Introducing Zoom AI Companion Pilot
The Zoom AI Companion, a new feature from Zoom, the campus videoconferencing platform, is now available as a pilot project under the Aggie AI umbrella.
The pilot is open to select staff members for administrative uses in their daily work, starting in December 2024 through March 2025. If you are interested in joining the pilot, please contact the IT department in your unit.
Goals & Outcomes
Gather feedback from pilot participants on opportunities and limitations of this tool.
Identify and highlight the benefits and limitations of Zoom AI in preparation for a wider release.
Develop communications and usage guidelines following existing guidance from UCOP.
Develop support documentation, including information on how to enable and disable the feature.
Use Zoom AI Companion Pilot
- Generate a meeting summary and next steps for what was discussed in your meetings and share them through email.
- Please note: Summaries generated by Zoom AI Companion and Smart Recording may contain errors in fact, tone, or intent. Meeting hosts should not release these summaries or recordings without reviewing and/or correcting the content as needed.
- Make a smart recording to review cloud recordings faster through highlights, smart chapters, summaries, and next steps.
- Ask in-meeting questions and get answers from the content discussed in your meeting thus far.
Learn more about Zoom AI Companion. Other features such as Teams & Chat, Mail & Calendar, Docs, or Whiteboard are not included in the pilot but may be available in the future.
Learning Resources
- Zoom AI Companion: Draft campus guidance and technical documentation
- AI essentials at UC Davis (UCD Learning Management System)
- AI fundamentals (UCD Learning Management System)
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is Zoom AI secure?
- Before using the Zoom AI features, participants are expected to complete the AI Essentials Training Course which covers foundational AI concepts, UC policies regarding the usage of AI tools, and opportunities for application in Higher Education.
By default, Zoom AI Companion will be disabled in each account. Each person participating in the pilot can decide to enable or disable Zoom AI Companion at any time during the pilot. During meetings, only the host can enable Zoom AI Companion during each specific meeting. Unlike other services, Zoom AI Companion does not offer the ability to send a “bot” to a meeting without the person being present at the meeting. The person who wants to use Zoom AI Companion must be present in a meeting in which the host has Zoom AI Companion enabled for their own account, and the host will need to enable them for the meeting, if they wish to do so.
Participants should be aware of the data protection level of the topics being discussed in meetings. Zoom AI features are only approved at UC Davis for meetings that include data and conversations classified as P1 and P2, but consult with the Privacy Office for any privacy-sensitive use cases. Do not discuss any P3 or P4 data when Zoom AI features are enabled. P3 data includes communications with UC Legal, sensitive research, and personally identifiable information; P4 data includes Social Security Numbers, sensitive health information, credit card numbers, and research falling under International Traffic in Arms Regulations.
Note: Zoom does not use audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, or other communications-like content (such as poll results, whiteboards, and reactions) to train Zoom’s or third-party AI models. - How do I get started with Zoom AI Companion?
- Enable AI Companion: click the AI Companion control button (sparkle icon) in the bottom meeting toolbar to activate AI features. Once you enable the AI Companion for a meeting, a notification will appear on everyone’s screen. Note: AI Companion features will not be active or have access to content in meetings you host until you manually enable them on a meeting-by-meeting basis.
Manage features and settings: adjust AI Companion features and settings, and access meeting summaries and smart recordings in the UC Davis Zoom web portal. Meeting summaries are available for 30 days and smart recordings are available for 100 days.
Review request notifications: meeting participants can request that the meeting host disable AI features for a meeting.
Join meetings: when joining a meeting where AI Companion features are in use, you will receive a notification describing the active capabilities for that meeting, and a glowing sparkle icon will be visible in the top right corner of your Zoom screen.
Ask questions: start a chat with the AI Companion to obtain details about anything that you missed during a meeting.
Provide feedback: share your experience and ask questions in the Zoom AI Companion pilot community at #zoom-ai-pilot in the UC Davis Slack. An evaluation survey will follow at a later date. - Who can I contact about the Zoom AI Companion pilot?
- If you need technical assistance or have questions about the pilot, please email ithelp@ucdavis.edu.
Content on this website is subject to change as AI tools continue to develop. Page last updated December 16, 2024.