AI Responsibly: Zoom's Tailored Solutions for Data Governance

[CSA_Jenny]

As organizations explore the benefits of generative AI, one of the most prevalent concerns revolves around privacy and data governance. At Zoom, we firmly believe that AI should be both powerful and adaptable, conforming to your specific requirements rather than forcing you to adapt to it.

 

Customers using AI Companion in Zoom Workplace have three distinct deployment options available, where each involves different approaches to data processing and third-party AI models. Customers can reach out to Zoom support to understand their default deployment and to select their preferred AI Companion data processing option based upon their data residency preferences, compliance requirements and account availability.

No matter what deployment option a customer uses for AI Companion, Zoom's commitment to responsible AI remains. In line with these commitments to responsible AI, we do not use any customer audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, or other communications-like customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions) to train Zoom’s or its third-party artificial intelligence models. Your content is your content, and this applies to all of our AI Companion deployment options.

Keeping it close with ZMO: A fully Zoom-managed approach

If it's important to you to limit data processing to the Zoom Platform, Zoom-hosted Models Only (ZMO) is the option for you. Available AI features are powered solely by Zoom-hosted models running on infrastructure managed directly by Zoom. With ZMO, the AI models are hosted in the region where your account is provisioned and allows us to process the data in region within the Zoom trust boundary.

 

Available AI Companion features are powered by Zoom-hosted models running on infrastructure managed by Zoom. That means:

 

• Content data used for AI Companion is processed within Zoom's infrastructure
• Deployment aligns with data residency preferences for supported regions

ZMO is a good fit for highly regulated industries or customers with strict internal policies that still want to utilize AI capabilities to enable features like Meeting Summary.

 

However, because this approach does not use external model providers, AI Companion features that rely on third-party model providers are not available with this hosting option. Currently, AI Companion's ZMO deployment option supports a number of popular features, among them are Meeting summary, Team Chat Compose, Whiteboard and Docs content generation, and many others.

 

For the most up-to-date details on ZMO applicable features, see the “AI Companion Features” section of the AI Companion Security and Privacy Whitepaper.

 

Utilizing Amazon Bedrock with ZM+: Enable a broader set of models in Region

For customers who want to use third-party models, but still want to keep AI model processing under Zoom's technical control, Zoom-hosted Models Plus (ZM+) offers a compelling solution.

 

This approach adds Anthropic’s large language models running on Amazon Bedrock to the Zoom-hosted models. Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service provided through Zoom’s existing cloud services provider AWS. Importantly, Bedrock allows AI Companion to be powered by cutting-edge third-party models—such as those from Anthropic—without sending user content to those model providers.

 

In short:

 

• AI Companion data processing remains
• Utilizes trusted and familiar AWS infrastructure
• Aligns with data residency preferences for supported regions

While ZM+ provides for an expanded set of AI models, not all AI Companion features are currently supported. For more information, see the “AI Companion Features” section of the AI Companion Security and Privacy Whitepaper.

For customers choosing to utilize Zoom's European infrastructure, ZM+ is the default AI Companion deployment option. To change to ZMO, please reach out to Zoom support or your account team. Customers hosted in regions beyond the U.S. or the EU, can access available AI Companion features through ZMO. We are currently in the process of rolling out ZM+ to more regions.

 

Bring your own data to customize your AI Companion

ZM+ has another advantage compared to ZMO as this option is now available with Custom AI Companion. This premium add-on for AI Companion powers the customization of AI Companion’s agents and skills to expand its knowledge for your organization. 

With Custom AI Companion paid add-on for Zoom Workplace plans, you can include information from your organizational data sources, including third-party applications, using Zoom AI Studio for expanded knowledge to help drive decisions, actions, and complete tasks.

 

Unleash the full power of Zoom AI Companion with federated AI and access to industry-leading models

For customers looking for the full experience with everything Zoom AI Companion has to offer, utilizing our federated AI approach is the right choice.

This approach comes in two flavors:

For customers provisioned on our global data cluster, we currently offer our full portfolio of AI models —from Zoom-hosted models to leading third-party AI model providers and services like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Perplexity.

Our federated AI approach:

• supports the widest range of AI Companion features;
• enables use of large language models from leading providers.

This option is perfect for organizations focused on innovation and performance who are comfortable with external model usage and AI Companion data being processed outside our trust boundary. And as with other approaches, inline with Zoom's commitment to responsible AI, we have implemented controls to ensure that customer content data is not used for training models. This includes use of features that require third-party AI providers.

For customers provisioned on our local data cluster, for example in Europe, we offer a combination of ZMO and ZM+ with additional models by OpenAI and Elvenlabs available for Zoom Contact Center. The communication with these models is done via API-Calls to data centers in the region.

 

Choose what works for you: A flexible AI strategy built around trust

With our flexible approach to AI, you don’t have to choose between performance and compliance. Whether you’re running in highly regulated environments or scaling innovation fast, Zoom gives you the ability to align AI usage with your data governance priorities.

Deployment Option	Data Residency Support	GDPR Alignment	Third-Party AI Model Providers	Supported Regional Infrastructure
ZMO	Aligns with data residency preferences for supported regions	Supported	No	US, EU, SG, KSA, AU, IN, CA
ZM+	Aligns with data residency preferences for supported regions	Supported	Anthropic via Amazon Bedrock (hosted on AWS)	US, EU
Federated	Might involve global processing, including the US	Supported	Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity	US, EU

It's also important to consider other aspects including performance, use cases, and desired feature sets. Whether you're operating in a highly regulated environment or pursuing cutting-edge AI capabilities, Zoom provides the right level of control.

For more detailed information on how and why we use data—and how it’s processed and stored—check out our blog post A Legal and Compliance Guide to Zoom AI Companion or watch the recording of our webinar  Zoom’s approach to AI privacy & security.

Original post: Zoom Blog