Use Zoom's AI Companion for Automatic Meeting Summaries

What This Does

Zoom's AI Companion automatically generates a written summary of your meeting, including key discussion points, decisions made, and action items with owners. It arrives in your inbox within minutes of the call ending, so you never have to write a meeting recap again.

Before You Start

• Your organization has a Zoom account with AI Companion enabled (included in paid plans, check with your IT admin if unavailable)
• You're the meeting host, or the host has enabled AI Companion for participants
• Time needed: 2 minutes to enable; summaries generate automatically
• Cost: Included with Zoom paid plans (check otter.ai or Teams if Zoom AI isn't available to you)

Steps

1. Enable AI Companion for your account

Go to zoom.us → sign in → click your profile icon → "Settings." In the left panel, click "AI Companion." Toggle on "Meeting Summary with AI Companion." You can also toggle on "Smart Recording" to get AI chapter markers when recording meetings.

What you should see: A confirmation that AI Companion is enabled. If you don't see these options, your account may need admin-level enablement. Contact your IT/Zoom admin.

Troubleshooting: If the option is grayed out, AI Companion may not be included in your organization's Zoom plan or may require admin approval.

2. Start a meeting and activate AI Companion

Start your Zoom meeting normally. During the call, look for the "AI Companion" button in the bottom toolbar (it looks like a small star/sparkle icon). Click it and select "Start Meeting Summary."

A notification appears to all participants: "AI Companion is generating a meeting summary." This is standard Zoom behavior. Participants are always notified.

What you should see: A small "Summary in progress" indicator in the AI Companion panel.

3. Run your meeting normally

Continue your stakeholder alignment call, SME coordination meeting, or L&D planning session. No special changes needed. Speak clearly and use names when assigning actions ("Sarah, can you send the updated policy doc by Friday?"), as this improves action item capture.

4. Review the summary in your email

Within 3–5 minutes of ending the meeting, check your email. You'll receive a Zoom-generated meeting summary with:

• Overview: a 2–3 sentence abstract
• Key discussion points: bulleted by topic
• Action items: with owner names if they were named during discussion
• Next steps: what was agreed for follow-up

What you should see: A clean, readable email you can forward directly to stakeholders or paste into a project tracking document.

5. Use the summary for L&D project management

Copy the action items section directly into your project tracker (Notion, Asana, or even a simple shared doc). Forward the full summary to any SME who couldn't attend, with a note: "Here's what we covered. Please confirm the action items assigned to you."

Real Example

Scenario: You have a weekly L&D team meeting to align on the Q2 training calendar, review completion data, and discuss a new compliance course request from HR.

What you do: Start the meeting → click AI Companion → Start Summary. Run your 45-minute meeting. Four minutes after hanging up, you have a complete summary in your inbox with four action items, each assigned to a team member by name.

What you get: No more "who was supposed to do that?" follow-up emails. The summary goes to the team, and everyone has a shared record of what was decided.

Tips

• Edit the summary before forwarding to stakeholders. It's good but not perfect, and sometimes conflates two discussion points.
• Use the meeting summary as the starting point for a project status update email, rather than writing one from scratch
• For recurring meetings, keep a running doc where you paste each week's AI-generated action items. Instant project log with zero manual effort.

Tool interfaces change. If a button has moved, look for similar AI/magic/smart options in the same menu area.