Zoom AI Companion in 2026: what it includes, what ZoomMate adds, and how to deploy it

By Michael Obraitis, Managing Partner, and Michael Dale, CEO · Published August 6, 2026 · Last reviewed August 2026 · ADAM Pulse Knowledge Base · Zoom Mastery Series, Guide 1

What is Zoom AI Companion, and what changed in June 2026?

AI Companion was Zoom's integrated AI assistant, embedded across Meetings, Team Chat, Phone, Whiteboard, Docs, Mail, and Calendar. Zoom introduced it in 2023, expanded it with a cross-product side panel in AI Companion 2.0 (October 2024), added agentic capabilities through 2025, and shipped AI Companion 3.0 to general availability on December 15, 2025.

In June 2026, Zoom announced that AI Companion's features are now natively built into Zoom Workplace and the AI Companion name is being retired from the interface. Zoom's community success guide is explicit: the familiar AI Companion name has officially retired, and the built-in features now carry descriptive names such as meeting summary, smart compose, and call summary. At the same time, Zoom launched ZoomMate, which it describes as its new agentic product that builds on Custom AI Companion and takes it further.

What do you get at no additional cost?

Zoom's current language: AI features are included with eligible paid Zoom Workplace plans and may not be available for all regions or industry verticals. Free Basic accounts get only the limited monthly allowances described on Zoom's pricing page, while paid plans include the core features without a separate per-use charge, subject to Zoom's usage policies. In December 2025 Zoom also introduced a $10 per month standalone AI option for Basic users, but as of August 2026 that offer no longer appears on Zoom's live pricing pages, where the purchasable standalone product is ZoomMate. Confirm current packaging on Zoom's order page.

The newest additions came with AI Companion 3.0 (December 2025) and the Enterprise Connect 2026 announcements (March 2026): agentic retrieval across meeting summaries, transcripts, and notes plus connected sources such as Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive, a Post Meeting Follow Up template, Daily Reflection Report, agentic writing mode, personalization and memory, a dedicated conversational AI tab in the Workplace app, and AI Canvases (AI Docs, AI Sheets, AI Slides) in preview. Zoom Phone AI prerequisites are a paid Pro, Business, or Enterprise account.

What does ZoomMate add?

ZoomMate is aimed at turning conversations into completed work. Per Zoom's June 1, 2026 launch release and pricing materials, it is sold as a Zoom Workplace add-on or standalone, starting at $20 per user per month in North America, with EMEA and APAC availability later in 2026. Each user gets 2,200 AI credits per month, allocated per user.

• Agentic search across Zoom, the web, and connected enterprise systems such as ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Workday.
• Task orchestration: scheduling through Google Calendar or Outlook, updating records, and triggering workflows in connected apps such as Jira and Slack.
• Content generation: decks, documents, spreadsheets, and reports built from meeting context.
• Custom AI agents created from prompts (added June 22, 2026), building on the earlier low-code agent builder with Model Context Protocol support.
• Deep research and other credit-consuming capabilities. Routine features such as meeting summaries and AI note taking do not consume credits.

Zoom also announced Zoom AI On-Prem for regulated enterprises in June 2026, and Zoom AI Services with a Scribe API for developers at Enterprise Connect 2026.

How does the AI actually work?

Zoom uses what it calls a federated approach: requests are routed dynamically across Zoom's own hosted models and third-party models operated as subprocessors. Zoom's AI documentation in the Zoom library, as retrieved August 6, 2026, lists Zoom-hosted models, Anthropic models (Claude 4.1 or later), and OpenAI models (GPT-5.1 or later), plus specialized providers for specific features: Perplexity for web search, ElevenLabs for audio generation, Google Gemini for whiteboard image generation, and AWS Rekognition for image moderation. The December 2025 release also cited NVIDIA Nemotron open source models. Zoom states that changes to the models used in federation can occur at any time, so treat version numbers as a dated snapshot and consult Zoom's current AI documentation and subprocessor disclosures.

For organizations with residency or sovereignty requirements, Zoom offers three deployment options:

The practical workflow has not changed: an admin enables a feature and sets any locks, a host or user activates it, participants see the in-product AI indicator, the feature processes permitted context, and a person reviews the output before it is shared or stored. Generated content can omit context, misattribute a statement, or assign an action item to the wrong person, so human review remains mandatory for anything consequential.

Is it secure, and who can see the data?

Zoom's standing commitment, written into its terms of service since August 11, 2023 and repeated on the AI security and privacy page:

Zoom does not use any customer audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, or other communications-like customer content to train Zoom's or its third-party artificial intelligence models.

Zoom also states that third-party model providers do not retain customer content, with limited trust and safety exceptions, and that data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Zoom identifies portions of its AI portfolio as ISO 27001, 27701, and 27017/18 certified and within its SOC 2 scope; certifications are scoped to identified systems and report periods, so review the current certificate and SOC report scope for the exact service being deployed. For US public sector, Zoom AI Companion received FedRAMP JAB Moderate authorization in September 2024 on the Zoom for Government platform. For healthcare, Zoom supports HIPAA programs through a Business Associate Agreement, but a BAA does not by itself establish that every AI feature is appropriate or available for every healthcare workflow. Confirm eligibility, contractual coverage, configuration, retention, and permitted data use for each feature before processing protected health information.

Retention controls worth knowing: summaries are stored according to account, group, and user retention settings, hosts can delete meeting assets during the meeting, and a Meeting Summary Zero Data Retention option lets hosts decide per meeting whether a transcript is retained at all. There is no published default retention number; retention is whatever your admin configures, which means the real question is whether your organization has made that decision deliberately.

For the full analysis of the training question, the 2023 terms of service history, and what participants actually see when AI is active, read our companion article: Does Zoom use your meetings to train AI?

How should administrators deploy it?

Treat this as a managed business capability, not a toggle. The controls live in the Zoom web portal at the account, group, and user levels (site level for Zoom Phone), and many can be locked so users cannot change them. A phased rollout that works:

How should end users work with it?

The quality of AI output tracks the quality of the conversation. Before the meeting, decide whether AI is appropriate for the topic and confirm participants know it is on. During the meeting, state decisions and owners explicitly ("the decision is", "the owner is"), confirm names, dates, and amounts aloud, and correct important misunderstandings in the conversation itself. After the meeting, review the summary before sharing it, fix errors while the discussion is fresh, and move approved tasks into your real system of record.

A prompt formula that consistently produces usable drafts: specify the outcome, audience, source context, format, and constraints. For example: "Using this meeting summary, draft a concise follow up for the project team. Include confirmed decisions, owners, and due dates. Keep it under 200 words."

What mistakes should you avoid?

On measurement: a simple value model helps. If 100 employees attend four AI-eligible meetings a week and save ten minutes each on notes and follow up, that is roughly 111 hours a week. Validate the assumption with your pilot data rather than quoting it as fact, and track correction effort alongside it, because high usage can coexist with poor outcomes.

Frequently asked questions

References

Prepared by ADAM Pulse (USA Telecom Consulting LLC) — managed Zoom Phone / network services. Support: (888) 989-4872 · support@adampulse.us