How an AI note-taker helps you save time and stay focused

If you’ve ever been assigned to take notes in a meeting, you know the struggles. You’re trying to write down what every person said accurately, but if your attention shifts for just a moment, you might miss an important detail. It’s harder to participate in the discussion fully if you’re occupied with listening and typing. Then after your meeting, you need to clean up your notes, capture crucial next steps, and send your summary to the rest of the team. All these tasks eat away at your ability to be productive and can stop collaboration in its tracks. But help is at hand: an AI note-taker is just the tool you need.

Many people are turning to AI meeting apps and tools to automate note-taking and summarize meeting information. It’s like having an AI assistant by your side during meetings, taking notes, and keeping track of discussion items so you can focus on the conversation. Not to mention, having a meeting summary with key points to refer back to makes writing that follow-up email much easier.

See how you can benefit from an AI note-taking tool — and why it just might become your new best friend in meetings.

Generative AI models are perhaps best known for generating messages based on a prompt, but they’re also great at summarizing information. They use natural language processing (NLP) to synthesize longer messages into short summaries that include key points about the text.

An AI note-taker transcribes a meeting conversation and uses the transcript as the text input to generate a meeting summary of what was discussed. Many note-taking apps also identify key points and action items based on the context of the call.

Some AI note-taking apps require a full meeting recording to generate a meeting summary. If you don’t want your meeting recorded, look for a tool that doesn’t require it — for instance, Zoom AI Companion can generate a meeting summary without recording the meeting.

Taking notes during meetings, and sharing notes and action items with colleagues afterward, can take up a fair amount of time at work. According to a survey conducted by Morning Consult,* nearly 75% of team leaders said they perform these tasks at least a few times a week, and 48% of leaders surveyed said they spend more time than they want taking notes.

An AI note-taker can help you save time, but there’s more to it than that. Here are a few advantages of using an AI note-taking app:

When you’re taking notes, you’re focused on the task at hand, not on what you can contribute to the discussion. Let your AI note-taker do the work, and you can be a full participant in the meeting.

Have you ever had to step away from a meeting for a second, only to miss an important detail? An AI note-taker doesn’t need to take breaks, so you can rest assured that your meeting summaries will be comprehensive. Plus, some tools allow you to ask your note-taking app questions about the meeting in real time, so you don’t have to interrupt the discussion to ask, “Can you repeat that?”

It takes time to clean up your notes and organize them after every call before you can share them with others. AI-powered meeting summaries are ready to review and share as soon as they’re generated, so you can get those insights to your team faster. Some tools can automate that process by sending the summary directly to attendees in a follow-up email or chat as soon as the meeting is over.

If you have a packed schedule and are double-booked, don’t worry. Instead of asking colleagues for an update (and relying on their notes, which might be incomplete), an AI-generated meeting summary can help you catch up on what you missed.

Attending meetings and taking notes can add up to hours of lost productivity per week. An AI note-taker could help you save time, freeing up your schedule to concentrate on more important tasks with higher impact. An ROI calculator can help you quantify the potential cost savings of implementing an AI note-taking app based on the number of employees and hours saved in a week.

The best AI note-takers enable you to be more productive with your time by offloading some of the tasks in your workday. In addition to note-taking and meeting summaries, they might also help you find the information you need by responding to questions about the meeting, capturing and sharing next steps so you can follow up with your meeting participants more quickly, and formatting your notes based on helpful project templates.

Not all AI note-taking apps have these capabilities. When evaluating solutions, here are some of the key features to look out for.

This is the cornerstone of any AI meeting note-taker: the ability to accurately transcribe a conversation and generate a summary from the text. Some note-taking tools even allow you to ask questions like, “Was my name mentioned?” or “Can you tell me what happened so far?” and get a response based on the transcript. When evaluating AI meeting summary providers, read reports and reviews that speak to the accuracy and reliability of the transcript and summary.

Whether you use Zoom Meetings, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams, your AI note-taking app should be able to seamlessly join the meeting and generate the transcript. Using a consistent AI note-taker across multiple platforms is a great option because all of your meeting data can be saved in the same place.

Sometimes sensitive topics will come up during a meeting that you didn’t anticipate would be discussed. Having the ability to turn off your AI note-taker gives you control over what information gets included or excluded from the meeting summary. Look for a tool that has an easy off switch you can access quickly if needed. Along with that, AI tools should offer transparency, with a clear “on” status and notification so attendees know when they’re active in a meeting.

An AI note-taker should go beyond summarizing the meeting conversation — look for one that identifies next steps and assigns action items to team members based on the discussion.

Look for a tool that allows you to automatically share AI summaries via email or chat for easy follow-ups. You should also be able to choose who receives the summary automatically. Some solutions, like Zoom AI Companion, make it easy to create a document and automatically populate it with action items from the meeting summary, so you can get started right away.

If you have a global team and customer base, different languages might be spoken in meetings throughout the day. Find a solution that can support multiple languages — it’s especially helpful if it can automatically recognize the language being spoken and provide the AI summary in that language.

Many platforms, such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, offer AI capabilities as an added cost per user. Zoom AI Companion capabilities, including meeting summaries, next steps, and real-time meeting queries, are included at no additional cost with eligible paid Zoom plans.**

While AI Companion has delivered reliable, accurate AI meeting summaries for those on eligible paid Zoom plans, note-taking with AI Companion is about to get even better with My Notes (expected October 2025), the ability to bring AI Companion to third-party meetings (available September 2025), and much more. With My Notes, you'll be able to take your own notes alongside your meeting, and AI Companion will enhance them with the meeting summary for a more complete context of your meeting.

If you have an eligible paid Zoom plan, you already have access to AI Companion (if you don’t have an eligible plan, you can upgrade today). You may need to ask your Zoom administrator to turn on some features.

Think of how you can implement note-taking with AI Companion before, during, and after your meetings:

Before the meeting

During the meeting

After the meeting

Editor’s note: This blog was originally published in November 2023 and was updated in September 2025 to include the latest product information.

*Based on an online survey of 11,023 full-time knowledge workers in the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Germany, France, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. Conducted by Morning Consult on behalf of Zoom Video Communications, Inc., between August 10–25, 2023.

**Zoom AI Companion features may not be available for all regions or industry verticals. Included at no additional cost with the paid services in your Zoom user account.