Use Zoom's AI to Summarize Archival Committee Meetings

What This Does

Zoom's built-in AI 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 (meeting summary is included with eligible paid Zoom Workplace plans, including Zoom One Pro and higher, and many institutional/education licenses)
• You're the meeting host, or the host has enabled meeting summaries for participants
• Meeting participants have been notified that AI summarization is in use (best practice and often legally required)

Steps

1. Turn on meeting summaries before your meeting

Sign in at zoom.us and open Settings. Look for the meeting summary controls in the AI section and turn on automatic meeting summaries. If your account offers smart recording, turn that on too for automated transcription of recorded meetings.

Zoom used to group these features under the name "AI Companion" and dropped that brand in 2026, so older help articles and colleagues may still use the old term.

What you should see: The meeting summary controls switch to the enabled state.

2. Start your meeting and enable AI Summary

When your meeting starts, hover over the AI icon in the meeting controls toolbar at the bottom of the Zoom window.

Tick the Meeting summary checkbox, then click Start Zoom AI.

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

What you should see: A message visible to all participants that Zoom AI is creating a summary.

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: Start the meeting summary at the beginning 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

• The summary 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.