Gainsight teams stay connected, save time with Zoom AI Companion

When third-party AI note-takers began popping up in internal Zoom meetings, Gainsight CIO Karl Mosgofian knew it was something his team needed to address.

“If you’ve got five people in a meeting with five different AI assistants and each one is recording the same meeting somewhere, it becomes more of a security and privacy issue. Now that data is living in all those different places,” Karl said.

Karl and his team knew that standardization could help contain the spread of many different tools across the company — they’d been in a similar situation before. Back in 2020, Gainsight consolidated from several meeting platforms to Zoom and that decision led to a better user experience for employees. 

“Being a very globally dispersed company, since we started leveraging Zoom, it’s been a real game-changer,” said Brandon Wolf, senior software-as-a-service ops engineer at Gainsight. “We struggled for years with all these different meeting tools. The simplicity that Zoom manages to bring into the workforce has been tremendous.”

A simpler way to integrate AI

Simplicity turned out to be a major draw when Zoom introduced AI Companion, a smart AI assistant with capabilities across the platform to help people save time and collaborate better. 

As a company, Gainsight saw the potential of AI — in its own customer success platform and in the time-saving capabilities it could offer employees. Brandon quickly seized the opportunity to give employees access to AI without the security and privacy concerns they were experiencing from unvetted third-party apps.

“From the top down, AI has been a focus for us. As soon as we found out AI Companion was available to us, I turned it on,” Brandon said. 

“We ran it through security and privacy, but that was relatively easy because we had already vetted Zoom as a platform,” Karl added.

“It’s one of the most useful examples of generative AI that I’ve seen integrated into an existing app,” Brandon said. “I appreciate that with Zoom, as long as you’re paying for a license, you get AI Companion. You don’t have to be on a higher tier.” This means that Gainsight is saving tens of thousands of dollars a year as a result of not paying for another AI assistant provider that could charge them up to $30 per license per user. In addition to not having to pay a premium for AI capabilities, they saw cost savings from not having to reimburse employees who were expensing third-party AI apps. 

Zoom’s clear stance on not using customer content data to train AI models was another benefit for the Gainsight team. “I really appreciate the transparency that Zoom had with listening to customers saying they didn’t want their data used to train AI, and figuring out another way to do it,” Brandon said. 

Giving employees control over what gets shared

Once people started using AI Companion, Karl and Brandon saw a decrease in the number of third-party AI applications being used. Meeting hosts now have more control over what information gets shared without worrying about attendees using outside AI note-takers to capture potentially sensitive information.

Karl sees these controls as standard meeting etiquette in a modern work environment. “It should be up to the meeting organizer whether or not the meeting is being recorded. If the meeting organizer wants there to be an AI summary of the meeting, then they should turn it on, and if they want to share it, then they should share it,” he said. 

Employees can decide for themselves how they want to use AI Companion meeting summaries, whether they’re turned on automatically at the beginning of every meeting or on an ad-hoc basis. For example, Karl prefers to start a meeting summary for every meeting he hosts. 

“I don’t know if I might want to refer back to something, but if it’s easy to have it, then I’m glad to know I’ve got it sitting in my email archive if I need it,” he said. 

After the meeting is over, Karl often takes advantage of the ability to review and edit the summary before sharing it with his colleagues, removing off-topic conversations and making sure next steps are captured accurately.

Helping employees save time and stay connected

AI Companion’s meeting summaries help employees save time on note-taking, but that’s only part of the value it brings. It also helps teams stay more connected and helps people glean more from their meeting discussions.

“Meeting summaries are one of the most consumable forms of AI that we have that’s actually being used in the real world doing real stuff for people,” Karl said. “The biggest material impact is for people who need to create formal notes for meetings because that’s just pure time savings.” Before implementing AI Companion, Karl spent a portion of his meeting time solely focused on notetaking instead of taking part in important conversations, estimating that 17% more of his in-meeting time is now focused on impactful discussions because of AI Companion.

Brandon finds that he rarely rewatches meeting recordings but can easily scan a meeting summary to jog his memory about a conversation. “To have a summary that’s consolidated into talking points without having to record the whole meeting, I find that really valuable,” he said. “AI Companion can just simplify what was talked about, especially those times when you’re having a discussion and trying to work through something. You can get that idea encapsulated in a few sentences.”

As a busy executive, Karl also relies on meeting summaries delivered to his inbox to stay up to date on what’s going on with his team, even though he isn’t able to attend weekly IT operations meetings. Karl reported that he now has 1.5 more hours each week that he can spend in more impactful conversations making key decisions while still understanding what’s going on within his team. “I read through it because even though I never have time to join the meetings, I really like keeping my finger on the pulse of what’s discussed,” Karl said. 

Supporting a more transparent culture

Gainsight bills itself as a “human first” company with a strong culture of open communication. Karl noted that AI Companion’s meeting summaries have opened up new levels of collaboration and transparency within the organization.

While saving time and improving productivity may be measurable benefits of AI, Karl said that he’s also interested in the cultural impacts of making information more widely available across the company.

“What does it mean when everyone can read about what happened in a meeting, even when they weren’t there? It means even more transparency, better communication, and more openness within and across teams. That’s the lifeblood of a modern organization — the ability to collaborate and share information,” Karl said.