Use Zoom's Meeting Summary to Generate Meeting Notes

What This Does

Zoom's meeting summary automatically generates a written recap, including key discussion points, decisions made, and action items with owners, and delivers it to you within minutes of the call ending. For project managers running 5+ meetings per week, this eliminates 45-90 minutes of note-taking per meeting.

Before You Start

• You have a Zoom account with meeting summary available (included with eligible paid Zoom Workplace plans, including Pro, Business, and Enterprise)
• You are the meeting host or a co-host (the host controls AI features)
• Meeting participants have been notified that AI will summarize the call (required by Zoom and good practice)

Steps

1. Turn on meeting summary in your Zoom settings

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 you want it to run without manually starting it each time. Zoom used to call these features "AI Companion" and dropped that name in 2026, so older help articles and colleagues may still use the old term.

2. Start your meeting and start the summary

During the meeting, hover over the AI icon in the meeting toolbar (it looks like a small star or sparkle icon). Tick the Meeting summary checkbox, then click Start Zoom AI. A notification will appear to all participants telling them the meeting is being summarized by AI. This happens automatically if you turned on automatic summaries.

3. Let the meeting run normally

You don't need to do anything differently. Talk, share screens, and run the meeting as usual. Zoom listens to the audio and identifies speakers automatically.

4. End the meeting and receive the summary

Click End Meeting for All. Within 1-3 minutes, Zoom emails you a meeting summary. The email contains:

• A short paragraph overview of the meeting
• Key topics discussed (with timestamps)
• Action items with assigned owners (when the conversation clearly named someone)
• A link to the full meeting recording if you recorded

What you should see: An email in your inbox with subject line "Meeting Summary: [meeting name]" from no-reply@zoom.us within a few minutes of ending the call.

Troubleshooting: If you don't receive the summary, check that it was active during the meeting (you'll see a summarizing indicator in the meeting after you click Start Zoom AI). If participants joined from outside your Zoom organization, the summary may be delayed.

5. Review, edit, and share

Open the summary. The action items are good but not perfect, scan for anything it missed or misattributed. Copy the action items section and paste it into your project tool (Jira, Asana, Monday.com) or the team chat channel. Forward the full summary to attendees as your meeting follow-up.

Real Example

Scenario: You run a weekly project status meeting with 6 team members, your project sponsor, and a vendor contact. The meeting runs 50 minutes and generates 8 action items from different people.

What you do: Turn on the meeting summary before starting. Run the meeting normally. End the call.

What you get: Within 3 minutes, an email with:

• "The team reviewed Q1 milestone progress. API integration is on track; the data migration workstream is 5 days behind schedule due to legacy data quality issues. The vendor committed to a remediation plan by Thursday."
• Action items: "David, escalate data quality issue to database team by EOD Tuesday. Sarah (vendor), deliver remediation plan by Thursday. Marcus, update project plan with revised data migration timeline."

Time saved: Instead of 60 minutes of post-meeting documentation, you spend 5 minutes reviewing and forwarding the AI summary.

Tips

• Name the action item owner out loud: Say "Marcus, you'll handle the timeline update" instead of "someone should update the timeline". Zoom assigns owners much more accurately when names are spoken explicitly.
• Use the summary as your follow-up email: Copy the key points and action items, paste into a reply-all to attendees, and add one line: "Please confirm your action items." This is now a 2-minute follow-up instead of 20 minutes.
• Access past summaries: In the Zoom web portal, open your recordings and transcripts area to find all past meeting summaries, searchable by date and meeting name.

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