Favorite AI Companion tips and tricks from actual Zoomies

Incorporating AI into your workday can seem like a daunting task, especially if you’re not familiar with the technology. How can AI help you? What AI tools should you use? Trying to navigate these questions and more might prevent you from uncovering the potential of an AI assistant.

With Zoom AI Companion, using AI is as easy as hopping on a Zoom meeting or sending a chat message. That’s because AI Companion is part of the Zoom platform, and just as intuitive to use. All you need to do is look for the sparkle icon when you’re using Zoom, like in your meetings, Team Chat tools, whiteboards, and more.

But if you’re stuck not knowing what prompt to use, or have yet to try your first meeting summary, Zoom employees — or Zoomies — are here to help. Zoomies are the first to try out many of AI Companion’s latest capabilities in their everyday work, and we’ve compiled some of their favorite tips and tricks to help you get the most out of our AI assistant.

A favorite capability among Zoomies is the ability to ask AI Companion questions in a live Zoom meeting about the conversation in progress. AI Companion then uses the meeting transcript to answer those questions. And though Zoom provides example prompts like “Catch me up,” you can also draft and submit your own prompts. Zoomies suggest using specific prompts for results that are more tailored to your desired output, but it takes some practice. Prompting is an art form, and it can be hard to know what to ask.

Here are a few of our favorite custom prompts to ask AI Companion in your next meeting:

• If you didn’t quite catch what was said: “What did [person] say about [topic]?” 
• If you want to know if an agenda item was already covered: “Did the team discuss [topic]?” 
• If you want a numbered list: “Create a list of [topics] discussed in order and include the name of the main presenter for each.” 
• If you want AI Companion to go into more detail on a topic, ask a follow-up question: “Tell me more about [topic].”
• If you want to keep track of next steps, ask: “What action items have been assigned? Include the owner of each.”

“When you ask AI Companion a question, look at a non-answer as a positive thing,” said Will Siegelin, senior product manager. “If you ask whether a topic has been discussed and AI Companion says it’s not in the transcript, you know there’s an important point that still needs to be addressed.”

If you keep forgetting to turn on AI Companion’s meeting summary capability at the start of the meeting, simply set it to start automatically. You can do this in your web portal settings under the AI Companion tab.

However, there may be meetings you don’t want a meeting summary for — like one-on-ones and other calls where sensitive info might be discussed, Will noted. “You can edit your recurring meetings and choose to only auto-start meeting summary for your weekly team calls, for example,” he said. 

You’ll find the ability to do this in your web portal by editing your recurring meetings (show “Options,” then check the appropriate box).

Did you know you can set pronouns in your Zoom profile? Not only does this help with displaying your pronouns more easily across the Zoom platform, from Meetings to Team Chat, it also helps provide more detail for meeting summaries. If you have your pronouns set in your profile, AI Companion will use those pronouns when referring to you in meeting summaries.

“Getting pronouns right is an important and highly requested feature among our customers,” said Ailian Gan, lead product manager of AI products. “Putting customers in control of their pronouns means they have control over how AI Companion presents them in meeting summaries.”

If you’re returning from a long break away from work, coming back to a mountain of chat messages can be overwhelming. If you’ve got a chat thread with dozens of replies, instead of reading through each message, right-click the original post and select “Summarize with AI Companion.” This can help you catch up on chats quicker, and you can always dive into the individual messages if you need to know exactly what was said.

“Coming back from the holidays to a thread with over 100 chat messages — there’s a good chance you don’t need to read through them all. AI Companion does a great job capturing the key points,” said Josh Stanley, specialist sales strategy lead.

Likewise, your colleagues may have recorded those meetings you missed, but sitting through every recording can take up a lot of time. With AI Companion, you can use the smart chapters feature in Smart Recording to watch only the parts of those meetings that are relevant to you. And if your meeting wasn’t recorded but meeting summary was activated, you can simply read the AI-generated meeting summary instead. 

Ready to see how our smart AI assistant can help you be more productive? Check out our guide to getting started with AI Companion.