‘It’s not only centered around video anymore’: Zoom’s CEO explains the video conference giant’s next act

Zoom made a name for itself during the pandemic, becoming synonymous with video conference calls. But the company recently changed its name from “Zoom Video Communications Inc.” to simply “Zoom Communications Inc.,” a sign that it’s pushing beyond video. Other Zoom offerings include a Team Chat product comparable to Slack, a collaborative document platform that integrates with Zoom meetings, business phone features, and an AI companion. 

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan spoke to Fast Company about the company’s offerings and ambitions beyond video, his vision for the future of AI-powered work, and what the return to the office has meant for how people use Zoom. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

You recently dropped “video” from your company name. What does that mean for the future of Zoom?

When I started Zoom in 2011, the mission was very simple: to make video communication frictionless. And that’s pretty much what we did. 

So, when we started, everything centered around video. Now, you look at what we’re doing today: Way beyond video, we have a full workplace platform. We have Zoom Phone, Contact Center, Team Chat, Whiteboard, Zoom Docs. Essentially, our new mission is to build an AI-first work platform for human connection. It’s not only centered around video anymore. 

And what role is AI going to play in all that?

Before everyone talked about generative AI, we already heavily invested into AI—some traditional AI and some generative AI. We have a smart team and built our own large language model as well, even before ChatGPT.

Today, I open up my Zoom Workplace and I still spend a lot of time to manually do so many things. I check my email, look at my channel messages, phone calls, calendars, meetings, and sometimes I need to write in meeting notes. A lot of manual work. 

I think AI can completely change that. Essentially, AI will become my personal assistant. As a step one, to free up a lot of time and make my work more productive and help coordinate so many things—booking travel and managing travel plans, making scheduling meetings much easier, leveraging agentic technology to improve productivity.

Step two is even more interesting. We all work for five days a week. I think in the next 10, maybe 15 years, I think the four-day working week might become a standard because of AI technology. Step two of digital assistant technology is more like my digital twin. A personal large language model with my personal contacts, knowledge, skills, and everything. I can even send my digital twin to join a meeting.

Say you and I are working on a contract. You and I need to look at all the terms, negotiate, spend hours, days, or weeks to finalize the contract. In the future, I send my digital twin, you send your digital twin, and we let them work together and come up with a preliminary contract and just sign off.

Plenty of companies are working on AI, office software, and video conferencing. What sets Zoom apart?

I think on many fronts we definitely differentiate ourselves.

One thing is our innovation velocity. We stay very close with the customers, really understand their pain points, to be the first one to come up with a solution.

Number two is really about our philosophy. We want to build a project that just works. When you look at our customers, when they’re using Zoom versus competitors’ products, their feedback is, I really enjoy using Zoom because it’s a very simple intuitive experience—no learning curve—and any network environment and all kinds of devices, it just works.

The third thing is really about AI. We just finished our Q4 and we’re working on creating our quarterly board slide deck. Quite a few team members have to get all the information from all our systems and work on our slides—many days work just to get a quarterly slide deck. What if we leveraged AI and could tell the AI, please create our Q4 slide deck? The AI agent will take action proactively, look at all the systems, grab the information and our board slide deck template and create slides automatically. 

It used to be every meeting, our chief of staff would write down all the notes and create a Zoom Doc to share. Today, we leverage Zoom AI and, after each meeting is over, we automatically create Zoom Docs with all the action items and insights, and also leveraged our agent to create some tasks assigned to me or assigned to you. It’s a kind of AI-first experience.

How has the return to the office affected how people are using Zoom?

First of all, the way they use the conference room is very different. Prior to COVID, say you and I joined from a conference room, and some people joined remotely, probably they’re in listening mode, because the conversation is driven by the people in the conference room.

Now, it’s very different. Even if people join remotely, they want to have the same experience as the ones sitting in the conference room. Let’s say there are five people in the conference room. From the remote side, they want to see each of those people. The conference room experience is different, and we are much better positioned than other competitors.

Another change is, when you work remotely, there’s probably more conferencing meetings and phone calls. Now that it’s back to the office, especially for internal meetings, sometimes it’s just a walk to your desk or your office, and we can talk. Asynchronous collaboration is used more frequently. 

We have a Zoom Team Chat solution. People use, more and more, Zoom Team Chat and create more Zoom Docs. If you cannot reach out to your teammates in real time, create a Zoom Doc, share it to the Team Chat. Other people can look at it later on. These async collaboration capabilities are becoming more and more popular, together with the AI.

And Zoom is often associated with office work, but you also recently built Zoom Workplace for frontline workers. What motivated that and what does that expansion look like?

We build a workplace platform. However, there’s different use cases for some vertical markets—for educators, the financial industry, healthcare, and frontline workers. The use case is different and the feature set is also different. You can’t build one feature set to serve all these different use cases.

The frontline workers’ market is big. A lot of our customers already deploy the Zoom platform. However, they gave us feedback that they need some features for their frontline workers. So, back to our innovation philosophy, when customers share with us the pain point, what can we do? Listen to them and build a new service.

That’s how we built a Zoom Workplace for frontline workers, for educators, and for healthcare as well. I think the market is big and we wanted to build more vertical solutions for these different use cases.

And as you listen to customer needs, how do you decide which features to build out?

We serve customers from freelancers and SMB customers all the way to large enterprise and Fortune 100 customers. It’s so many customers, so many different use cases, and lots of feedback as well, so how to prioritize is very important.

We look at each different segment and how to improve our product experience. When you build a feature you cannot say, just deliver the feature and you’re done. You’ve got to keep caring about those features—how to make those features better and better every day.

Number two is really looking at new use cases, features, and opportunities. For example, we already have scheduling functionality, and a customer asked how they can easily schedule a meeting with someone outside the same company. That’s feedback we can go on and a reason we’re working on improving that.

The third thing is, we also want to expand our total addressable market. Zoom Docs is a great example. It’s not like traditional Google Docs or traditional Word. It’s a new service. And now, given the AI era, we’re thinking about how to leverage AI to build some brand new services. 

How do you get customers who still mainly associate Zoom with video to try these products?

Internally, we talk about that a lot. On the one hand, Zoom got popular, sort of becoming a household name, during COVID. On the other hand, it also hurt us, because so many other collaboration and communication platform capabilities, customers do not know about.

As an example, we have a free Zoom Team Chat service that compares with Microsoft Teams or Slack. A lot of customers don’t know it.

I think our priority of focus on marketing is how to drive entire platform awareness. Otherwise, we build so many services and customers do not know. That’s a huge disconnection, and it takes some time for the end user to realize the entire platform’s capabilities. I think as long as we keep improving each of the services and make the product really work better and better, sooner or later, customers will follow that.

Video as well, prior to COVID, was only used by some universities and knowledge workers. Most people never heard about Zoom. Hopefully this time we aren’t going to wait so long, and we are going to be proactive to tell users and tell the public, we have way more services than videoconferencing.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91274277/its-not-only-centered-around-video-anymore-zooms-ceo-explains-the-video-conference-giants-next-act?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss