Zoom AI Companion & ZoomMate: What You Get in 2026

If you went looking for Zoom AI Companion recently and found the name half-gone from Zoom's own menus, you're not imagining it. In June 2026 Zoom retired the brand, kept the features, and launched something new called ZoomMate on top. Here's the untangled version.

Three questions cover most of what people want to know: what is Zoom AI Companion and what does it include, what is ZoomMate and is it worth $20 a month, and — a search that has quietly grown its own audience — how do you turn the whole thing off. This guide answers all three, plus the privacy questions that usually follow.

What Zoom AI Companion is — and what happened in June 2026

AI Companion launched in 2023 as Zoom's built-in assistant: not a separate app, but a layer woven through Meetings, Team Chat, Phone, Whiteboard, Docs, and Mail. It grew fast — a cross-product side panel arrived with version 2.0 in late 2024, and AI Companion 3.0 reached general availability on December 15, 2025, adding retrieval across your meeting history, connected files in Google Drive and OneDrive, and a more conversational way of working with all of it.

Then, in June 2026, Zoom did something companies rarely do with a three-year-old brand: it retired the name. The features didn't go anywhere. They're now presented as native parts of Zoom Workplace under plain descriptive labels — meeting summary, smart compose, call summary — rather than under an umbrella brand. If your admin portal, your mobile app, and Zoom's own help pages currently disagree about what to call things, that's the rebrand rolling through; some official documentation still said "AI Companion" months after the announcement.

The same month, Zoom launched ZoomMate — and this is where people get tangled. ZoomMate is not the new name for AI Companion. It's a separate, paid, agentic product that builds on what used to be the Custom AI Companion add-on. A Zoom spokesperson put it plainly: ZoomMate is a new work surface, not a replacement for AI Companion. So the mental model for 2026 is two layers: the included AI features that come with paid Zoom Workplace plans, and ZoomMate, an optional add-on for people who want the AI to go beyond summarizing and start doing.

What's included on which plan

The pricing logic has stayed steady through the rename: the core features ride along with eligible paid Zoom Workplace plans at no extra cost, the free tier gets a small taste, and the agentic capabilities are where the new money is. Availability can vary by region and industry vertical, so treat this as the map and Zoom's pricing page as the territory.

Snapshot as of August 2026, North America. A $10/month standalone AI option for Basic users appeared in December 2025 but had left Zoom's live pricing pages by mid-2026.

For context on that $20: a dedicated cross-platform note-taker sits in the same range — Laxis starts free with 300 minutes a month and its paid tier is $15.99 — so the choice is less about price than about whether you need the agentic layer inside Zoom or coverage across every platform you meet on.

Two fine-print items worth flagging. Meeting summary does not require you to record the meeting — it's a separate function with its own retention settings, which is why some teams get summaries from calls that were never recorded. And everything above needs an admin to have enabled it at the account level; a paid plan with the toggles off behaves exactly like no AI at all.

What it's genuinely good at

Having tested most tools in this category, we'd say the included features earn their keep in three places.

The zero-effort recap. Turn on meeting summary and every Zoom call produces a structured recap — what was discussed, what was decided, who's doing what next — without anyone installing anything or inviting a bot. For internal syncs among people who all live in Zoom, that's a real, recurring time-saver, and the smart chapters on longer recordings make hour-long sessions navigable.

The mid-meeting catch-up. Joining ten minutes late and asking the AI "what did I miss?" instead of derailing the room is the feature people don't expect to love and then quietly use constantly.

The drafting layer. Compose in Team Chat and Mail turns bullet fragments into sendable messages. It won't win awards, but it clears the small-writing backlog that eats afternoons.

The honest caveats are the ones that apply to every meeting AI, Zoom's included: summaries occasionally misattribute a remark or hand an action item to the wrong person, so anything consequential deserves a human read before it's shared. And the output quality tracks the conversation — meetings where people say "the decision is X and Maria owns it" summarize beautifully; meetings that trail off don't.

The boundaries worth knowing before you rely on it

None of these are flaws. They're the edges of what the product is designed to be, and knowing them up front saves you from discovering them mid-quarter.

It's built for the Zoom side of your week. The included features are at their best inside Zoom Workplace. Zoom has been reaching outward — licensed users can now send Zoom's AI into supported Microsoft Teams and Google Meet meetings, and My Notes can capture other meetings from your device — but if your calendar splits across three platforms every week, you'll want to think about where all those notes should live, which is a workflow question more than a feature one. This is the gap cross-platform note-takers exist for: a tool like Laxis sits above the platform layer, capturing and summarizing Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams calls into one searchable archive — so the answer to "what did we promise them?" doesn't depend on which app the promise happened in.

If Zoom is where your week happens, that boundary costs you nothing. If half your calls are on Google Meet or Teams, it means the summary lives in one place and the rest of your week lives somewhere else — which is the case for a cross-platform note-taker like Laxis, covered at the end of this piece.

Summaries and transcripts are different animals. The AI summary is an interpretation; the transcript is the record, and it comes with its own settings, retention rules, and plan requirements. If what you actually need is the verbatim text of a call, that's a separate rabbit hole we've mapped in our Zoom transcription guide — and if you need the video itself, the mechanics live in our guide to recording a Zoom meeting.

The workflow ends at Zoom's doorstep. Without ZoomMate, the summary is a destination, not a hand-off: pushing action items into a CRM or project tracker is still a person's job. That's precisely the gap ZoomMate was built to close — which brings us to it.

ZoomMate: what $20 a month actually adds

ZoomMate launched June 1, 2026, priced from $20 per user per month in North America (EMEA and APAC to follow later in the year), sold as an add-on to Zoom Workplace or standalone. Each seat includes 2,200 AI credits a month, which meter the heavyweight agentic work; routine things like meeting summaries and note-taking don't burn credits.

What the credits buy is the shift from "tells you what happened" to "does something about it":

• Agentic search across your Zoom content, the web, and connected enterprise systems — ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Workday among them — so one query can pull from the meeting, the ticket, and the record at once.
• Task orchestration: scheduling through Google Calendar or Outlook, updating records, and triggering workflows in tools like Jira and Slack, driven from what was said in the meeting.
• Content generation: decks, documents, spreadsheets, and reports assembled from meeting context rather than a blank page.
• Custom agents, added June 22, 2026 — build your own from a prompt, on top of the earlier low-code agent builder with Model Context Protocol support.

Who is it for? Teams that already run their day in Zoom Workplace and want the follow-through automated — the sales ops manager tired of copying commitments into Salesforce, the project lead who wants Jira tickets born directly from standups. If you were a Custom AI Companion customer ($12/user), you're the audience ZoomMate was built on: Zoom has said existing customers of that add-on will continue to be supported. If your team barely uses the included summaries yet, start there; the add-on rewards teams that have already made the free layer a habit.

Before you buy: run the credit math. 2,200 credits sounds abstract until you map it to your actual week. Pilot ZoomMate with a handful of heavy users for a month, watch what the credit burn looks like for your real mix of search, automation, and document generation, and then decide seat count from data. Credits are allocated per user, so a team of light users and one power user is priced differently than the average suggests.

How to turn it on — and how to turn it off

Both directions matter. Half the "Zoom AI isn't working" tickets trace to a switch nobody flipped; and plenty of teams have good reasons — client confidentiality, legal review, simple preference — to switch some or all of it off. During the rebrand you may see the settings tab labeled AI Companion in some tenants and reorganized under new names in others; the toggles behave the same.

Enabling it (admin)

1. Sign in to the Zoom web portal as an account owner or admin.
2. Go to Account Management → Account Settings, then open the AI tab.
3. Toggle on the features you want — meeting summary, in-meeting questions, compose — and decide whether summaries auto-start for every meeting or wait for the host.
4. Scope and lock. Settings apply at account, group, or user level; the lock icon prevents individuals from changing what you've decided. Roll out by group if some teams handle sensitive calls.

Turning it off

1. Account-wide (admin): same path — Account Management → Account Settings → the AI tab — toggle off each feature, and lock the setting if you need it to stay off for everyone.
2. Just for you: sign in at zoom.us, open Settings on your personal account, find the same AI section, and switch off what you don't want — unless an admin has locked it on, personal toggles win for your own meetings.
3. For one meeting: the host can stop or decline the summary from the AI icon in the meeting toolbar, and can delete AI-generated assets for that meeting afterward.
4. As a participant: you can't switch off another host's AI, but you'll always see an on-screen indicator when it's active — and asking the host to pause it is a normal, reasonable request.

The privacy questions people actually ask

Does Zoom train AI on my meetings? Zoom's standing commitment, written into its terms of service since August 2023, is that it does not use customer audio, video, chat, screen shares, or other communications content to train Zoom's or third parties' AI models. Third-party model providers, per Zoom, don't retain customer content beyond narrow trust-and-safety exceptions.

Whose AI is it, exactly? Zoom runs a federated setup: requests route dynamically across Zoom's own hosted models and partner models — Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT among them, with specialists like Perplexity handling web search. Organizations with residency requirements can restrict processing to Zoom-hosted models only, or to Zoom's trust boundary, via the ZMO and ZM+ deployment options.

Who sees the summary, and how long does it live? Sharing follows the host's settings — typically the host receives it and decides distribution. Retention is whatever your admin configured, which is worth confirming rather than assuming; there's also a zero-data-retention option that lets a host decide per meeting whether a transcript is kept at all. If your organization has never made these decisions deliberately, that — more than any model question — is the privacy homework.

Where a cross-platform note-taker fits alongside it

If Zoom is where all your meetings happen, the included features plus (maybe) ZoomMate can genuinely be the whole answer, and you should enjoy that simplicity. The complement case appears when your weeks look like most people's: a Zoom client call Monday, a Google Meet interview Tuesday, a Teams review Thursday — and a growing pile of platform-shaped note silos.

That's the lane a dedicated note-taker occupies. Laxis records, transcribes, and summarizes across Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams without sending a bot into the room, extracts action items with owners, syncs them to HubSpot or Salesforce, and — for multilingual teams — runs live side-by-side translation across 100+ languages, something we've covered in depth in our piece on real-time meeting translation. It starts free at 300 transcription minutes a month, with paid plans at $15.99 and $29.99 per user. For a fuller comparison of how the dedicated tools stack up on Zoom specifically — including Zoom's own built-in option — our Zoom note-taker roundup walks through the field.

One meeting memory across Zoom, Meet, and Teams

Laxis captures, transcribes, and summarizes every call in 100+ languages, pulls out action items with owners, and syncs them to your CRM — whichever platform the meeting happened on. Start free with 300 monthly minutes.

Try Laxis Free

The bottom line

Strip away the naming churn and Zoom's 2026 AI story is tidy: a capable set of included features that most paying customers should simply switch on, and a $20 agentic add-on for teams ready to automate the follow-through. The rename cost the world some clarity, but it didn't take anything away from users — the summaries, the catch-ups, the compose tools are all still there, still bundled.

The real decisions are quieter ones. Which meetings should the AI touch, and which shouldn't it? Who reviews a summary before it becomes the record? Where should notes live when your meetings don't all happen in one app? Answer those deliberately and the tools — Zoom's, and whatever you layer across platforms — will serve you rather than surprise you.

Frequently asked questions

What is Zoom AI Companion?

Zoom AI Companion is the AI assistant built into Zoom Workplace since 2023, covering meeting summaries, in-meeting questions, drafting help in Team Chat and Mail, and phone call summaries. It's included at no extra cost with eligible paid Zoom plans. As of June 2026 the AI Companion name is being retired, but the same features live on inside Zoom under their own names.

Is Zoom AI Companion free?

The features are included at no additional charge with eligible paid Zoom Workplace plans such as Pro, Business, and Enterprise, so there's no separate license to buy. Free Basic accounts only get small monthly allowances of a few AI features. ZoomMate is different: it's a paid agentic add-on at $20 per user per month in North America.

Did Zoom rename AI Companion to ZoomMate?

No. Zoom retired the AI Companion name in June 2026 and kept the features running inside Zoom Workplace under descriptive names like meeting summary and smart compose. ZoomMate, launched June 1, 2026, is a separate agentic add-on that builds on the earlier Custom AI Companion tier. A Zoom spokesperson called it a new work surface, not a replacement.

How do I turn off AI Companion in Zoom?

Admins go to the Zoom web portal, then Account Management, then Account Settings, select the AI tab, and toggle off features like meeting summary, locking the setting if needed. Individuals can do the same under their personal Settings, and a host can stop a summary mid-meeting from the AI icon in the toolbar. Settings locked by an admin override personal choices.

What is ZoomMate and what does it cost?

ZoomMate is Zoom's agentic AI add-on, launched June 1, 2026, at $20 per user per month in North America with 2,200 AI credits included monthly. It automates tasks, searches across Zoom and connected tools like Salesforce, Jira, ServiceNow, and Slack, and generates documents from meeting context. Routine features such as meeting summaries don't consume credits.

Does Zoom use your meetings to train AI?

Zoom states that it does not use customer audio, video, chat, screen sharing, or other communications content to train its own or third-party AI models, a commitment written into its terms since August 2023. Requests are processed by a mix of Zoom-hosted and partner models, and admins can restrict processing to Zoom-only infrastructure where residency matters.