According to PCWorld, Zoom has launched its AI Companion 3.0 initiative, making its AI assistant available via the web and, crucially, to users on free Basic accounts. The key concession for free users is a hard limit of just 3 AI-powered meetings per month. The features now on the table include automatic meeting summaries, AI-generated notes, and the ability to ask questions directly during a call. The assistant can also retrieve data from Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive, create follow-up tasks, draft emails, and generate daily reports. Furthermore, it can create and edit documents in Zoom Docs based on meeting data, with exports to formats like PDF and Word.
The Freemium Hook Is Strong
Look, this is a textbook freemium upsell move, and honestly, it’s a smart one. Giving free users a tiny, tantalizing taste of generative AI in meetings is a brilliant way to create friction. You use it for a couple of productive meetings, get used to having a summary magically appear, and then—bam—you hit that wall. Three meetings goes by in a blink for anyone remotely active. Suddenly, the pain of manually taking notes or trying to remember action items feels acute. That’s when the upgrade to a paid plan starts to look a lot more appealing. Zoom isn’t being purely charitable here; it’s running a highly effective trial campaign.
Is Three Meetings Enough?
Here’s the thing: three meetings is basically nothing. It’s a sample. A demo. For a student or someone with very occasional needs, maybe it’s a nice perk. But for anyone in a professional setting, even a casual one, it’s a drop in the bucket. You’ll burn through that allowance in a single busy week, if not a single day. This move seems less about empowering free users and more about clearly delineating the value gap between the free and paid tiers. It shouts, “See what you’re missing? This could be your whole work life.” The limit feels deliberately restrictive to drive that point home.
The Data and Integration Question
The ability to pull from Google Drive and OneDrive is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it makes the AI Companion more powerful and context-aware. On the other, it raises immediate questions about data privacy and permissions. How is that data being processed? Is it used to train Zoom’s models? While Zoom has its own privacy assurances for the Companion, anytime you start mixing corporate data from multiple cloud sources into a third-party AI, you need to be cautious. For businesses, this is a feature that will likely require a serious security review before being greenlit, free tier or not.
A Crowded Field of AI Assistants
Zoom is also not operating in a vacuum. Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and even standalone apps like Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai are all battling in this space. Making the AI free (if limited) is a clear competitive tactic to lock users into the Zoom ecosystem. Why switch to another meeting platform if Zoom gives you a little AI for free? But the risk for Zoom is that the “little” part might frustrate users more than it delights them. If the experience is clunky or the summaries aren’t great, that limited free taste could backfire, sending people to look for a dedicated, better AI tool elsewhere. So the pressure is on for AI Companion 3.0 to genuinely impress in those three short meetings.
