Hands-On with Zoom’s Impressive New AI for Meetings

Zoom just dropped an impressive set of AI features that will massively impact your meeting productivity moving forward.

These features are collectively known as “AI Companion.” They include:

• AI-generated summaries emailed to you shortly after a meeting. 
• An in-meeting AI Companion window that you can interact with during a meeting.

At Marketing AI Institute, we got our hands on these features this week—and got a glimpse of the future of meetings.

Why It Matters

There’s no going back. Zoom’s new AI features are downright impressive. And meetings without them now feel like a thing of the past.

On Episode 68 of The Marketing AI Show, Marketing AI Institute founder and CEO Paul Roetzer walked me through his hands-on experiments with the new features.

1. This is the real deal. Both the summaries and AI Companions features work really well. “I was honestly impressed with the simplicity of the ease of use and the quality of the outputs,” says Roetzer.
2. The in-meeting AI companion is impressive. You can prompt the in-meeting AI assistant in any way you want. For instance, you can ask it to catch you up, identify when your name has been mentioned, or list out action items. “You can pretty much have a conversation with it,” says Roetzer.
3. And the after-meeting summaries are great. Roetzer found the summaries to be helpful, accurate, and factual. And the outputs were fast. He got his summary for an hour-long meeting just a few minutes after the meeting ended. Like any tool, it makes mistakes. But you can also edit summaries after the fact.
4. This is going to change meetings forever. These features simply create a much better, smarter meeting experience, says Roetzer. “Any meeting that doesn’t have the summary feature and an AI companion is going to feel inefficient and archaic.”
5. It’s also going to have a huge impact on productivity. Microsoft, Google, and others have already planned similar features. Given the sheer volume of virtual meetings, teh AI features we already have are going to dramatically increase productivity, to say nothing of future advancements, says Roetzer.

What to Do About It

Prepare for AI’s impact on meetings.

“Are companies ready for this?” asks Roetzer. AI’s impact on meetings will be positive, but potentially disruptive. Companies should consider if these AI features affect anyone’s job. (Administrative assistants, for instance.) They should also start thinking about how to effectively reallocate the time saved by teams using these features.

Education and usage policies can also be helpful, says Roetzer. Initially, it may be strange for some staff to get used to AI summaries and companions during meetings.