My Perspective on Zoom Perspectives 2023

At Zoom’s industry analyst conference, Zoom Perspectives, the company laid out its priorities and roadmap, while demonstrating how to do hybrid events the right way. With a mix of in-person and remote attendees, Zoom showcased how its various technologies can create an engaging hybrid event for all attendees.

There were sessions on Zoom events, collaboration, meetings, the Zoom ecosystem, go to market, and much more. For me, the highlights were the discussions around contact center/CX, AI, and of course, hearing from Zoom Founder and CEO Eric Yuan.

According to Yuan, the key to Zoom’s growth is innovation, and the biggest opportunity for Zoom is to leverage its platform for developers to build solutions and vertical applications.

While Zoom’s growth has slowed down since the pandemic days when everyone turned to Zoom for everything from business meetings to yoga classes, book groups, and even weddings and funerals, the company continues to expand its total addressable market by introducing new products and entering new market segments. The company announced an email and calendar application and is expanding its contact center capabilities.

Zoom as a Collaboration Platform

Yuan stated that Zoom’s number one goal is to be a collaboration platform, noting, “Our customers still don’t understand the value of our platform – they use Zoom and Zoom Phone but don’t know about all of the functionality and features like whiteboard, scheduling, Huddles, etc. We need to make sure our end users understand what we offer. And we’ll keep adding features and capabilities to be a collaboration platform.” He noted that “7,500 Zoomies want to build the best collaboration platform to make the world a better place.”

Zoom is also increasing its focus on verticals by leveraging the platform to create vertical solutions. For example, Zoom’s CCaaS capabilities can be used to create solutions for service, sales, and other departments.

And of course, a top priority is AI. As Yuan noted, “We’ve been investing in AI since before ChatGPT became popular. Our AI approach is federated AI – we have our own large language model (LLM) and can embrace other LLMs.” Zoom is developing new solutions based on its federated AI approach, including meeting summaries, and much more. As CFO Kelly Steckelberg noted, “The age of AI and LLMs has arrived and we’re enabling smarter workflows and embedding AI into workflows to provide customers with richer insights. We’re also providing tailored solutions for different departments.”

As Zoom expands from a video conferencing vendor to a unified communications vendor, to a platform and line of business applications provider, its strategy is to provide one platform delivering limitless human connections that drive outcomes, creativity, and happiness by:

• Driving impact with intelligence
• Making teamwork more meaningful
• Strengthening customer relationships
• Enabling seamless workflows

A Federated Approach to AI

Driving impact with intelligence is all about AI. Zoom is taking a slightly different tactic from most other vendors with its federated approach. Through this federated approach Zoom is looking to maximize quality and flexibility by offering its own Zoom models, as well as partnering with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta in order to help deploy the right model for each use case. Zoom chooses the best (and most economical) model for each use case and does the work in the back end, relieving customers of having to choose the right model. For example, Zoom uses its own LLMs for meeting summaries, while using OpenAI for Team Chat Compose capabilities, and Anthropic for contact center use cases. This gives Zoom and its customers more flexibility as new LLM models are introduced, while avoiding vendor lock in. Going forward, customers will be able to bring their own models.

We heard about some exciting new AI capabilities that will be announced at Zoomtopia in October, but unfortunately the information is NDA for now.

Transparency is an essential element of any AI approach and Zoom laid out how it ensures responsible AI. As shown below, Zoom described four key principles to responsibility:

Case in point, the Meeting Summary feature is turned off by default and must be enabled by the administrator, who can then choose whether or not to enable data sharing. End users get full notice when the Meeting Summary feature is enabled.

I spoke with Mahesh Ram, Head of AI Applications, about Zoom’s AI strategy, which focuses on being federated, empowering, and responsible. Ram discusses how Zoom provides transparency and ensures security and privacy (e.g. Zoom does not provide customer data to third parties like OpenAI).

(Note: After the event, there were several articles and twitter discussions about Zoom’s new Terms of Service as of July 27, which caused a great deal of confusion about Zoom’s right to use customer data. While Zoom clarified that “for AI, we do not use audio, video or chat content for training our models without customer consent,” there is still some misinformation and concerns about what the Terms of Service actually entail. For more information, see the blog by Zoom’s Chief Product Officer Smita Hashim).

Zoom Contact Center

Contact center momentum is picking up, with more than 500 enterprise CCaaS features launched since Zoom Contact Center was introduced. The latest new capabilities are workforce engagement management (available now) and quality assurance capabilities powered by AI (in beta). The new Workforce Management works with Zoom Contact Center to improve agent performance and boost productivity by generating staffing based on forecasting, monitor schedule adherence, and much more – all in a single tool and interface.

In this video interview, Vi Chou, head of product for phone and contact center, discussed Zoom’s focus on contact center and the company’s efforts to extend and augment the customer experience via video, as well as the use of Zoom Contact Center beyond the contact center, Zoom’s omnichannel capabilities, and more.

As a provider of both telephony/unified communications and contact center, Zoom is promoting the use UCaaS and CCaaS together. In this video interview, Ted Yoshikawa, head of product, Zoom Contact Center, described how customers are using Zoom Phone and Zoom Contact Center together. He also discussed how Zoom customers are using video in the contact center for various use cases, including the use of video kiosks. And of course, Yoshikawa talked about how Zoom uses AI capabilities within its contact center offering, including generative AI meeting summaries, workforce management, and more.

Unified Communications

And speaking of unified communications, Theresa Larkin, Global Lead, UCaaS product marketing manager discussed what’s new in UC. In the past year, Zoom introduced Mail, Calendar, and Scheduler, which I expect to hear more about at Zoomtopia.

According to Larkin, Zoom is focusing on minimizing the “toggle tax” created by distractions and other tasks, as well as increasing meeting effectiveness and improving employee connection and collaboration. Once again, there was lots of discussion about enhancements that are currently NDA – stay tuned.

Workvivo

At the event the analysts learned more about Workvivo, which Zoom recently acquired. As I tweeted (or X’d?) during the event, “I didn't understand why Zoom acquired Workvivo, but after hearing from them, now I get it. Great EX focus that's really needed in organizations.”

As Workvivo CEO John Goulding and CMO Gideon Pridor explained, Workvivo is a unified digital workplace and employee experience platform with three pillars – communications, engagement, and digital workplace.

I spoke with Goulding to drill down a bit more into Workvivo.

Setting the Stage for Zoomtopia

Zoom Perspectives was packed with information – much of which is NDA for now or at least until Zoomtopia in October. It was great to see all the innovations coming out of Zoom at such a rapid pace, and to hear about Zoom’s strategy for growth. The Zoom team was open and transparent, which is what analysts expect and hope for at these types of events. There’ll be lots more to talk and write about after Zoomtopia – watch this space.