Click-clack, click-clack. That’s it. The sound of someone typing meeting notes during a Zoom call is so annoying. Like caffeinated squirrels, sometimes people don’t realize they’re typing on a keyboard. Still, someone has to jot down to-dos and reminders.
However, that “someone” doesn’t have to be a human being. Released last fall, Zoom’s new AI Companion feature—included with all paid Zoom subscriptions—is like having an administrative assistant on every call. The bot can summarize a meeting, create action items, and even tell you who spoke the most.
AI Companion uses large language models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, but it also trained itself by listening to thousands of Zoom employee meetings, according to Smita Hashim, Zoom’s chief product officer. (“For confidentiality, we do not use any actual conversations from our customers for any training purposes,” she says.)
While AI Companion is powerful, it’s not always obvious what you can do during a call or how the bot saves you time. I decided to run several meetings and put Zoom’s AI assistant through a series of tests. I’ll explain how to achieve these same results and provide best practice guidelines for getting started. Plus, I’ll cover what AI Companion can’t quite do:still.
Summarize a meeting
During a meeting, you can access AI Companion by clicking the icon below the main video window (it looks like a sparkly magic wand). Zoom offers some built-in prompts to help you get started, such as “Summarize the meeting,” which lists detailed bullet points based on what’s been discussed so far. AI Companion works as a human manager during meetings—you can have the bot create a whiteboard of ideas based on the real-time conversation as a way to visualize the discussion.
In my testing, it became clear that the feature works best when people are clear and intentional during the Zoom call. If you stick to a meeting plan, covering the most important topics succinctly, the summary is really helpful. In a call talking about designing a new website, the summary mentioned doing the design work, building a prototype, and testing. However, AI Companion didn’t always pick up on the talking points perfectly. In a meeting to plan a trip abroad with family members, the conversation was too random, and the AI-generated summary I got afterward didn’t really make sense. Bots are teaching us how to live in their world, right? AI Companion works best when your meeting follows a well-defined structure.
Instead of a summary, you can also ask the AI Companion for a “catch up” or ask it “Does anyone have any to-dos?” The bot won’t summarize everything that was said in the meeting, but it will mention some high-level topics and takeaways. On the call about a vacation, the bot told me that my daughter Rachel had just talked about flights. When your mind wanders during a meeting, asking for a catch-up is incredibly helpful. Not that any of us do that in Zoom meetings, of course.
