It seems like every other day a new AI assistant pops up promising to make work easier. There are tools to summarize meetings, draft emails, and sort out your thoughts. Zoom, the app where many of us spend our entire day, now has its own version: the Zoom AI Companion. The idea is to build AI help directly into your calls, chats, and whiteboards.
But with all the buzz, you’re probably wondering what it actually does. This review will give you a straightforward look at what the Zoom AI Companion is good at, what it costs, and where you’ll start to hit its limits, especially if your team’s work extends beyond the Zoom window.
What is the Zoom AI companion?
The Zoom AI Companion isn’t a separate app you have to download or a fussy add-on. It’s a generative AI assistant that’s built right into the Zoom Workplace platform. This means it’s available inside the tools you already use, like Meetings, Team Chat, Phone, and Whiteboard. Its main purpose is to help you get more done, handle repetitive tasks, and work better with your team, all without having to switch apps.
One of the most appealing things about it is that the AI Companion is included for free if you have an eligible paid Zoom plan. So, if you’re already paying for a Pro, Business, or Enterprise account, you get these AI features as part of the package.
Behind the scenes, Zoom uses what it calls a federated approach to AI. In simple terms, this means it doesn’t stick to one AI model. Instead, it uses a mix of its own AI and models from other top companies. This lets it pick the best tool for the job, whether that’s summarizing a meeting or writing a chat message, so you get better results.
A deep dive into Zoom AI companion features
So, what can this AI assistant actually do? Its features are spread across the whole Zoom platform. Here’s a look at what you get and how it can help with your daily tasks.
Making meetings and webinars better with Zoom AI
For most of us, meetings are the heart of Zoom, and the AI Companion adds some pretty useful upgrades here.
- Meeting & webinar summaries: The big one everyone talks about is the meeting summary, which automatically pulls out highlights and action items. This lets you focus on the actual conversation instead of scrambling to type notes. A nice touch is that you don’t even have to record the meeting to get a summary; the AI can create one from the live conversation.
- In-meeting & in-webinar questions: If you join a meeting late, you can ask the AI Companion questions in the side panel. You can ask for a quick recap of what you missed, if your name was mentioned, or if any decisions were made, all without interrupting the person talking.
- Smart recording: When you record a meeting to the cloud, the AI Companion makes the video much easier to look through later. It automatically breaks the recording into “smart chapters,” highlights important parts, and pulls out a list of next steps for everyone.
Improving chat and written communication with Zoom AI
Beyond live meetings, the AI Companion also works as a writing helper to make your communication a bit quicker and easier.
- Chat compose & thread summary: If you’re stuck on what to write in a chat, the AI can help you draft a message based on the conversation’s context. You can also ask it to summarize a long, winding chat thread so you can get the main points quickly.
- Sentence completion: As you type in Team Chat, the AI will suggest words and phrases to finish your sentences. It’s a small thing, but it can save you some time.
- Email compose: If you use Zoom Mail, the AI Companion can help you write and reply to emails, letting you adjust the tone and length to match what you need.
Other Zoom AI features in the Zoom world
The AI Companion has a few other tricks up its sleeve. It can help you brainstorm ideas on a Zoom Whiteboard, create Call Summaries from your Zoom Phone conversations, and even help write content and generate images for Zoom Events.
| Feature | Zoom Product | Primary Benefit |
|---|---|---|
| Meeting Summary | Meetings | Avoids manual note-taking and captures action items. |
| In-Meeting Questions | Meetings | Lets latecomers catch up without derailing the meeting. |
| Smart Recording | Meetings | Makes it faster to review long recordings. |
| Thread Summary | Team Chat | Quickly summarizes long chat conversations for a quick catch-up. |
| Chat Compose | Team Chat | Helps you get past writer’s block and draft messages faster. |
| Call Summary | Phone | Automatically summarizes phone calls and pulls out tasks. |
| Content Generation | Whiteboard | Generates and organizes ideas for visual brainstorming sessions. |
How to get Zoom AI and what does it cost?
One of the first questions people ask about the Zoom AI Companion is about its price. The good news? It’s not an extra thing you have to buy. Instead, Zoom includes it at no additional cost with all its paid plans. This does mean it’s not available for folks on the free “Basic” plan; you’ll need to subscribe to get access.
Zoom pricing for plans that include Zoom AI
Here’s a quick rundown of the plans that come with the Zoom AI Companion, based on annual billing.
| Plan | Price (per user/month, annual billing) | Key Features for AI Access |
|---|---|---|
| Workplace Pro | ~$14.99 | AI Companion, 5GB Cloud Storage, 30-hour meetings |
| Workplace Business | ~$18.32 | Everything in Pro + 300 participants, unlimited whiteboards |
| Workplace Business Plus | ~$22.49 | Everything in Business + Zoom Phone features |
For bigger companies, Zoom has Enterprise plans with custom pricing that include more advanced features like unlimited cloud storage and more control for administrators.
How to turn on Zoom AI features
Heads up, the AI features aren’t on by default. To get them working, an account admin needs to log into the Zoom web portal, go to Account Management > Account Settings, and then click the AI Companion tab. From there, they can switch on the specific features they want to make available for the whole company.
The limitations of a platform-native Zoom AI
While the Zoom AI Companion is a handy tool inside Zoom, its biggest weakness is that it can’t see anything outside of it. This creates some real problems for teams who use more than just one app to do their jobs. It’s like a helpful assistant who is locked in one room.
The Zoom AI limitation: Your knowledge lives everywhere, not just in Zoom
The biggest issue is that the AI Companion only knows what happens in Zoom. It learns from your meetings, chats, and any files in Zoom Docs. But what about the information that’s actually the source of truth for your business? Your official product docs in Confluence, your internal guides in Google Docs, or your entire customer history in a help desk like Zendesk are completely invisible to it.
For a customer support or IT team, this is a showstopper. An agent can’t get a full, correct answer if the AI has no idea what’s in your past support tickets or the official troubleshooting guides. A useful AI needs to sit on top of all your company knowledge. This is where you’d need a different tool, like eesel AI, which connects to all your apps to give answers based on the complete picture, not just what was said on a call.
Zoom AI’s limitation: From summarizing information to taking real action
Zoom AI is good at summarizing what was said and writing text. But its ability to do something with that information is stuck inside the Zoom platform, like scheduling another Zoom meeting. It can’t perform the real business actions that actually get work done in other tools.
Think about what a support team actually does all day. They need an AI that can automatically sort a new ticket in their help desk, check an order status in Shopify, or escalate a major problem in Jira Service Management. The Zoom AI Companion just can’t do these things. Today’s AI support tools are built to take action. For example, the AI Agent from eesel AI connects right into your help desk and other business apps, letting it tag, route, and sometimes even resolve tickets on its own based on your team’s rules.
Why Zoom AI falls short: Support teams need a copilot in their help desk, not just in meetings
The main workspace for a support agent isn’t Zoom; it’s their help desk, whether it’s Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Intercom. A meeting summary might be nice to have once in a while, but agents need help in the app where they spend their entire day.
Having to copy and paste info from a Zoom summary into a help desk ticket kind of defeats the point of having an AI assistant. And more importantly, the AI isn’t learning from your most valuable information: the thousands of past ticket conversations where all your team’s knowledge is stored. An AI tool like the AI Copilot from eesel AI is built to work inside your help desk. It learns from old tickets, macros, and connected docs to draft solid, context-aware replies in your team’s voice—right where your agents are working.
Is the Zoom AI companion the right tool for your business?
So, what’s the final take? The Zoom AI Companion is a great add-on for teams who do most of their work in Zoom. For no extra cost on paid plans, you get a bunch of features that can make meetings and internal chats more productive. If that’s your main goal, it’s a fantastic choice.
But its usefulness drops off a cliff once your team’s important information and workflows live in other apps, which is the case for nearly every customer support, IT, and operations team. Its knowledge is stuck in a silo, and its ability to take action is limited to the Zoom universe.
If all you want is an AI assistant to make your Zoom calls a bit easier, the AI Companion is a solid choice. But if you need an AI platform that can actually learn from all your company knowledge, automate support tasks, and do real work in your other tools, you’ll need something designed for that job.
See how eesel AI can act as a true automation layer for your whole company. Book a demo to see how you can connect all your knowledge sources and start automating support in minutes.
Frequently asked questions
No, the AI Companion is included at no additional cost with all eligible paid Zoom Workplace plans (like Pro, Business, and Enterprise). However, it is not available for users on the free Basic plan.
An account administrator must first enable the AI Companion features in the settings. They can do this by navigating to the AI Companion tab in the Account Settings on the Zoom web portal and toggling on the desired features for the organization.
No, this is its main limitation. The AI Companion can only access information from within the Zoom ecosystem, such as meeting transcripts and team chats, and cannot connect to external knowledge sources or apps.
The main benefit is convenience and cost-effectiveness for teams that primarily work within Zoom. It makes meetings more productive with features like summaries and smart recordings without requiring any extra software or payment on top of an existing paid plan.
No, you do not need to record the meeting. The AI Companion can generate a meeting summary from the live conversation in real-time, allowing you to get key highlights and action items without creating a full recording.
