Use Zoom's Meeting Summary to Capture Operations Meeting Action Items

What This Does

Zoom's meeting summary automatically generates a written summary of your meeting, including key discussion points, decisions made, and action items with owner names, delivered to your inbox right after the call ends.

Before You Start

• You have Zoom installed and are signed in
• Your firm is on an eligible paid Zoom Workplace plan (meeting summary is included at no extra cost)
• You've turned on meeting summaries in your Zoom settings
• Participants should be informed that AI summarization is active (Zoom shows a notification at the start of the meeting)

Steps

1. Turn on meeting summary before your next call

Sign in at zoom.us and open Settings from your profile icon. Look for the meeting summary controls in the AI section and turn on automatic meeting summaries. You only need to do this once. Zoom used to call this "AI Companion" and dropped that name in 2026, so older help articles and colleagues may still use the old term.

2. Start or join a meeting normally

When you start a meeting, you'll see a small AI icon in the meeting toolbar at the bottom. If the summary isn't already running, hover over that icon, tick the Meeting summary checkbox, then click Start Zoom AI.

3. Run your meeting as usual

Just meet normally. Discuss your exception queues, outstanding items, compliance updates. You don't need to take notes.

4. After the meeting ends

Within a few minutes of ending the call, Zoom emails you (and optionally other participants) the meeting summary. It includes: a brief overview, key topics discussed, and action items with the name of whoever said they'd handle each task.

5. Copy action items to your tracker

Open the summary email, scan the action items section, and paste them into your Excel exception tracker or email them to the relevant team members.

Real Example

Scenario: You have a 30-minute weekly operations team call discussing open NIGO items, failed trades, and wire exceptions. Normally someone takes notes and they don't always capture everything.

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

What you get (in your inbox 5 minutes after the call): A 1-page summary: "Meeting covered 4 open NIGO items. Action items: [name] to follow up with advisor on Smith account by Friday. [name] to escalate failed trade #4422 to compliance today. [name] to update wire tracking sheet by EOD."

Tips

• Say action items clearly and with a name attached during the meeting: "John, can you follow up on that by Friday?". the summary captures ownership better when it's explicit
• If the Zoom meeting summary isn't available on your firm's account, use Otter.ai (free tier) as an alternative: otter.ai/meeting-transcription
• Review the summary before forwarding. AI occasionally misattributes who said what

Tool interfaces change, if the meeting summary settings have moved, search "meeting summary" in Zoom's help center at support.zoom.us.