Zoom founder Eric Yuan-interview

Everyone knows Zoom as a videoconferencing app. You’ve just released a bunch of new features. You have workplace features. You have AI features. How do you think about Zoom right now?

I think, for now, we are embarking on a 2.0 journey. You are right on. Looking back at 1.0, it was more about building some applications; videoconferencing is one of them. Our slogan was “Work Happy.” Right now, [when] you look at a 2.0, it is different. It’s “Work Happy with the Zoom AI Companion” and everything really about Workplace, the entire collaboration platform as well as AI.

When you think about the elevator pitch for Zoom, you had the founder, and you had to go raise money once upon a time. In the beginning, it was very simple, right? Videoconferencing is very hard. It requires some dedicated hardware and expensive connections, and Zoom is going to be as simple to use as a consumer app. It’s videoconferencing, but simple. What’s the elevator pitch now?

With conferencing, again, this is one app. If you look at your calendar, it is not only to join your video meeting but also a lot of other things. You read emails, send a chat message, make a phone call, have a whiteboard session, schedule something with external third parties. What we are doing now, it’s really looking at your entire schedule, how to leverage Zoom Workplace to help you out. Essentially, you can leave Zoom Workplace, and Zoom Workplace can help you get most of your work done, right? That’s our pitch. We are not there yet. We have a big audience of product managers, engineers, and designers. I think what you’re saying is they’re going to send AI avatars to their stand-ups every morning. More than that. It’s not only for meetings. Even for my emails. I truly hate reading email every morning, and ideally, my AI version for myself reads most of the emails. We are not there yet.

The heart of Zoom is still the videoconferencing product. That’s how I think of it; that’s how most people think of it. Are you saying that Zoom, the videoconferencing product, will have AI avatars in it mostly, and it’ll push us into more in-person meetings?

I think two things. First of all, we are way more than just a videoconferencing business. We have a lot of other new capabilities, and essentially, that’s the entire Workplace platform. It’s a collaboration platform. That’s one thing. But if you look at just videoconferencing itself, I think we can leverage AI more and more. You do not need to spend so much time [in meetings]. You do not have to have five or six Zoom calls every day. You can leverage the AI to do that.

which meetings do you look at and think you would hand off?

I started with the problem first, right? And last but not least, after the meeting is over, let’s say I’m very busy and missed the meeting. I really don’t understand what happened. That’s one thing. Another thing for a very important meeting I missed, given I’m the CEO, they’re probably going to postpone the meeting. The reason why is I probably need to make a decision. Given that I’m not there, they cannot move forward, so they have to reschedule. You look at all those problems. Let’s assume AI is there. AI can understand my entire calendar, understand the context. Say you and I have a meeting — just one click, and within five seconds, AI has already scheduled a meeting.