How to make the most of Zoom AI Companion: Your guide to getting started with your AI assistant

No matter how you're using technology these days, AI has become integrated at some level, and it's important to make the most of it. A survey by Morning Consult for Zoom* revealed that over 75% of leaders using AI reported faster task completion, increased productivity, and higher-quality work. Building on these findings, Zoom recently announced AI Companion 3.0 is coming soon, designed to further enhance team efficiency by transforming conversations into actionable results.

Zoom AI Companion can do this by automating tasks, surfacing insights, and helping you work smarter, and faster. It’s included at no additional cost with the paid services assigned to your Zoom user account and is designed to seamlessly integrate with your Zoom Workplace experience, offering a range of capabilities that can help you work smarter, not harder.

Whether you’re preparing for meetings, managing projects, or responding to customers, let AI Companion work in the background to proactively suggest next steps, enhance your schedule, and help you focus on the work that matters most.

It can help you uncover critical information across conversations, documents, and apps through note-taking and retrieving relevant content. It helps you be more effective with your time, handling the more tedious work across meetings, docs, chats, and more, so you can focus on the tasks that require your unique expertise. And, coming soon with the launch of AI Companion 3.0, it allows you to deliver high-quality work faster, whether creating content, responding to customer inquiries, or drafting strategic plans, all with minimal guidance in a new AI work surface on the web (expected November 2025) or in the home tab of the Zoom Workplace app (expected March 2026) designed to get it right the first time.

In this guide, we’ll walk through how to activate AI Companion, explore its key functionalities, and share some tips and tricks to help you make the most of AI Companion in your workday.

Whether you’re new to AI or have been exploring its benefits for a while, AI Companion is designed to integrate into your workday without disrupting how you already work. It’s context-aware, capturing the details of your conversations, documents, and tasks to help you focus on what matters most.

If you’re short on time and have a mountain of chat messages to catch up on, AI Companion can quickly summarize your chat threads and identify action items, helping you grasp the big picture and respond efficiently. When you use the enhanced “prepare me for a meeting” skill (expected October 2025), you’ll automatically get a summary of any agenda items, previous action items, and relevant insights before you meet. You can skip the scramble and go straight into a more effective discussion.

AI Companion can also provide meeting summaries, highlight agenda items, and break your meeting up into smart chapters—so you stay on top of your priorities with less manual effort. What’s more, if you want the meeting summary, but don't want to record the full meeting, AI Companion can just provide the summary. No recording required.

Note-taking capabilities let you capture insights across Zoom meetings, in-person sessions, and meetings on other platforms like Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, with WebEx support expected soon. AI Companion organizes your notes, expands on key takeaways, and surfaces critical information so you can act without digging through every conversation. With the launch of AI Companion 3.0, agentic retrieval will allow you to search across Zoom Workplace, as well as enabled Google and Microsoft apps, helping you quickly find the information you need to move projects forward (expected November 2025).

According to the Zoom Morning Consult survey, the top task that leaders would be most willing to use AI for is real-time help during meetings, making an AI meeting assistant a valuable tool.

Get in-meeting assistance by chatting with AI Companion through the side panel, where you can request assistance with a wide range of tasks such as capturing feedback and discussion points, asking questions from the web, and learning more about attendees, like what their role is and what timezone they are in. Meeting hosts have settings to control whether they want participants to be able to ask questions about the meeting, including finding out about what happened before they joined. Coming soon, you can proactively track agenda items, highlight key decisions, and suggest next steps to help you stay focused and make the discussion more productive (expected November 2025).

After the meeting, you can use the side panel to ask AI Companion questions about the meeting like, “What topics were covered?” or “Was my name mentioned?” AI Companion can also summarize calls, SMS messages, and voicemails on Zoom Phone to make sure nothing is missed.

You’ll be able to take notes right alongside your meeting window with My Notes (expected October 2025). While AI Companion generates a meeting summary, you can take your own notes in My Notes. When you’re done, click Enrich to have your notes enhanced with the meeting transcript, automatically capturing and organizing the key takeaways. Everything is stored in Zoom Hub, so you can easily search and create documents based on your notes.

Employees spend more time drafting and sending emails and chat messages than anything else at work, according to the Zoom Morning Consult survey. Adding to that, 44% of employees say they spend more time on those tasks than they want to.

As an AI writing assistant, AI Companion can compose email messages with the appropriate tone and length, helping you craft professional and effective communications. AI Companion can also help you write a follow-up thank you email to meeting attendees based on what was discussed.

You can also use it to compose Zoom Team Chat responses with the right tone and length, which can help you save time and enable efficient communication within your team.

In Zoom Docs, you can create, revise, and summarize content all in a single place. Create a new doc from your meeting summaries and use AI templates to transform existing content into exactly what you need.

Within the AI Companion side panel, you can ask it to help with things like:

You can use AI Companion features available with the paid services assigned to your Zoom user account at no additional cost.** To activate it:

To see when new AI Companion 3.0 features have launched,check for updates.

Learn how to use AI Companion to help save time and streamline collaboration. Here are a few pro tips:

Here are some example prompts to get you started and some features we plan to implement in the future. Try these ways of asking AI Companion for help, and remember that you can upload local documents to AI Companion:

Actual AI Companion results and response speed may vary depending on prompt, product settings, and available data. Zoom will innovate and improve AI Companion over time, collect feedback from customers, and improve responsiveness. At the time of writing, AI Companion is available on the Zoom App for macOS, Windows, iPhone, and Android.

Deeper insights and AI note-taking

Proactive agentic AI

Enhanced writing and research

Custom AI Companion add-on

Zoom Workplace enhancements

Video and hardware updates

These capabilities are coming soon, giving users additional ways to capture insights, streamline workflows, and turn information into actionable work.

If you’re ready to enhance your productivity and collaboration, start using AI Companion today — at no additional cost with the paid services assigned to your Zoom user account. Custom AI Companion features are available as an additional paid add-on.

If you don’t have an eligible paid Zoom plan, upgrade today to access the benefits of AI Companion. It’s time to work smarter, collaborate more effectively, and achieve your goals with ease.

If you want even more AI Companion tips and tricks, check out these resources:

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Editor’s note: This blog post was edited on September 17, 2025 to include the most up-to-date information on Zoom AI Companion.

*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 Communications, Inc., from August 10 to 25, 2023.

**AI Companion may not be available for select verticals and select regional customers.