Use Zoom's AI to Summarize Archival Committee Meetings

What This Does

Zoom's built-in AI Companion automatically generates a summary of your recorded meeting, covering key discussion points, decisions made, and action items, so you can skip manual note-taking during department meetings, donor conversations, and advisory committee calls.

Before You Start

• You have a Zoom account (AI Companion is included in Zoom One Pro and higher, and many institutional/education licenses)
• You're the meeting host, or the host has enabled AI Companion for participants
• Meeting participants have been notified that AI summarization is in use (best practice and often legally required)

Steps

1. Enable AI Companion before your meeting

Sign in to your Zoom account at zoom.us. Go to Settings → AI Companion.

Turn on Meeting Summary with AI Companion and optionally Smart Recording (for automated transcription of recorded meetings).

What you should see: AI Companion toggles are green/enabled.

2. Start your meeting and enable AI Summary

When your meeting starts, look for the AI Companion button in the meeting controls toolbar at the bottom of the Zoom window (it looks like a star or sparkle icon).

Click it and select Start Meeting Summary.

A banner will appear in the meeting notifying all participants that AI summarization is active.

What you should see: "AI Companion is creating a summary" message visible to all participants.

3. Run your meeting normally

Conduct your meeting as you normally would. You don't need to do anything special; Zoom is transcribing and summarizing in the background.

If important decisions or action items come up, you can say them clearly for the transcript (e.g., "So the action item is: Jane will draft the deaccession policy by March 30th").

4. Review the AI-generated summary after the meeting

After the meeting ends, Zoom emails the summary to the host (and participants if you've configured it that way).

The summary includes: key topics discussed, decisions made, action items, and next steps.

Go to zoom.us → Reports → Meeting Summary to find and share past summaries.

What you should see: A structured summary with bullet points covering main discussion points and a separate action items list.

Real Example

Scenario: Your archives department holds a monthly processing priorities meeting with three staff members. You've been rotating who takes notes, an inconsistent and time-consuming task.

What you do: Enable AI Companion at the start of next month's meeting. At the end, Zoom sends everyone a summary noting: which collections were prioritized, which grant deadlines are coming up, and who volunteered to lead each project.

What you get: Consistent, automatic meeting documentation. No more competing notes documents, and nothing falls through the cracks between monthly meetings.

Tips

• AI Companion works best when people state things clearly and avoid heavily jargon-filled technical discussions. Brief clarifications ("let's be specific about the accession number") help accuracy
• Review the action items list carefully before distributing; Zoom sometimes misattributes who is responsible for what
• Check your institution's recording consent policies before enabling AI summarization on calls with donors, researchers, or outside partners

Tool interfaces change. If a button has moved, look for similar AI/magic/smart options in the same menu area.