This documentation was created in partnership with UW Medicine.
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UW Zoom offers AI-based features, branded as "Zoom AI Companion," to help UW faculty, staff, and students improve productivity and collaborate more effectively.
The UW Zoom service team only enables features that are HIPAA-compliant, FERPA-compliant, and meet UW privacy and security policies. Accordingly, the following Zoom AI Companion features have been authorized for use at UW, including UW Medicine:
All other Zoom AI Companion features are disabled and unauthorized for use at UW.
To view and change available UW Zoom AI Companion settings, visit the UW Zoom web portal AI Companion settings page.
Protecting UW information for our students, faculty, and staff is a shared responsibility for everyone at the UW. Before using Zoom AI Companion, review the interim guidelines for using AI-based tools at UW. UW Medicine workforce, please review the UW Medicine interim guidelines.
Zoom does not use your data to train external AI learning models. Zoom does not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments or other communication — such as poll results, whiteboard and reactions — to train Zoom’s or any third-party artificial intelligence models.
Learn more about how Zoom AI Companion handles your data.
When a meeting concludes, an AI-generated summary of the meeting, including action items, is saved to the cloud and available to the meeting host in their UW Zoom web portal. Meeting Summary allows meeting hosts to initiate an AI-generated summary of their meeting. By default, Zoom AI Meeting Summary is disabled during meetings. For meetings you host, you can start Meeting Summary by clicking the AI Companion button during your meeting. The summarization of the meeting only begins when the host or co-host clicks the AI Companion button during the meeting. By default, only the host has access to the Meeting Summary. Learn more about AI Meeting Summary.
Limitations of Zoom AI Meeting Summary
While AI-powered features can be valuable tools that increase productivity, AI outputs and AI-generated content do have limitations. AI outputs are not perfect. The performance of AI-powered systems is based on the data they have been trained on, which can lead to errors or inaccuracies (such as leaving out critical information or creating inaccurate content) when presented with new or unexpected situations. Zoom AI Companion utilizes developing AI technology, and AI Companion features may provide incorrect, inaccurate, misleading, or offensive responses. It is important for individuals using Zoom AI features to check AI-generated content for accuracy.
In-meeting questions allows meeting participants to ask questions about the content of the meeting thus far. Preset questions are provided, such as Catch me up, Was my name mentioned?, and What are the action items?, which can be useful for catching up when you join late or return after stepping away from the meeting. By default, in-meeting questions are disabled during your meeting, until the meeting host clicks the AI Companion button during the meeting. Only the meeting host can enable in-meeting questions during the meeting. As the meeting host, start in-meeting questions by clicking the AI Companion button during the meeting. More specific custom questions are also possible. Learn more about In-meeting questions.
Zoom AI Smart Recording allows meeting hosts to organize a cloud recording into sections called smart chapters, get key takeaways in a quick and digestible format through recording highlights, and identify action items to take after the meeting or webinar.
This enables meeting and webinar participants, or students reviewing course material, to quickly find and consume specific topics. Zoom AI Companion will attempt to highlight the most important parts of the recording. Meeting hosts can manually adjust highlights as needed and can save highlights as separate files. Zoom AI Companion will automatically group the recording into different sections with timestamps. Meeting hosts can edit chapters, to adjust the start and end time of the chapter.
By default, Zoom AI Smart Recording is disabled for all licensed UW Zoom meetings at the UW. Meeting hosts (instructors) must enable AI Smart recording on the Zoom AI Companion settings page in order to make cloud recordings with AI Smart Recording available for student viewing. Learn how to enable AI Smart Recording.
AI Companion for Team Chat allows UW Zoom users to summarize lengthy threads and catch up on important details at a glance. By default, summarize chats with AI Companion is disabled. Thread summary with AI Companion can be enabled on your Zoom AI settings page. All other AI Companion Chat features are disabled. Learn how to enable AI Companion for Team Chat.
For more information about these features, please see the Zoom AI Companion FAQ.
When the meeting host starts AI Companion during a meeting, a meeting summary and meeting transcript is saved to their UW Zoom account.
AI-generated meeting summaries are automatically deleted from the UW Zoom Cloud after 30 days for all users. The meeting host can delete AI-generated files on the Zoom Meeting Summaries management page prior to auto-deletion.
Zoom cloud recordings and AI Companion-generated meeting transcripts are automatically deleted from the UW Zoom Cloud after 120 days, EXCEPT for UW Medicine and UW School of Medicine employees (see below). Prior to auto-deletion, meeting hosts can delete meeting transcripts on the Zoom Transcripts page.
For UW Medicine and UW School of Medicine employees, Zoom cloud recordings and transcripts are automatically deleted after 30 days. Please note that any recordings older than 30 days are automatically moved to the UW Zoom trash bin. These recordings remain in the trash bin for 30 days before being deleted permanently. Within those 30 days, you may retrieve recordings at any time. Learn how to download recordings from the Zoom cloud.
Faculty, staff, and students should review UW Records Management Services Best Practices for Zoom records to determine how long Zoom-generated records should be retained. Meeting hosts enabling AI Companion features are responsible for ensuring that meeting artifacts are retained in accordance with UW record retention policies and are saved in such a way that the files can be accessed in the event of a document request.
Instructors considering using Zoom AI features within their courses should consider whether such features advance student learning. The Teaching@UW AI+Teaching webpage offers guidance for talking with students about AI, as well as some sample syllabus statements instructors might consider adapting for their course.
The UW Medicine GenAI Task Force has evaluated and approved the new Zoom AI Companion features. UW Medicine personnel should review and follow all of the above guidelines, with particular attention to the following:
Always keep a person in the loop
As with any AI-generated content, Zoom AI transcripts, notes and summaries must be reviewed and edited as needed by a UW Medicine team member to ensure both accuracy and appropriateness.
Zoom AI features are not approved for patient-facing appointments
Zoom AI features are not approved and should not be used for any patient-facing interactions, such as telemedicine visits. For telemedicine appointments scheduled in Epic, Zoom AI features have been disabled. For telemedicine appointments scheduled outside of Epic, Zoom AI features should not be used, even if available.
School of Medicine Zoom courses move to Panopto
All UW Medicine cloud-based Zoom recordings, AI transcripts and AI artifacts are set to auto-delete after 30 days. To protect data, School of Medicine instructors should follow the instructions for integrating Zoom and Panopto lecture capture. This allows for Zoom course recordings to be automatically moved to your course folder in Panopto. The steps for Zoom-Panopto integration, created in collaboration with the School of Medicine, take only a few minutes to implement.
For student-facing MD and WWAMI program curricular video content, the School of Medicine’s Mediasite platform remains the primary home. If you are creating material for the MD program curriculum, please coordinate with your course administrator, clerkship administrator or the Academic and Learning Technologies team (somalt@uw.edu) to plan and schedule uploads for your course or clerkship. Video content from other School of Medicine programs may be hosted on a case‑by‑case basis. All recordings must adhere to HIPAA, FERPA and School of Medicine privacy policies. Patient identifiers and other sensitive data must be redacted before videos are uploaded.
If you have technical questions about Zoom, please contact UW IT Services at help@uw.edu. For UW Medicine’s AI policies, please see UW Medicine’s Interim Guidance for Generative AI in the healthcare setting or email GenAIatUWM@uw.edu.