Artificial Intelligence will be next industrial revolution in workspace: Sameer Raje, Zoom

Zoom, one of the leading video software apps, gained huge popularity during the coronavirus-induced lockdown. However, with people heading back to offices, the demand for the services slowed down. It also faced tough competition from other players who entered the segment. In such a scenario, what is the strategy of Zoom and how it is staying relevant? Sameer Raje, General Manager and Head, India & SAARC Region, Zoom Video Communications, Inc., in an exclusive interaction with Zee Business' Raghwendra Shukla, said that their key focus has been on providing best-in-class solutions to companies. 

Raje also talked about the recent acquisition of Workvivo, a modern, feature-rich employee experience platform and how Zoom plans to utilise AI (Artificial Intelligence) in the coming days. 

Below are the edited excerpts

Companies are now calling employees back to the office. In fact, many organisations are now working only from the office. Has this impacted your business? 

The last few years have just accelerated the importance of fostering better collaboration among employees – no matter if they are working from home, at an office, or in a different country. Work is no longer just a place but a space where we come together to collaborate. Employees are now demanding for flexibility, whether it is working from home or returning to the office - and for how many or on which days. There is a consistent and constant demand from employees for a work environment that is more productive, more inclusive and more collaborative. Flexible work allows employees to continue being productive even in adverse circumstances that are beyond their control. For instance,  a few weeks ago, a photo of a woman stuck in Bengaluru traffic working on her laptop while riding a pillion on a Rapido bike went viral on the internet. This incident highlights the growing need for flexibility to overcome obstacles like floods, air pollution or traffic congestion which are common even in the metro cities of our country. 

Zoom, at its core, makes flexible work possible. We are focused on providing organisations with a collaboration platform that integrates seamlessly into employees’ preferred ways of working - be it in the office, at home or even while they are on the move. 

\With flexible work, naturally, also comes the challenge to continue engaging teams across time zones and geographies, to help ensure they feel included no matter where they are. With built-in features like automated translation and transcription as well as "raise hand" functionalities, our platform helps ensure that every employee - regardless of language or geographical barriers - has their voice heard. We are focused on helping remove barriers, lowering stress and providing tools that work best for employees, their lives and their workflows. For instance, with Zoom Rooms enabled, participants can still enjoy an engaging virtual conference room experience that blurs the lines between in-person and remote attendees. With the Zoom Rooms smart gallery feature, participants can zoom in on participants and separate them into individual video tiles for better interaction. This way, employees feel like everyone is on the same playing field. 

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Ultimately, Zoom helps to build trust between teams and within the organisation. We believe that trust, along with technology, are the cornerstones of a successful flexible work model. 

With the current scenario of work-from-office, what is Zoom’s strategy to stay relevant? 

People are central to the success of any flexible work model. For Zoom, that means providing our customers with new ways to keep their employees informed, engaged, and connected, no matter where they work.

Zoom enables people to engage with one another, ideate, communicate,  and build toward a future limited only by their imagination. We deliver an all-in-one intelligent collaboration platform that fundamentally changes how people interact, connecting them through frictionless, smart and secure meetings, phone, team chat, email, content sharing, events and more, while prioritizing our customers’ security and privacy. We help deliver an omnichannel experience by integrating workflows thereby reducing business friction and broken silo’s amongst business units.  For example, our integrations with CRM systems and help desks ensure that every touch point - from sales to customer support has right information to help in improving customer experience.

Most recently, we announced the acquisition of Workvivo, a modern, feature-rich employee experience platform. With Workvivo's advanced internal communication and engagement tools, social intranet, and employee app, all blended into one central hub, we can offer our customers the best-in-class solutions they need to unlock the potential of their employees and evolve their company culture.

Part of our focus on helping organisations improve employee experience is in leveraging AI to support enhancing human connection in the workspace. This is why we are rapidly expanding our Zoom IQ capabilities to offer more innovative solutions powered by generative AI. From composing emails and chats to generating chat summaries - many of these features coming later this year, we hope to bring the power of AI directly to our users. We also recently announced our investment in Anthropic, an AI safety and research company. This is set to boost Zoom’s federated approach to AI by allowing Anthropic’s AI assistant, Claude, to be integrated with Zoom’s platform (which includes Team Chat, Meetings, Phone, Whiteboard, Zoom IQ), starting with Zoom Contact Center. 

Our approach to AI is no different than our approach to everything else: with care and with a commitment to empowering our users to save time so they can have more meaningful connections and collaboration opportunities.

There are so many other players in this sector now. What efforts is Zoom undertaking to stay ahead of competitors? 

The recent years have brought significant change for business leaders, including digital transformation initiatives, a transition to flexible workstyles, and increased pressure to deliver premium customer service. To stay competitive, businesses must be customer-centric and flexible while making investments that accelerate growth. Communication and collaboration technology can help organizations stay nimble while driving meaningful impact. 

Zoom is focused on helping our customers and delivering the best experience to them regardless of the economic environment, and many customers have found cost savings in migrating from legacy solutions to Zoom’s products. Our internal innovation engine has never been stronger. We are committed to product innovation that solves real customer problems. We believe expanding our product lines to encompass a full-service collaboration suite is key to achieving our platform vision. Zoom aims to ensure that we’re delivering an experience that enables a new kind of productivity – one that brings all the best tools and applications for modern, engaging collaboration into one destination. We’ll continue to keep our customers at the centre, focusing on solving their greatest challenges – growing across different segments, departments, industries and use cases. 

Can you please share some numbers on how much market share Zoom has and what growth percentage you are targeting? 

Zoom has built and launched more than 1,500 features and enhancements for the Zoom platform in FY23 and brought new products such as Zoom IQ for Sales to market, advancing the way people collaborate with each other, their organization, and their customers— ultimately, opening the doors wide for creativity and connection. Our total revenue for the first quarter of FY24 was $1,105.4 million, up 3 per cent year over year and we had approximately 215,900 Enterprise customers, up 9 per cent from the same quarter last fiscal year.

We serve customers of all sizes, from individuals to global Fortune 500 organizations.  86 per cent of the Fortune 100 choose Zoom. Our enterprise business is strong and we have seen a steady increase in spend from Enterprise customers with the Enterprise business growing 24 per cent in FY23. 

In May 2023, we announced that we have received the Unified License with Access – All/PAN India, NLD National Long Distance, and ILD – International Long Distance from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), Government of India to offer Zoom Phone, its industry-leading cloud PBX service, to multinational corporations (MNCs) and businesses operating in India. In FY23, Zoom Phone grew more than 100 per cent year over year globally, surpassing 5.5 million seats in FY23Q4. This is a testament to Zoom Phone’s ability to meet customer requirements and help businesses evolve to a modern cloud communications platform. 

Do you think AI can be helpful to Zoom in the long run, and how? 

We believe that AI’s ability to process data quickly makes human-to-human interaction more meaningful, processes more streamlined, and communication with coworkers, teams, and customers more effective.

At Zoom, we see artificial intelligence (AI) as the next industrial revolution in the workspace. Many of the existing Zoom products that our users know and love already incorporate AI, from the virtual backgrounds and gesture recognition of Zoom Meetings to our conversation intelligence solution Zoom IQ for Sales. Most recently, we have taken that to the next level with the enhancement of Zoom IQ, our next-generation AI smart companion that will empower collaboration and unlock the potential of a flexible workforce by summarising chat threads, organising ideas, drafting content for chats, emails, and whiteboard sessions, creating meeting agendas, and more. 

For example, teams will be able to simply open up a whiteboard session to collaborate on a product launch and have Zoom IQ generate a list of ideas based on text prompts. Once the meeting ends, Zoom IQ will be able to send the meeting summary to Zoom Team Chat, with suggested action items for owners to take on. 

Ultimately, the upcoming features of Zoom IQ will help employees focus on what matters by streamlining workflows. The time saved from, for example, finding the notes about a meeting missed, or catching up on unread chats - can be put to unlocking greater collaboration within teams and innovation to deliver better experiences to their customers. 

We are excited to see the industry going through this AI evolution brought by large language models and see the increased benefits we can bring to our users. We have announced a federated approach to AI that leverages Zoom’s proprietary AI models, those from leading AI companies — such as OpenAI and Anthropic AI — and select customers’ own models.  With this flexibility to incorporate multiple types of models, our goal is to provide the most value for our customers' diverse needs. These models can also be customized to perform better for a customer, based on their vocabulary and requirements. As we continue to invest in AI, Zoom remains committed to ethical and responsible AI development. Our AI approach puts user security and trust at the centre of what we do and we will continue to build products that help ensure equity, privacy, and reliability.

How are video collaboration tools creating new opportunities for businesses and entrepreneurs? 

Collaboration solutions serve as an establishment for empowering today’s digital workforce to be more productive wherever they are, adding immense value to businesses of all sizes. Implementing aspects of virtual collaboration provides a unique opportunity to cut costs, save time, and still bring workers face-to-face. We believe that virtual collaboration is a game-changer in terms of engaging and communicating with key stakeholders like customers and employees. Collaboration tools help in enhancing employee experience by offering many benefits including maintaining cohesion, increasing productivity, inspiring creativity, and enabling the workforce to learn new tools, helping them to gain new skills along the way. For customers, these tools help in going beyond a transactional relationship, empower them to choose their preferred communication channels and offer a customized interaction to make them feel valued. 

The potential of collaboration platforms goes beyond the office. By transforming the way work happens across industries from healthcare to education, banking to retail, these tools are at the same time helping reimagine industry transformation. People who live in remote places in the country, lack dependable transportation or the capacity to take time off work, and have medical issues that make it difficult for them to visit doctors, can now receive quality care in their preferred modality. Collaboration platforms such as Zoom can be embedded into the existing workflows of providers thereby enhancing equality and accessibility in health services. These solutions are helping to make education more inclusive and accessible to more. This is particularly relevant in India which has a large number of rural areas and Tier-2/3 cities that remain underserved. In line with the government’s ‘Digital India’ mission, Zoom as a collaboration platform also aims to assist SMEs in continuing their steady growth and helping them in expanding their operations and customer base. Financial institutions are leveraging such platforms to serve a growing number of clients who prefer to connect digitally and offer premium employee and candidate experiences by connecting global teams and enabling efficient collaboration, enhancing inclusivity in the workplace and reimagining its talent programs through virtual recruiting.

Zoom is creating new possibilities across industries like banking and finance, retail, and manufacturing among others and we are witnessing innovative use cases from companies of all sizes. Olive Living, a next-gen living community in India, found the perfect solution with Zoom Rooms Virtual Receptionist which is being leveraged at some of their properties to greet guests upon arrival, provide seamless check-in, and receive feedback on their virtual receptionist experience. Zoom helped Shyft, a personalized wellness provider scale 10x by encouraging global users to adopt a healthier lifestyle. Cypeer brings cybersecurity peers around the world to meet, share, learn, and make connections. The company is rolling out their platform with the integration of Zoom Meetings SDK to enable seamless collaboration while bringing together people for live interactions. Skylark Drones has recently integrated Zoom Video SDK with their Drone Software Platform - Drone Mission Ops, bringing forth a new level of connectivity between the skies and the screen. AccioJobs, an edtech startup, is ​revolutionising the way engineering students learn and upskill by integrating Zoom’s Meeting SDK and Video SDK into their product. Zoom has proven to be a game-changer for AccioJob, enabling the startup to improve both the student experience and its business bottom line. By automating processes and supporting real-time visibility into student engagement, the company has been able to make data-driven decisions and scale its operations more effectively.