Five critical considerations for legal and compliance teams for AI implementation

Employees want to feel safe and secure handling company information, and companies want to know they control what belongs to them. When most or all of your work is created, saved, or transferred on various systems, apps, and platforms, it’s important to think about what that actually means for your organization. To balance the various needs of different departments, get a better understanding of what it means to implement AI Companion in your organizations. 

AI Companion can help you in plenty of different ways throughout your day. When you use AI Companion, it usually starts with a prompt, a meeting recording, or creating a document. Often, you get something in return. Maybe it’s a summary based on your meeting or an outline based on your prompt. How these inputs and outputs are retained typically comes up as a central point when organizations review implementing AI solutions. Our customers can be confident that Zoom treats those inputs and outputs with care by knowing their options and testing AI Companion in their organization.

At Zoom, we do 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 its third-party artificial intelligence models. Regarding retention, customers have controls for both inputs and outputs and can set deletion periods where available to best align with their organization’s needs.

Another important option for our customers who require flexibility is Zero Data Retention (ZDR) for Zoom Meeting transcripts used to provide a Meeting Summary. ZDR is typically used by organizations that need more time to outline their AI policies but still want the benefits of AI Companion.

Without ZDR, we retain your data for set periods of time solely to provide AI Companion features to your users. When you use ZDR, you trade some AI Companion capabilities for our Zero Data Retention model. For example, with ZDR enabled, you won’t be able to use meeting transcripts to quickly create Zoom Docs or let meeting participants request meeting content through the AI Companion side panel. To determine the best balance of features and retention for your organization, we recommend creating pilot groups to test AI Companion in a way your organization is comfortable with.

Regarding third-party models, some customers also ask how they can know how third-party model providers respect Zoom’s requirements involving retention periods and not training AI models with customer content. Zoom has contractual agreements with our third-party model providers and a third-party risk management program that includes annual audit rights.

For more detailed information regarding data retention, read our Security and Privacy Whitepaper.

When onboarding new tools, it's critical that they meet your organization’s policies. Safety and security are paramount, especially when dealing with AI. That means it is just as important to have a partner who focuses on giving your organization the tools necessary to deploy AI safely. 

That’s why we built safety features directly into the account controls for AI Companion, giving admins choice when setting up AI Companion to align with their organization’s needs. This includes features like auto-starting AI for a meeting and locking down who can use certain features for meetings they host. 

If you’re not sure about a certain setting for your entire organization, you can create a pilot group and test it before you roll it out to everyone. Whether you want to have certain settings for specific groups in your organization or change the settings for the entire account, you get to decide how to make AI Companion meet your needs.

For example, when it comes to handling auto-start for meeting features, some organizations don’t want their employees to miss a meeting summary. They choose to enable meeting summaries to auto-start for all employees. Other organizations only want meeting summaries turned on as a specific choice for each meeting. Being able to control the settings at account, group, and user levels provides you the flexibility to align with your organization’s policies.

Our Security and Privacy Whitepaper has detailed information about model processing for AI Companion.

When using most AI tools today you will likely see phrases like, “AI can make mistakes. Review for accuracy,” and AI Companion is no different. The world is still adapting to the power and limitations of generative AI, and these notices serve as a reminder to validate AI outputs. 

We understand that accuracy is a major concern for organizations. That’s why we partner with external firms to also perform quality testing on our AI products. In our Zoom AI Companion Performance Report for 2024, TestDevLab assessed AI Companion against several competitors and found that the Word Error Rate (WER) in Zoom Meeting transcriptions was far lower than Microsoft Copilot.

We’re proud of the low WER and how it benefits our customers who use AI Companion. Our most used AI Companion feature is meeting summaries, and meeting transcripts power a large number of AI features across Zoom Workplace. A higher-quality transcript means higher-quality AI outputs for our customers across our suite of products.

Transparency is critical. It’s an important part of all human relationships, and that extends to how we interact with each other online and with artificial intelligence. When we build features for AI Companion, we try to build the most straightforward, user-friendly experience possible.

Whenever AI Companion is active in a meeting, anyone in the meeting will see the AI Companion diamond icon blinking in the top right corner. When a meeting participant clicks on that icon, they’ll get more information about which AI Companion features are in use in that meeting. When a meeting participant opens the AI Companion side panel in a meeting, they’ll see if they can ask in-meeting questions or request the meeting host to turn the feature on.

Meeting hosts also have a lot of control over which AI Companion features are active during their meetings and can turn them on and off. Perhaps you’re in a meeting and you’d rather not have the next agenda item summarized or recorded. You can pause the meeting summary, the recording, or both, and restart them when you’ve finished with that particular topic. Everyone in the meeting will be informed when AI Companion turns on and off.

It’s not just Zoom Meetings where AI Companion can be easily configured. When someone enters a Zoom Meeting, Zoom Webinar, or Zoom Phone call, they’ll see or hear a notice when AI Companion is active. Account admins can customize these notices for their users. Participants can also send a request to the host for AI Companion to be activated.

When it’s not clear what’s recording or how it’s being used, people can feel uncomfortable. AI Companion gives you all the settings you need to provide your employees, clients, and other partners with the clarity and confidence you need.

Our Security and Privacy Whitepaper has detailed information on our notices.

Getting a new product, platform, or tool fully integrated into your organization takes time, and it’s not the only aspect you need to focus on. Teaching employees and getting them to use a new tool can be just as much work as making sure you have the right tool to begin with. 

Luckily, Zoom has a series of guides, how-to articles, and other support content to help you get started. In our Zoom AI Companion Onboarding Center, we continue to create and update content to help those whose job it is to implement new software and tools and grow their usage in their organization. 

• If you want a summary of AI Companion’s features and suggestions on how to roll it out internally, check out our Guide to AI Companion. 
• If you need assets to send to employees internally, check out our templates in our Zoom AI Companion Onboarding Center.
• If you need product-specific guides for AI Companion, such as Zoom Meetings, Zoom Team Chat, and more, check out the Zoom AI Companion Onboarding Center.

It’s more than the supporting documentation we offer, it’s the product itself. Again and again, our customers are excited about the ease of use of AI Companion and the way it quickly becomes an everyday tool that they can rely on. 

Every organization and its needs are different. At Zoom, we are lucky to serve many different people in many different industries, and we want those people to have as much information about the Zoom Workplace platform as possible at each step of their decision-making process and rollout.

For in-depth information about our practices and how they work with your organization, read our Security and Privacy Whitepaper.

Join our webinar, Navigating Legal and Privacy Challenges in AI Implementation, to hear directly from Zoom’s Chief Legal Officer, Cheree McAlpine, and Micron Technology’s VP & Chief Security Officer, Hanan Szwarcbord. They’ll share how they tackle key legal, privacy, and security challenges in AI implementation.