Zoomtopia 2024 – we had questions, did Zoom have answers?

Big growth in Zoom’s annual extravaganza, Zoomtopia. A hybrid event with focus on customer experiences, and how AI – in the form of Zoom’s AI companion – will help them. In the run-up to the event, we had some burning questions and wanted to know if Zoom had the answers.

Firstly, it’s important to highlight that this isn’t a one-off update from Zoom. Cavell are incredibly well-briefed on the Zoom proposition on a regular basis. Zoom has been experiencing rapid growth in the communication sector, evidenced by the more than 7 million Zoom Phone users. Now, Zoom’s Contact Centre proposition, which has been in the market for less than 3 years, already boasts more than a thousand customers globally and hundreds of thousands of users. No other communications vendor has experienced the same proportional growth over this period, and this is reflected in the rapid development and rollout of not just features and functions, but entire portfolio areas. CEO Eric Yuan has always cited Zoom’s speed as a key differentiator. Since Zoomtopia 2023, Zoom has added more than 3 thousand new features across its platform.

Despite the almost constant stream of updates and briefings that Zoom keeps the industry abreast with, ahead of this year’s Zoomtopia we had some key questions in my mind and wanted to try and understand how Zoom would address these. I’ll outline these key questions and highlight how Zoom’s approach to the market and event announcements addressed them, or otherwise.

Has Zoom moved beyond its pandemic poster-boy image?

Unequivocally yes. Surprisingly at Cavell, we still get questions about Zoom in the context of the pandemic which started more than 4 years ago. Most in communications will know that Zoom is now fully established as one of the market’s leaders in several sectors including video conferencing and UCaaS with its eyes firmly set on CCaaS too. But still, it’s worth reiterating that Zoom now boasts millions of paid subscriptions globally after converting its freemium popularity into commercial success.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that not every organisation and application that was successful in the pandemic made it this far. See House Party: Epic Games’ video-based social media platform that gained more than 50 million users in 2020 but was shut down before the end of 2021.

Zoom’s 2024 status as UCaaS Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader just goes to show how much it has achieved and should demonstrate that it will be a communications powerhouse for years to come.

Can Zoom maintain the free status of its AI Companion?

Commercial models for AI within communications are causing huge debate within the industry. Often AI capabilities are made available as a chargeable add-on. Most prominently by Microsoft with its Copilot which is $30 PUPM add-on for Microsoft 365 users.

As a side note, Zoom actually went directly after Microsoft in its keynote saying that AI Companion registers significantly fewer errors across transcription and meeting summaries than Copilot. Zoom commissioned the study which was conducted by TestDevLab. Still, interesting to note the direct comparison from Zoom, who are apparently not shying away from the AI assistant battle that’s looming.

Zoom, and CEO Eric Yuan maintain that AI Companion will remain free as part of all paid Zoom subscriptions. Zoom does though charge for AI in a host of other areas of its portfolio and the leadership team fully acknowledge that more customised AI and advanced capabilities will be chargeable and that they always have charged for domain-specific areas of AI.

Still, we had naively assumed that AI Companion’s free status in comparison to Copilot was because of its more limited scope. However, that’s not the case. During the event, a host of demonstrations showcased AI Companion’s breadth of capability across the Zoom platform: within Zoom Docs, Zoom Contact Centre, and probably most pertinently from a Cavell perspective, Zoom Phone.

So as a Zoom Phone customer you can already utilise AI Companion for a wide range of tasks. It can summarise voicemails and provide call summarisation as well as curating action lists of follow-up tasks. Currently this is only available as a retrospective feature, but not for long. AI Companion 2.0 was announced during Zoomtopia 2024. This new iteration will become generally available in 2025 and will also remain a free addition to Zoom’s paid packages. In the Zoom Phone use cases AI Companion 2.0 will be able to offer all of the above but in almost real-time.

AI Companion 2.0 will also straddle the entire Zoom platform and beyond that. If given compliant access – it will also be able to go beyond Zoom’s boundaries into third-party software. The tool will be able to access data and sources to help users in the same way across software such as Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, and Salesforce.

Yuan hopes that AI Companion 2.0 can act as a digital assistant, removing mundane planning and administration tasks – not just from power users who pay for it – but for all Zoom users. This development is a further step toward Yuan’s concept of ‘digital twins’. The idea that one day we will all have a digital version of ourselves to attend meetings on our behalf, freeing us up for other tasks, maybe even non-work-related ones. Yuan even discussed the possibility of AI efficiency savings one day leading to widespread uptake of the four-day workweek. Something for all of us to look forward to!

So, Zoom’s commercial AI strategy is clear. It will charge additionally for it where necessary; when there is customisation or extreme complication required, but AI Companion and its 2.0 evolution will remail free within the Zoom software suite, indefinitely, providing a lot more value than you get from a host of other communication’s software vendors.

How does Zoom differentiate?

The answer to this question, as with many other technology providers, is found in multiple areas. The first of the most prominent differentiators apparent during Zoomtopia 2024 was with its commercial proposition.

As detailed above, Zoom is offering a lot more capabaility for free with AI Companion than other vendors in the space are. But its not just in relation to its AI commercials. Yuan as always cited the company’s need to drive value for its customers. Cavell regularly hears of Zoom in competitive landscape discussions with other communication providers. To capitalise on its brand awareness and free user base, Zoom has been aggressive with its pricing models to uplift business customers to paid subscriptions across its portfolio. With an attractive value proposition and contract term uplifts, Zoom has been able to expand its use in business around the world. Including with a significant proportion of Fortune 500 companies.

This doesn’t mean that all of Zoom’s wins are coming from its existing customer base though. With Zoom Contact Centre, it has managed to not only persuade hundreds of customers to expand their Zoom usage from Zoom Phone and Zoom Meetings but also win brand new greenfield logos. In fact, nearly a quarter of new CCaaS wins are from organisations who are completely net new to Zoom.

The battle for the frontline worker space isn’t a new one and targeting it doesn’t differentiate a provider from the field. However, Zoom’s proposition to frontline workers – which according to data from Forbes account for 80% of the global workforce – is a strong one, particularly with its Zoom Workplace for Frontline. This aspect of the portfolio will offer a fully mobile-centric experience for frontline workers, with AI Companion capability throughout. The purpose-built mobile solution will offer time keeping capability for shift workers, consolidated chats with local site teams, and a host of other features such as push-to-talk designed specifically to meet the needs of frontline workers such as those in retail environments.

As well as tailoring its offerings for the frontline, Zoom is also employing a vertical specialisation strategy in key sectors such as healthcare where it already controls around a thrid of the telemedicine sector. It announced a Zoom Workplace for Healthcare and a Zoom Workplace for Clinicians all with bespoke features developed with the vertical and its users in mind. For its healthcare proposition, these include access to healthcare dictionaries and, where possible, access to third-party data sources for electronic healthcare records all designed to streamline and improve the efficiency of workflows.

The education sector is another where Zoom has traditionally been strong. Building on this Zoom Workplace for Education will include AI Companion 2.0, combining its capabilities to offer features to help improve lesson planning and offer lecture summaries for educators. It will also offer benefits for students with AI Companion-generated live notes, something any student would find useful during duller lectures.

Zoom’s key differentiator, however, is probably the breadth of its portfolio. Only Microsoft and Cisco can argue theirs is more extensive, although in different areas across cloud infrastructure and networking respectively. The single platform Zoom offers now ranges across Zoom Workplace – with Zoom Phone, Docs, and Meetings – through to its business services across Zoom Contact Centre, Webinars, and its Revenue Accelerator. Revenue Accelerator is AI-enhanced conversational intelligence software offering productivity and efficiency savings through advanced analytics for sales and marketing teams.

Zoomtopia 2024 provided the forum for yet another new portfolio addition, Zoom Tasks. It will work across all communication channels: meetings, calls, chats, and Zoom Docs detecting, recommending, and even completing tasks. This is just another example of Zoom aiming to improve and reduce user workload. Tasks might identify an action from a call and remind the user, automatically creating a task in the relevant list but where possible complete the task on its own, like scheduling a follow-up.

These factors: the compelling commercials, the customised offerings across verticals and user personas, and the sheer breadth of the portfolio give Zoom the ability to offer a unique proposition to any business.