Zoom AI Companion is a generative AI digital assistant available in Northwestern Zoom for meetings. It is an automated meeting summary solution that captures key points and action items, saving time and effort to manually capture these details. It can be used to share recording highlights and action items from meetings.
The features available include:
Feature Availability
The availability of Zoom AI Companion features and its controls is managed in your Northwestern Zoom account settings. By default, the features are off and must be enabled in your Zoom account to be used in meetings. If enabled in your account settings, you must manually enable them on a meeting-by-meeting basis by using the AI Companion control button in the meeting window
- Zoom AI Companion features are not available in Zoom Desktop Team Chat;
- Meeting summary and smart recording are available in Northwestern Zoom Rooms;
- In-meeting questions are currently unavailable for Zoom Rooms.
To manage Zoom AI Companion settings:
- Log in to your northwestern.zoom.us account.
- Click Settings from the left navigation.
- Click the AI Companion tab at the top.
- There are separate settings for meetings, webinars (if licensed), and recordings:
- Toggle the "Allow users to ask AI Companion questions during meetings" option ON or OFF under the "Meeting" section.
- Toggle the "Meeting summary with AI Companion" option ON or OFF under the "Meeting" section.
- For Recording: Toggle the "Smart recording with AI Companion" option ON or OFF under the "Recording" section. This applies to both meetings and webinars.
You can adjust granular settings for each feature after toggling them on. Please refer to Getting started with Zoom AI Companion features for more details for those specific AI Companion features.
Data Security
Zoom AI Companion should not be used during meetings with sensitive information. It is approved only for Level 1 and 2 data (see the Data Classification Policy for a description of data levels). Level 3 data and higher (PHI, HIPAA, Business Sensitive Data) is prohibited in any use cases where AI Companion is present.
Feature and Use Details
General - Meetings
- Only meeting hosts can manage AI settings for the meetings they host; meeting participants and attendees do not have access to the AI settings.
- Participants can request that the host turn on/off AI features for the meeting.
- When Zoom AI Companion features are enabled by the host, all participants will see a banner message alerting them to the use of the companion when it is enabled (either when joining the meeting or during the meeting if enabled after the meeting starts). If an attendee leaves the meeting and re-joins, they will not see the banner message again in the same meeting if re-joining from the same account.
- Participants and attendees who do not want to attend a meeting with AI features enabled may choose to leave the meeting. When joining a meeting where AI Companion features are being used, a glowing sparkle icon will be visible in the top-right corner of your Zoom window, and you will receive a notification informing you of its use.
- The meeting summary features are OFF by default. However, you must manually enable it on a meeting-by-meeting basis using the AI Companion button in the meeting window.
- You cannot create a summary retroactively if it wasn't enabled during the meeting.
- The ability to include the full meeting summary text in the after-meeting email is turned OFF by default. You will receive an email with a link to the summary in Northwestern Zoom if requested.
- By default, only the host will receive a meeting summary after it ends if they have enabled the feature.
- Meeting hosts can share a meeting summary with participants/attendees if desired, either individually via Zoom or by copying and pasting the Zoom meeting summary text into a document and sending it separately.
- Northwestern does not recommend changing the Automatically Share (summary) setting.
- Please consider reviewing the meeting's AI summary for accuracy before distributing meeting summaries.
- To share a meeting summary with non-Northwestern attendees, we recommend meeting hosts review and copy the summary text from Zoom and paste it into a document to share separately.
- Meeting summaries older than 12 months will be deleted at the end of the academic year (same as recordings). After 30 days in the trash, they are permanently deleted.
- At this time, there is no method for exporting a summary. Users who are seeking long-term retention of a summary should copy/paste the contents into a document.
- For meetings where you set the "Automatically share summary with:" setting to "Only me (meeting host) and meeting invitees in our organization," participants joining the meeting ad hoc (through the in-meeting contact invitation or sharing the join link) will not receive the summary, as they were not on the original invitee list. You will need to share it with them manually.
The Smart Recording feature is OFF by default. To enable Smart Recording:
- Log in to your Northwestern Zoom account.
- Click Settings from the left navigation.
- Click the AI Companion tab at the top.
- Scroll down to Recording section
- Toggle ON the Smart Recording with AI Companion
There are additional recording settings you can enable for each recording.
Additional Zoom Resources
Zoom does not use any customer audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments or other communications-like content (such as poll results, whiteboard and reactions) to train Zoom’s AI models. Learn more about how Zoom uses data to provide Zoom AI Companion features, or view the Zoom AI Companion Security and Privacy Whitepaper.