Zoom launched an AI tool designed to enhance your meetings, but what, exactly, does it do?
Like almost every company, Zoom is pushing into AI. The meeting service has been steadily rolling out new features enhanced by AI, and the latest is a smart assistant that makes using Zoom for virtual meetings a more enjoyable experience, especially if you’re the type who shows up late or doesn’t always pay full attention to what’s happening.
The Zoom AI Companion has a few primary features that will be useful for all remote workers. There are new AI features in Zoom that extend outside of the actual meetings, which is making it even an even more powerful tool for anyone who isn’t in the same physical space as their coworkers. Here’s everything you can do with Zoom’s new AI assistant and how much it’ll cost to take advantage of it.
What is Zoom’s AI Companion?
Zoom’s short pitch for its AI Companion is that it “empowers you to increase productivity, improve team effectiveness, and enhance your skills.” Like most AI assistants, it does a lot of the busy work for you, saving you time. It’s also helpful during long meetings if you miss something or if you happen to be late. Here’s a quick breakdown of each feature offered by Zoom’s AI Companion:
- Process meeting recordings: Zoom will now offer highlights, smart chapters, summaries, and next steps from meeting recordings, so if you cannot attend, you can watch the recording more efficiently. During conversational portions of meetings, it’ll organize them with topic-tracking indicators and playlists.
- Meeting summaries: The AI Companion will generate a summary of any meeting and offer practical next steps of what was discussed. From there, you can share the summary via email and Team Chat with others.
- Meeting catch-up: It’ll help you catch up on what you missed during a meeting (either because you were late or not paying attention) without stopping the flow to ask everyone what happened so far.
- Draft chat responses: Zoom’s AI can automatically generate written chat responses for you. It will use conversational context and what you want to say to draft a message. You can customize the length and tone of the message based on your current needs.
- Draft emails: You can use the tool to write emails for you. It’ll even use the context of historical email conversations to create messages that make sense within the context of your team.
- Chat summaries: It’ll take long written chats and offer an overview of what was discussed, saving you from having to go back and read all the messages to figure out what’s happening.
How much does Zoom’s AI Companion cost?
Zoom’s new AI Companion is part of any paid plan. The most affordable plan is the Pro level of Zoom One, which sells for $150 yearly or $16 monthly. The Pro plan gives you a lot of features in addition to the AI Companion, including 5GB of cloud storage, longer meetings, and access to Essential Apps.
You can also go with the Business plan for $200 yearly or the Business Plus plan for $250 yearly. These offer extra features but don’t change anything about the AI Companion’s functionality. If taking advantage of the AI features is your main concern, you’ll be okay with the Pro plan.
What kind of privacy does Zoom’s AI Companion offer?
For Zoon’s AI companion to do all the cool stuff outlined above, it needs to be able to analyze your meetings and chats. That immediately raises privacy concerns, especially if you and your team are using Zoom to discuss sensitive company secrets you wouldn’t want out there. The company has a lengthy blog post where it talks about its approach to AI, and there are some critical highlights, both for people using the new features and those who aren’t.
First, Zoom says it “does not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, or other communications like customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions) to train Zoom’s or third-party artificial intelligence models.” So, while its AI can figure out the context in a meeting, it isn’t using random Zoom calls to train it, which is nice.
Additionally, the company says, “Administrators and account owners are able to control whether they want to turn on AI Companion capabilities or features for their organization (all capabilities will be off by default).” If you’re worried about privacy for a specific meeting, Zoom says, “meeting hosts will have the ability to turn AI Companion features for Zoom Meetings, like meeting summaries or in-meeting queries, on or off. “So if you like the AI features most of the time, but you want the feature off for a particularly sensitive meeting, you can disable them.
Additional information can be found on a Zoom support page that tackles how it uses customer data. Your meetings and chats will be shared with the AI model for it to do its job. The company uses several different AI models, and each will receive data. The company uses “Zoom’s own large language model (LLM) in addition to Meta Llama 2, OpenAI, and Anthropic.” As such, it says, “Even when data is shared, we do not allow third-party AI models to use your data to improve or train their models. Your data may be temporarily retained by those third-parties for Trust and Safety purposes or to comply with legal obligations. Data processed by Zoom AI Companion may be processed within U.S.-based data centers.”
If privacy is a concern, you need to know that your data will go through data centers and to AI models, so it’s definitely something to be concerned about. Thankfully, if these features aren’t of interest to you and you’re more worried about the privacy of your meetings, Zoom says the AI features are off by default, so you can safely ignore them, at least now.