As remote work has become the norm, video conferencing platforms like Zoom have transformed the way we meet and connect from a distance. Whether you’re leading a team brainstorming session or catching up with friends, video calls have become second nature for many of us. However, there is always more to learn about Zoom, as the platform continues to evolve with exciting new features and innovative integrations, including powerful artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
Zoom AI Companion is one of many AI features, acting as a virtual assistant that offers meeting transcription, automated note-taking, and meeting summaries. While it is easy to enable the Zoom AI Companion for your workspace or as an individual user, I also provide some expert tips on how to use the Zoom AI Companion to increase productivity and save time.
Meet your new assistant: Introducing Zoom AI Companion
Zoom AI Companion is a generative AI assistant integrated into the platform to help reduce repetitive and time-consuming tasks that many workers encounter on a daily basis. Instead of spending extra time taking meeting notes or crafting polished responses to team chats, the AI Companion is available free of charge for Pro and Business account users.
Although Zoom’s AI Companion was introduced several years ago as Zoom IQ, it continues to evolve as artificial intelligence becomes more prevalent among business owners and individual users. For those familiar with virtual assistants or meeting note-takers, Zoom AI Companion provides similar features, including meeting transcriptions, automatic task creation, and content generation.
Increase productivity and streamline communications by getting started with Zoom’s AI Companion. From real-time meeting summaries and smart recordings to task and email automation, Zoom enables you to get more done in less time, so you can focus on other crucial to-dos.
Bring on the benefits: Learn what Zoom AI Companion can do for you
As an AI assistant, Zoom’s AI Companion offers several benefits in the workplace by providing multiple ways to boost productivity and enhance collaboration and communication with team members. The following list highlights some of the many ways that using Zoom AI Companion could help you:
- Time-saving capabilities: Every day, countless workers find themselves bogged down by repetitive tasks that eat up valuable time. But with the AI Companion, you can start reclaiming your time by delegating tasks to the virtual assistant, allowing you to focus on what truly matters and get more done.
- Enhanced accessibility: Ensuring that every employee has an equal opportunity to participate is crucial in today’s workplace. By incorporating essential accessibility features, such as meeting transcriptions and live captioning, you create a more inclusive environment. The Zoom AI Companion takes this a step further, not only providing these valuable features but also offering personalized support to answer questions.
- Organized documentation: Managing office documentation for regular meetings can often feel like a tedious task. From organizing agenda documents to sifting through meeting recordings and sending action items to team members, it can be overwhelming. But Zoom’s AI Companion not only organizes your recordings but also crafts meeting agendas using customizable templates and keeps track of tasks within your workspace, making your workflow smoother and more efficient.
- Increased productivity: Having an AI Companion that provides virtual assistance in workplace planning helps enhance productivity by efficiently managing essential tasks and tracking quantitative data about meeting productivity, such as length, sentiment, and inclusivity, through the dashboard.
- Streamlined communication: Not only can the Zoom AI Companion help you craft content like emails and chat responses, but it also acts as a smart editor for your communications. By offering a second set of eyes, the AI Companion ensures you always present your best self before sending your next message.
- More equitable division of labor: In many offices, a common issue is fairly assigning repetitive tasks. It’s easy to feel frustrated when one person always takes meeting notes or sends follow-up emails. However, with Zoom AI Companion, these responsibilities can be shared more evenly, promoting teamwork and alleviating individual burdens.
Getting started: How to enable Zoom AI Companion
Depending on the type of Zoom subscription you have, there are different ways to enable Zoom’s AI Companion. While the feature can be turned on in the Zoom account settings, the available features vary depending on your account’s capabilities. For individuals who are the account owners of a Pro or Business account, you can enable Zoom AI Companion in your Settings.
Enable Zoom’s AI Companion in your account settings. (Sources: Zoom)
If you are an individual user accessing Zoom through your workplace, your ability to use the AI Companion feature depends on whether your account administrator grants access. Account Administrators and Owners have the option to enable the Zoom Companion feature in the Account Management settings, specifically under the AI Companion tab.
Once you enable the Zoom AI Companion in your account settings, you can also adjust additional settings that allow you to automate certain features, such as creating and sharing meeting summaries. Before using the AI Companion, it’s essential to consider whether you’d like to automate specific tasks or prefer to decide when and how to use the assistant, ensuring that you uphold standards of data privacy and security within and outside your organization.
Let’s take a tour of the latest AI features
As a generative AI assistant, the Zoom AI Companion offers several features that are particularly useful for business owners and individual users with a paid account. Select the following tabs to explore some of the top features available and learn how to use them.
The simplest use of the AI Companion is acting as a meeting assistant or note-taker within the Zoom platform. Once the feature is enabled, you can choose to record meetings with transcriptions as well as receive meeting notes and summaries. Even before a meeting ends, you can ask the AI Companion for meeting recaps, ensuring that you never get lost during a lengthy meeting and creating meeting agendas before the meeting even starts.
Use custom meeting templates to organize notes and summaries. (Source: Zoom)
In addition to the individual meeting benefits, the AI Companion also serves as a valuable assistant during team collaboration. Instead of getting bogged down responding to team chats, use the chat composition feature to speed up or improve your responses. You can also ask the AI Companion to search the chat for information or summarize responses based on previous meetings or conversations.
Compose responses to messages in the team chat. (Source: Zoom)
As a generative AI assistant, the Zoom AI Companion doesn’t just record meeting notes; it can also be used to create content that benefits workers, such as using Zoom Email compose to write and edit email correspondence or creating sticky notes for the Zoom whiteboard during a team brainstorming session.
Respond to follow-up emails with content generated by the AI Companion. (Source: Zoom)
Like the Zoom platform, the AI Companion also connects with third-party applications to provide assistance with different tasks and actions. For example, integration with document sharing platforms such as Dropbox and Google Drive makes it easier to find and share information. You can also customize the AI Companion by connecting it to platforms like Glean and Amazon Q to improve its knowledge base.
The latest artificial intelligence feature provided through Zoom’s AI Companion is the personal coach, which utilizes your meeting data to offer personalized insights on how to have more productive meetings. The coach also helps you create clear goals to improve your meetings, supported by research studies on hosting the most effective sessions.
The personal coach provides key insights on meeting data. (Source: Zoom)
Curious how Zoom AI Companion compares to other meeting tools? Check out our guide on the “8 Essential AI Meeting Assistants” for a quick look at their pros, cons, and key features.
Expert tips and tricks: Using Zoom AI Companion for productivity
There are countless ways to unlock the full potential of Zoom AI Companion and boost your productivity. But what I find particularly exciting is the ability to customize the Companion specifically for your business needs. Unlike many meeting assistants that offer basic custom vocabulary, Zoom takes it a step further. Administrators can upload their company’s unique data and information, empowering the AI Companion to provide even more tailored support for daily tasks.
Specifically, account owners and admins can upload company-specific documents, such as meeting agenda templates or industry-specific jargon. By creating a knowledge collection for the AI Companion to draw from, you will also spend less time fine-tuning your meeting transcripts because the Companion understands your unique vocabulary and the specifics of your work. This not only makes sharing information across your team effortless but also equips the AI with the necessary context to do so.
Customize the AI Companion to improve the quality of responses. (Source: Zoom)
Once you have set up the AI Companion, it’s important to train your team members on how to use it effectively. While Zoom offers a variety of videos and an onboarding center full of resources for your teammates, it’s particularly helpful to organize in-house meetings and create your own documentation. This should focus on informing individual users about the features available to them in the workspace and how to utilize them to enhance productivity.
After you have implemented your training sessions and team members have started using the AI Companion regularly, you can visit the Account dashboard to collect data on how artificial intelligence is enhancing productivity within the workspace. The AI Companion provides insights about the top users on your plan, making it easy to identify power users and gather information on how to optimize your Zoom account effectively.
From there, you can start setting goals to improve meeting productivity and continuously monitor whether you are meeting your expectations. This includes tracking meeting links, camera participation, and analyzing speech patterns. By gathering this information and applying insights from the AI Companion, you can gradually enhance the productivity of your meetings.
Ditch the glitch: Addressing common issues with the AI Companion
While enabling Zoom AI Companion offers several advantages, it is also important to be aware of some common challenges that may arise when using the feature. Explore these concerns in the tabs below to discover effective ways to address them.
Bottom line
Over the past few years, Zoom has become a leading player in the video conferencing market, thanks to its affordable plans and user-friendly interface. Yet, each year, the platform continues to impress me with the ways it incorporates automation and artificial intelligence into its features.
Zoom’s AI Companion goes beyond basic transcriptions and content creation, offering robust features like scheduling, file sharing, summarizing key points, creating tasks, and organizing meeting recordings. Therefore, paid Zoom users should utilize these tools to streamline workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and boost productivity.
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
The Zoom AI Companion is a generative AI assistant that operates in the background during your meetings, provided that it is enabled on your account. This Companion offers various features, including suggestions for messages in team chats, synthesizing information, and tracking action items during meetings.
No, the Zoom AI Companion is included at no extra cost in the Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans. However, free Zoom users on the Basic plan do not have access to this feature.
Attendees will receive a notification to ensure that everyone is aware of the AI Companion’s presence. Specifically, the Zoom AI Companion promotes transparency during meetings by clearly indicating its presence to all users through a star icon that appears in the Zoom app.
