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Zoom AI Companion and Teams Copilot are a different problem from Otter or Fireflies when they run inside their own platform. There is no bot in the participant list to eject, because the feature lives in the service already hosting your call, and the controls sit in settings you may not own. Here are the exact paths, the live control most guides omit, and the two places where turning it off does not do what it looks like.
A third-party notetaker has to get into your meeting the way a person does, by dialing in as a participant. That is what makes it removable: it shows up in the list, and you can eject it. Built-in AI is not in the list because it never joined. It runs inside the service that is already carrying your audio.
The practical consequence is that most controls here are settings rather than actions, and the setting is often owned by someone else. There is one real live action, covered below: a Zoom host can stop Meeting Summary during the call. If you are not the host or an admin, the most reliable move in the room is the social one: ask the organizer to stop it, and confirm they did.
One qualification, because it cuts against the framing above. Zoom now supports bringing AI Companion into meetings hosted on Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, and in that configuration it does join as a participant and can be removed like one. The “nothing to eject” rule holds for a platform’s own AI inside its own meetings; it does not hold for Zoom’s AI visiting someone else’s.
Sign in to the Zoom web portal, then take the path that matches your scope:
In any of those, open Zoom AI and toggle the meeting summary features off. Admins changing an account or group can also click the lock icon, which prevents users below them from turning it back on.
If the toggle is grayed out
It has been locked above you. Zoom’s documentation is explicit: if a feature is grayed out, it has been locked at the account or group level and must be changed by an admin. This is worth knowing because it catches account owners too, who reasonably expect their own settings page to be authoritative. A setting locked at the group level still reads as unavailable in your personal settings, so the fix is to change it at the level where the lock was applied rather than the level where you noticed it.
Stopping it during the meeting
This is the control most guides skip, and it is the only one that works in the moment. A Zoom host can open Zoom AI during the call and stop Meeting Summary, or stop all Zoom AI use, and has the option to delete the associated meeting assets.
It matters more than it sounds, because of how the summary is scoped: Zoom documents that Meeting Summary covers the meeting from the point it was enabled. Stopping it partway therefore limits the summary to what came before, rather than leaving a full-meeting summary behind. If a call turns sensitive halfway through, speaking up is not futile.
In the Teams admin center, go to Meetings → Meeting policies, open the Recording & transcription section, and set Copilot. The dropdown offers four options:
Assign the policy to the users or groups it should apply to.
“Off” is a default, not an enforcement
This is the detail that catches people, and it comes from Microsoft’s own documentation: the only Copilot policy setting you can enforce is “On with saved transcript required.” The others create a default that your organizers can change.
So an admin who selects Off has expressed a preference, not a guarantee. An organizer can still switch Copilot on for their own meeting. If your compliance posture assumes the tenant setting is binding, that assumption is worth testing before you rely on it, and enforcement of the outcome you actually want may need to come from policy and training rather than the dropdown.
Because Copilot builds on the transcript, transcription policy is the other lever worth reviewing at the same time. Check what your meeting policies set for transcription rather than assuming it matches the Copilot setting.
Most people asking this question do not run the tenant. Honest options, in order of how well they work:
We make a local notetaker, so it is worth being direct about where it does and does not belong in this conversation.
Everything above is governed by your organization. When an admin disables Copilot or locks Zoom AI, that is a decision your employer is entitled to make, frequently for legal or records-retention reasons you may not be able to see from your seat. Running your own capture tool is not the workaround for that, and we are not suggesting it. If your organization has decided meetings are not recorded, a local recording is still a recording, and it is still your employer’s policy that governs it.
Where Minutes is a reasonable answer is the case where notes are wanted and permitted, and the open question is only where they live. It records device-side, transcribes locally with whisper.cpp, and writes markdown to a folder you control, which some organizations prefer for confidential work precisely because it keeps the record inside the perimeter they already govern. That is an architecture to propose to whoever owns the policy, not a way around them.
To be exact about our own limits: conversation content leaves your machine when you send it somewhere, which means a summarizer you configured, or an AI agent you connect and ask to read your meetings, whose provider then receives what it reads. Out of the box neither is happening. The complete list is on our security page. For third-party bots, which are a different problem with different fixes, see removing AI notetaker bots.
And the constant: tell people you are recording, and follow your organization’s policy on it. The legal detail is in recording consent law by state.
Next step
Admin interfaces in both products change often. Verify the current path in your own tenant before relying on any of this, and confirm the effect on a test meeting rather than assuming a saved setting took effect.