How Zoom is charting its course towards an AI-first platform

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan has outlined the company’s vision for the future of work as it doubles down on infusing artificial intelligence (AI) across its collaboration platform and driving global growth, particularly in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region.

Yuan, who founded Zoom in 2011, described the company’s current evolution as “Zoom 2.0”, where it is transforming into a platform that seamlessly integrates various work functionalities, from video conferencing and chat to email, document collaboration and task management. The platform would be open, integrating with other services, such as Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive.

He also underscored Zoom’s resolve to become “AI first”, signifying a shift from AI-assisted features to AI-driven services that proactively handle tasks for users. AI, he explained, could pre-filter emails, summarise lengthy messages and draft responses, freeing users from tedious tasks. “AI will do everything for us first while we, as human beings, will assist.”

While acknowledging that this vision is still in its early stages, the launch of Zoom AI Companion 2.0 at Zoomtopia this year marks a significant step forward. He envisions a future when “every morning when you wake up, AI Companion has already done so much work for you”.

This transformation extends to the enterprise space, where Zoom is vying for market share against unified communications and customer experience platforms. Yuan believes Zoom’s winning formula remains its commitment to delivering a “better product, better service and better price”.

He also emphasised Zoom’s focus on ease of use and innovation, driven by close customer interactions and a rapid development cycle, contrasting this with competitors burdened by legacy systems, arguing that the AI era requires a reinvention of existing features, creating an advantage for Zoom’s modern architecture.

Yuan expects education institutions and healthcare organisations to be early adopters of Zoom’s AI capabilities, with financial companies and the public sector following at a more cautious pace due to compliance concerns. The company’s focus remains on higher education, its earliest customer base, and healthcare, where it holds the top spot in the US telemedicine market.

Addressing data security and privacy, a critical concern for enterprise customers, particularly in regulated industries, Yuan reiterated Zoom’s commitment to not using customer content for training its AI models or third party models. He assured customers that they will continue to retain control over their data, with options to disable recording, transcription, summaries and even action items.

While committed to data privacy, Yuan also addressed the question of how Zoom improves its models without relying on user data. He explained that the company uses a federated AI approach that combines its own models with third-party models, including those from Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta. Zoom also uses internal data from its employees and data sourced from external partners to improve model performance.

On geopolitical concerns that have arisen in the past, Yuan said these have not cropped up over the past three years. He attributed this to Zoom’s transparency and robust security features, including post-quantum encryption that keeps information safe and decipherable only by parties who possess the decryption keys, to alleviate security concerns.

Turning to the Asia-Pacific region, Yuan identified three key growth markets: India, spurred by the launch of Zoom Phone; Japan, benefiting from improved translation quality; and Southeast Asia, particularly Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand.

Yuan highlighted the need to educate customers on the full breadth of Zoom’s platform capabilities and to further promote services such as its contact centre offering. He identified the public sector, education, healthcare and financial services as key verticals for growth in the APAC region.

While expressing confidence that Zoom will remain profitable, as it has been for a while, Yuan acknowledged that the company’s growth was affected by customers that cut back on spending after the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as corporate layoffs in the past 18 months.

Still, Yuan remains optimistic about future growth, which he expects to come from improvements in productivity and efficiency, as well as investments in AI. “When we kicked off this fiscal year, we mentioned that the first half would be relatively challenging. The second half, in terms of growth, will be much better. We’ve already raised our full-year revenue guidance for the third quarter and the rest of the year,” he said.

Yuan also discussed Zoom’s return-to-office policy, clarifying that it is a twice-weekly requirement driven by two key factors: the need for employees to be in the shoes of customers who are embracing hybrid work, and fostering in-person interactions, particularly for new hires, to build trust and relationships.

On what keeps him up at night, Yuan cited the need to revive Zoom’s customer-centric mentality, including the need to act on customer issues quickly, and to inculcate a strong company culture, especially with a large influx of new employees hired during the pandemic.

The CEO also highlighted the importance of driving growth at a time when competitors are offering bundled packages at seemingly lower prices. He stressed the importance of conveying the value and lower total cost of ownership of Zoom’s offerings despite the pricing strategies of rivals. “We need to tell a better story,” he said.