Zoom AI Companion: Summarizing Meetings Automatically

Missing a meeting used to mean hunting down a colleague for their notes or sitting through an hour-long recording just to find the five minutes relevant to you. With the introduction of the Zoom AI Companion, those days are largely over. This built-in tool uses generative AI to analyze discussions in real-time, providing concise summaries and actionable insights without the need for third-party plugins.

This guide explains exactly how the Zoom AI Companion works, how to enable it, and how to use it to catch up on discussions you missed or simply want to revisit.

What is Zoom AI Companion?

Zoom AI Companion is a generative AI assistant integrated directly into the Zoom platform. Unlike Microsoft 365 Copilot, which often requires an additional hefty monthly fee per user, Zoom has included AI Companion at no additional cost for customers with eligible paid accounts. This includes the Pro, Business, Business Plus, and Enterprise plans.

The tool focuses on productivity across the entire Zoom ecosystem, but its most popular feature is Meeting Summary. This function creates a comprehensive recap of a video call, organizes it by topic, and highlights action items. Perhaps most importantly, it can do this without recording the meeting. This is a major privacy benefit for teams who want a written record but do not feel comfortable having their audio and video stored permanently in the cloud.

Key Features for Catching Up

If you are double-booked or simply join a meeting ten minutes late, the AI Companion offers specific features to bring you up to speed immediately.

1. The Meeting Summary with Next Steps

When enabled, the AI Companion listens to the conversation and generates a structured summary. Once the meeting ends, the host receives an email containing:

  • Quick Recap: A brief paragraph overview of the main intent of the meeting.
  • Detailed Summary: A breakdown of the discussion organized by topic or “smart chapters.”
  • Next Steps: A bulleted list of assigned tasks, deadlines, and action items detected during the call.

You can choose to automatically share this summary with all attendees via email or Team Chat, ensuring everyone has the same set of notes.

2. In-Meeting “Ask AI Companion”

This is the specific feature that helps you catch up on a meeting while it is still happening. If you join a meeting late, you do not need to interrupt the speaker to ask what you missed.

You can open the AI Companion side panel and type natural language questions, such as:

  • “What topics have been discussed so far?”
  • “Was my name mentioned?”
  • “What decisions were made regarding the project budget?”

The AI processes the temporary transcript of the meeting up to that point and gives you a private answer. This allows you to jump into the conversation seamlessly.

How to Enable Meeting Summaries

The AI Companion is not turned on by default for privacy reasons. You must enable it in your web portal before your meeting starts.

Step 1: Access Account Settings

Log in to the Zoom web portal (zoom.us/signin). If you are an individual user, go to Settings. If you are an administrator managing an organization, go to Account Management > Account Settings.

Step 2: Locate the AI Companion Tab

In the settings menu, look for the tab labeled AI Companion. This is a centralized hub for all AI controls.

Step 3: Toggle Features

Find the setting for Meeting Summary with AI Companion and switch the toggle to ON (blue). You will see additional configuration options here:

  • Auto-start: You can choose to have the summary start automatically for every meeting you host.
  • Share settings: You can dictate who receives the summary (only the host, the host and invitees, or all users in your organization).

Using AI Companion During a Live Call

Once you have enabled the settings in the web portal, using the tool is straightforward.

  1. Start your meeting. Look at your bottom control toolbar. You will see a new icon that looks like a sparkle, labeled AI Companion.
  2. Click the icon. A menu will appear. Select Start Summary.
  3. Notification. All participants in the meeting will see a notification banner stating that “AI Companion is on.” This ensures transparency so everyone knows the discussion is being processed, even if it is not being recorded.
  4. Stop or Pause. As the host, you can click the icon again to stop the summary if the discussion turns to sensitive topics that should not be documented.

Privacy and Data Security

A common concern with AI tools is data usage. Zoom has updated its terms of service to address this explicitly. Zoom states that they do not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, or other communications to train their artificial intelligence models (including third-party models).

The specific content of your meeting is processed to generate the summary and then discarded from the AI processing environment. The final summary is stored in your account, but the raw data used to create it is not used for machine learning purposes by Zoom.

Smart Recording vs. Meeting Summary

It is important to distinguish between “Smart Recording” and “Meeting Summary.”

  • Meeting Summary: Does not create a video or audio file. It produces text only. It is lightweight and great for quick reading.
  • Smart Recording: This requires you to record the meeting to the Cloud. The AI analyzes the recording to create “Smart Chapters,” highlight reels, and a transcript.

If you only need notes, use Meeting Summary. If you need a replayable video asset, use Smart Recording. Both features use the same underlying AI technology to identify key moments.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Zoom AI Companion available on the free Basic plan? No. At this time, AI Companion features are only available to customers with paid subscriptions (Pro, Business, Education, and Enterprise).

Does the AI Companion support languages other than English? Yes. Zoom has expanded support to over 30 languages. You can set the language for the meeting summary in the in-meeting controls to ensure accuracy if the meeting is conducted in Spanish, French, German, or Japanese, among others.

Can I edit the summary before sending it to my boss? Yes. The summary is generated and sent to the host first (depending on your settings). You can review the summary in the Zoom web portal or the Zoom desktop client, edit any inaccuracies, and then manually share it with stakeholders.

What happens if I forget to turn it on at the start of the meeting? If you turn on the summary halfway through the meeting, the AI can only summarize from that point forward. It cannot retroactively summarize the first half of the meeting if the tool was inactive. However, if you have “Ask AI Companion” enabled, it may have access to the temporary transcript of the full session depending on your specific admin configuration.