Zoom AI Companion

Zoom AI Companion started life as a meeting-summary feature bundled into Zoom. As of mid-2026 it is something larger: at Zoomtopia 2025, Zoom unveiled AI Companion 3.0 and repositioned the product as an agentic AI platform, with general availability arriving through November and a wider launch announced on December 15, 2025. It still generates meeting summaries, drafts follow-ups, suggests smart replies, and answers questions about what was discussed. But it now also retrieves information across your meetings and connected apps, drafts documents from transcripts, and reaches into conversations that happen outside Zoom entirely.

The appeal remains simplicity. There is nothing to install for existing Zoom users, no bot to configure, and no separate subscription to manage. You enable AI Companion in settings and it starts working — summaries appear after calls, action items are extracted automatically, and the AI can catch up latecomers on what they missed. The friction-free integration is still a real advantage if Zoom is your hub.

What changed most is reach. The old criticism — that AI Companion only worked inside Zoom — no longer holds. Through the new My Notes notetaker, it captures Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and in-person conversations, and a dedicated In-Person transcription mode records offline conversations straight from the AI Companion web interface with no meeting link required. The AI analysis has also moved past “adequate but basic”: 3.0 brings agentic retrieval, document drafting, deep research, and custom agents built on a mix of Zoom’s own models plus OpenAI and Anthropic. The genuine gaps now are narrower. There is still no real-time coaching, and everything runs in Zoom’s cloud rather than on your device.

Key Features

AI Companion 3.0 is the centerpiece. Agentic retrieval and search let you query across past meetings, transcripts, and notes, and across third-party connectors — Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive are live, with Gmail and Outlook coming, and a May 2026 expansion added agentic search across ten connectors including Salesforce, Workday, and ServiceNow. My Notes is the AI notetaker that works beyond Zoom, covering Teams, Google Meet, and in-person conversations and syncing between desktop and mobile (with the mobile caveat that third-party apps aren’t captured there yet). In-Person transcription records face-to-face conversations from the web with no meeting link.

There is also a Help Me Write mode with canvas editing that drafts and revises business documents from meeting transcripts and assets, exporting to Markdown, PDF, Word, and Zoom Docs, with a deeper research mode for Custom AI Companion customers. Personal Workflows, in beta, is a low-code drag-and-drop builder for automating follow-ups, daily reflection reports, and Team Chat summaries. A new conversational web surface at ai.zoom.us gives standalone access outside the Zoom client. The older staples remain: post-meeting summaries, Smart Compose for chat and mail, catch-up for latecomers, and automatic whiteboard summarization.

Pricing

For existing Zoom customers, the core deal is unchanged: AI Companion is included at no extra cost with any paid Zoom Workplace plan — Pro at $13.33/user/mo billed annually ($16.99 monthly), Business at $18.33/user/mo annually, and Enterprise on custom pricing. The bundling makes it effectively free if you already pay for Zoom.

The bigger change is that you no longer have to buy into the whole ecosystem. Since December 15, 2025, Zoom sells a $10/user/mo standalone AI Companion that does not require a Zoom Workplace license, and Zoom Basic (free) accounts can now trial select 3.0 capabilities — independent reporting puts the cap at roughly three meetings a month. For heavier needs there is a Custom AI Companion add-on at $12/user/mo that brings the low-code agent builder and cross-platform notetaking; a separately reported $20/user/mo “Custom Companion” tier wires in enterprise knowledge sources. Zoom’s own pricing pages don’t cleanly reconcile the $12 and $20 figures, so treat the exact relationship between those two as the one fuzzy area here.

Privacy & Security

Zoom processes AI Companion data through its cloud. Following the 2023 backlash over terms that appeared to permit it, Zoom has stated it does not use customer content to train its AI models, and an April 2026 review of its terms confirms that position holds. Enterprise administrators get data-handling controls, including data-residency processing options. No new breach or incident surfaced in this review.

The architecture is still fundamentally cloud-based. All meeting content flows through Zoom’s AI pipeline, and 3.0’s federated model approach routes work across Zoom’s own LLMs and SLMs plus third-party models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and NVIDIA’s open Nemotron family. For organizations already trusting Zoom with their meeting content, AI Companion adds little new exposure. EU data is still processed in the US under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, which matters for teams with strict data-sovereignty requirements — the same caveat that applies to any cloud assistant.

Best For

Zoom AI Companion is the obvious pick for organizations that center their work on Zoom and want capable AI without adding another vendor. The zero-setup, zero-extra-cost bundle is hard to beat for Zoom Workplace customers, and the new standalone tier makes it viable even for teams that don’t live in Zoom but want its notetaker across Teams and Meet. The 3.0 platform also suits companies that want agentic retrieval tied into Salesforce, ServiceNow, or Google Drive.

It is a weaker fit where you need live in-meeting coaching, or where data must stay on the device rather than passing through a cloud pipeline. Mobile-first teams that rely on Teams or Meet on their phones should note that those apps aren’t captured by My Notes on mobile yet.

How Zoom AI Companion Compares to Hedy

The gap between these two has narrowed, and a fair comparison says so. Zoom AI Companion is no longer trapped inside Zoom — My Notes captures Teams, Google Meet, and in-person conversations, and 3.0’s agentic search reaches across connected apps like Salesforce and Google Drive. If you already pay for Zoom, it is free and frictionless, and even standalone it starts at $10/user/mo. Those are real strengths, and the old “only works within Zoom” knock no longer applies.

Where Hedy still pulls ahead is architecture. Zoom processes everything in its cloud; Hedy runs transcription, summarization, and analysis on-device, which means it keeps working with no internet and never sends your conversation to a server. Hedy also does real-time coaching during the conversation — surfacing prompts and guidance live — which Zoom AI Companion does not offer. And Hedy needs no meeting bot or platform integration to capture any conversation, in person or online. So the choice is clearer than it used to be: Zoom AI Companion is a strong, increasingly agentic assistant for cloud-comfortable teams already oriented around Zoom, while Hedy is the better fit when on-device privacy, offline capability, and live coaching are the priorities.