our support page for more information on how to start automating your workflows.
6 min read
Consolidate business applications and unify communications using Team Chat as your collaboration hub — at no added cost with your Zoom license.
5 min read
See how Zoom Workplace, your AI-powered collaboration platform, can help you be more productive throughout your workday.
10 min read
Get our tips for using Zoom Team Chat to communicate when and how you want, manage complex projects with ease, and automate everyday busywork — all in one place.
