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Years after its pandemic boom, Zoom Communications is still trying to compete with Big Tech rivals.
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Zoom is changing its name from Zoom Video Communications Inc. to just Zoom Communications Inc. In a post on the company blog, Zoom Communications CEO Eric Yuan writes that Zoom is now an “AI-first work platform for human connection” that delivers “modern, hybrid work solutions.” It’s a muddy, if vague, change compared to its 2020 rise when the classic Zoom Meetings product became synonymous with video conferencing and thrived as companies were forced to transition employees to work from home.
Now, it no longer wants to be known for video as workers have returned to offices, and bigger, better-resourced competition from Google, Microsoft, and Slack offers video as a feature of the office suites companies already pay for.
By the end of 2020, Zoom’s year-over-year revenue had quadrupled, but by early 2022, the projections had changed, as Wedbush analyst Dan Ives predicted that “the work from home beneficiaries… Netflix, Facebook, Zoom, Peloton, they’ll see growth fall off a cliff.” For both Peloton and Zoom, the next few months and years have borne that out.
Zoom has fought back by launching more comprehensive communications tools, starting with Zoom Team Chat. Now, Zoom offers its own full-suite Zoom Workplace solution with Google- and Microsoft-style Office productivity apps, a business email client, and more.
Yuan said in an appearance over the summer on Decoder that:
…today we all spend a lot of time either making phone calls, joining meetings, sending emails, deleting some spam emails and replying to some text messages, still very busy. How [do we] leverage AI, how do we leverage Zoom Workplace, to fully automate that kind of work? That’s something that is very important for us.
Zoom’s AI companion 2.0 launched in October with improved summarizing and assistance tools, which he says “will translate into a fully customizable digital twin equipped with your institutional knowledge, freeing up a whole day’s worth of work and allowing you to work just four days per week.”