Click-click, click-click. That’s it. It’s really annoying when you hear someone typing meeting notes during a Zoom call. Like a squirrel on caffeine, people sometimes don’t realize they’re typing on the keyboard. And yet, someone has to write down action items and reminders.
But that “someone” doesn’t have to be human. Released last fall, Zoom’s New AI Companion Feature—included with every paid Zoom subscription—is like having an administrative assistant on every call. The bot can summarize meetings, create action items, and even tell you who talked the most.
According to Zoom’s chief product officer, Smita Hashim, AI Companion uses large-scale language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, but it trained itself by eavesdropping on thousands of meetings between Zoom employees. (“To protect confidentiality, we do not use real customer conversations for any training purposes,” she says.)
As powerful as AI Companion is, it’s not always clear what it can do during a call or how the bot can save you time. I decided to host several meetings and put Zoom’s AI assistant to the test in a series of tests. I’ll explain how to get the same results, give you the best prompts to get started, and cover what AI Companion can’t do.yet.
Summarizing the meeting
During a meeting, you can access the AI Companion by clicking the icon below the main video window. (It looks like a shiny magic wand.) Zoom offers a few built-in prompts to help you get started, such as “Meeting Summary,” which lists broad points based on what’s been discussed so far. The AI Companion acts like a human manager during the meeting. The bot can create a whiteboard of ideas based on the real-time conversation, helping you visualize the discussion.
In my testing, it became clear that this feature works best when people are clear and intentional during their Zoom calls. If you stick to a meeting plan that covers the most important topics in a concise manner, the summary is really useful. In one call where we were talking about a new website design, the summary mentioned design work, building a prototype, and testing. However, AI Companion didn’t always capture the main points of the conversation perfectly. In a meeting where we were planning a trip abroad with family, the conversation was too random, and the AI-generated summary I received later didn’t really make sense. Aren’t bots teaching us how to live in their world? AI Companion works best when the meeting follows a well-defined structure.
Instead of summarizing, you can ask your AI Companion to “catch me up” or “anyone have any action items?” The bot won’t summarize the entire meeting, but it will mention some important topics and points. On a vacation phone call, the bot said that my daughter Rachel had just talked about flights. When your mind wanders during a meeting, asking for a catch-up is surprisingly helpful. Of course, no one does that in a Zoom meeting.
