Third Bridge 专家访谈称 Zoom 会议业务趋于成熟、Phone 增速或放缓，Contact Center 与 AI 仍待验证

[[00:02:55]]
Zoom has gone through a myriad of changes from the organisation it was nearly six years ago, since the onset of the pandemic. Could you walk us through the company's evolution during that time, including its product portfolio over the last several years?

[[00:03:27]]
Sure. You're right. Again, I joined Zoom at the peak of COVID. Back then, it was quite of a crazy time at Zoom, as everybody knows, there was significant growth backed up by amazing operation and scalability, where it basically was a testament to Zoom's architecture and its ability to scale really in amazing ways. When I joined, there was about 2,000 individuals or employees in the organisation. When I left, probably around 9,000. Within those five years, there was significant growth across the board. There was like a few hiccups in the middle, mostly post-COVID when many organisations started to remove a lot of fat. There was a significant, I think it was a 15% reduction in force. Again, it's turned back and there was a lot of investment, mostly around AI. Most of the growth, at least employee-wise, percentage-wise, was around AI. In regards to offerings, the main offering and when I joined was Meetings, again, which is to degree still is, but that was the main focus. People trying to still work while being remote.

The main thing for them was around meeting people, whether it's voice or video, where video became very important as well, of course, as anything around data sharing and screen sharing and things of that nature. At the time that I've joined, there is starting to see a significant uptake within Phone. Again, Phone was a relatively short development cycle and a significant uptake in customers. Again, that was a little bit started slow, but again, for sure, gained market share and accelerated becoming a significant technology as well as product and revenue for Zoom as it was a separate component and grew, I think it's just past 10 millions recently. Yes. This was the second like engine of Zoom, and they were starting to see expansion into additional fields like whiteboards, like productivity solutions that started to appear starting from enhancing the meeting experience, but then also going into the pre and post meeting.

Also during my time, of course, there was a significant investment in the Contact Center. That again, picked up, even though it was… Again, it's to a degree, a different type of market for Zoom, where Phone was quite an organic growth, if you think about it, when it comes to Meetings, to Phone to an extent. Contact Center is a little bit different at least even from the buying personas. Towards the… I think, the end of my tenure over there, I've seen the significant investment and within AI, starting from more of the productivity side of things, meeting summaries, transcriptions, inline help, those seems like nobody calls it even AI today.

It just becomes like the standard even across the board for many organisations, the ability to transcribe and summarise meetings, hence, the huge growth of those summarising bots as well as getting into more of the LLM side, the integration with other data sources and doubling down really around the productivity, even including the productivity suite, Zoom Dwocs at the time was also really… Again, you see expansion across the board. Again, we've seen also significant acquisition like Workvivo that is more of the customer experience side of things. I've seen significant growth across the board throughout my tenure.

[[00:08:49]]
RingCentral is up YTD [year to date]. Many software names have been somewhat beaten down over the course of 2026 across sectors, not just in the UCaaS [unified-communications-as-a-service] and CCaaS [contact-centre-as-a-service] world. Even within these markets, there have been some weaker names in terms of relative market share performance. YTD, Zoom is up nearly 6-7% as of today. The company had a positive Q1 FY27, with YoY revenue growth of 4.6% in constant currency. Enterprise revenue expanded 7.2% to USD 755.7m. There was tepid growth in the online segment but, all in all, it reported some very positive characteristics across the overall business.

Regarding your comments on the product portfolio, core Meetings still makes up the bulk of Zoom's revenue, or at least a significant portion of it. There are also very interesting growth vectors in newer products with strong potential. When you aggregate all these points and look at recent performance alongside the promise of new products, do you view the company as currently trending on a positive trajectory, a neutral trajectory or would you take a contrary position and say there are things beneath the surface that could pull it down?

[[00:10:48]]
Yes. Okay, let's see how I answer that. This is me, my view and again, seeing also a little bit behind the scenes, some of the challenges, struggles, internal discussions, the change in… Even you see the churn within individuals within the company. I see Zoom as more neutral, but with good potential to growth if they figure out a few things. Again, I don't want to put luck part of this equation, but Zoom is still really to a degree, tied to Meetings. I know they're trying to do whatever they can to get off Meetings. Their claim to fame come from meeting. This is their cash cow to a degree, everybody basically… Most people actually get Zoom for Meetings and not other way around. That's the base. I know they need to build on that. To a degree that also has some type of, I'd say, sort of a double-edged sword to a degree because I read somewhere it's just… I think I agree with the statement that to a degree, you basically… All of the ports in the world were actually sold when it comes to Meetings. Yes, again, I think it's a little bit overexaggerating, but I think that's close to the truth.

Again, you won't find new organisation that, "Wow, let me do meetings now again, to figure out now how do I meet online." I think COVID and of course, the technology progress, everybody understand that they have to meet. I didn't go to any type of organisation that does not have meeting. The thing is that meeting became ubiquitous. Also the relative advantage that Zoom had when it comes to Meetings, when it comes to user experience and quality and features within Meetings, has diminished. Teams for sure, caught up. You have a G Suite for mostly mid-market and down market that fills that void and actually does a good job. Cisco Webex is still there. You have a slew of other companies that are fighting over meetings. All in all, you would not find Zoom trying to go over a greenfield of meetings. It basically becomes more of a play of keeping what you have, renewal, long-term renewal, just not to worry about every time they have to renew and the continuous fights with your… Which becomes tougher throughout the time with the competition. Creating additional opportunity for growth.

One item that we already talked to that created a huge opportunity for growth for them was Phone. Again, I've been personally working on making sure that Phone also works for large enterprise and highly regulated environment, and we've had significant wins within Phone. Again, even phone is something that is starting to diminish as a way of communication directly, especially when it comes to non-regulated industries, you have meetings, you have cell phones, it's not too much over-the-top type of phone system, but there are still organisations that require phone. While some of the customer and client side of communications really fall into Contact Center where phone is one of those channels that you can communicate… In addition to WhatsApp or chat or anything else or even irregular text.

Again, there is also a push around Phone. Contact Center, I think it's early to say. I know that Zoom had… The really good thing about Zoom and about Eric is at the end of the day, they get good products out, products that people like, intuitive product to use. Contact Center is a very difficult end-to-end product to go from 0-1. I think Zoom did a great job. They did the same with Phone. Contact Center, I think it's an order of magnitude more difficult. Especially they have very tough new set of tough competitors and incumbents in the market that people say, "Why should I have Zoom?" Maybe they'll provide them the benefit of the doubt knowing them from the meeting side and the phone side and believing in them. Zoom really needed to make sure that they check all the boxes when it comes to functionality and keep up.

If I had to think about it, I think the main next thing for Zoom as carrying them while Meetings stays flat and maybe even, I think, decreases in time and phone… The growth starts to… I don't want to say it's getting flat, but I think the speed of the acceleration within the revenue from phones is going to, again, subside and it will eventually peak at a certain point. I think the next thing really for them, the big next thing is around Contact Center. I'm putting Workvivo on the side. I think it's more of a complementary thing that has quite a good success and actually contributed to the enterprise adoption within Zoom, even if it's not around Meetings, it's probably the only product outside of Contact Center that doesn't really require Meetings. I think those are the main items. I still believe it's quite neutral. I know that there is a lot of volatility within the stock price for quite some time. I think there's a lot of value there that is totally… I don't know if it's luck, but it's… Eric was smart investing in a relatively small AI company called Anthropic at the time. It becomes a significant part of the valuation of this one, which is weird.

You've probably seen people hearing about that and stock went up above USD 100 the day it was, and then it basically came back to where it is. Bottom line is, again, I know I talked a lot, but I think it's neutral with some positive trends if they exercise. Again, AI, we can certainly talk about it. I'm sure that we'll have a separate section about AI. I think the jury is still out when it comes to can Zoom monetise from the significant investment in AI. I'll stop here because I know you probably have some follow-up questions, especially about AI.

[[00:18:40]]
Zoom is broken down into three segments – Phone, Contact Center and AI. Could you discuss buyer sentiment, specifically at the enterprise level, when we think about the mindset of buyers of either UCaaS or CCaaS services? This is done very well through the lens of Zoom Phone. Zoom Phone has eclipsed 10 million seats at this point. It has been growing and showing sustained growth in the mid-teens range. Contrary to what you might intuitively expect, especially given the pandemic years, there was a saturation of cloud products that hit the market. Every enterprise had to go to meetings online and migrate its on-premise PBX systems to the cloud.

A lot of analyst firms and market data suggest there's still a sizeable chunk of the market, with between 100 million and 150 million-plus PBX [private branch exchange] seats that are capturable. Through the lens of Zoom Phone, what does the runway for growth look like? How do you see it penetrating that addressable market going forwards?

[[00:20:24]]
Yes. This aligns with also my observation during my time at Zoom and even right now when it comes to Phone. You're absolutely right. I'm still involved on the other side on the compliance and capture side of things and large migrations. Even organisations that call themselves cutting edge still are on on-prem IP phones. Many on Cisco, some on Avayas and everything, but the main… You still see that. I'm aware for at least two or three big projects that are actually moving away and moving into the cloud. Over there, again, it's also not as simple. It's still uphill battle because most of the incumbents, especially Cisco, has a good migration into their cloud solution. In many cases, they also own to a certain degree, some of the networking side within the company. It makes it somewhat of a better positioned for them, even though their solution might not be as good or doesn't integrate well with other solutions. Many, many IT executives feel very comfortable when doing it. The thing about it is still organisations have phone and meetings actually as a separate organisation.

It creates a little bit of a challenge when it comes to switching technologies and vendors at the same time. Zoom is doing a great job. Again, as I've mentioned, during the part that we've done a significant penetration into enterprise, one of my responsibilities outside of verticals was also enterprise readiness across the board. I've worked on across the board where it's security, compliance, scalability, data, whatever a large enterprise would expect, especially with special taste for financial services with some additional set of requirements. Zoom is, at least from the way they accommodate customer needs and their speed is what really makes them different in this market. Even though you might have significant challenges vs Cisco or vs Microsoft as a bundled solution that many organisations are seeing it as an easy button to go through, both from the technology as well and most importantly, from the cost of ownership side of things. Zoom is attentive and making great products and accommodates to the customer. I can tell you just as an anecdotal example, I've been working without talking about names on really, really large deals.

I'm talking about hundreds of thousands of phone licences with one of the largest banks in the world. I was the one that basically represented that as a vertical, both from the financial services as a large organisation. We worked with the team at that bank for about half a year or so, got about 130-plus specific feature requests. Some of them are big, some of them were small, and we had to check all them off for the deal to go through. That level of dedication, I think it's part of the leadership and what Eric brings to the table is really the fact, yes, we will do things, of course. Zoom doesn't like to do things one-off. I can certainly tell you that most of the changes that we have done together to the Zoom Phone to make it work for a larger financial organisation was a good investment because later on was the next one and the next one as we were becoming easier and easier to do because we checked most of the boxes for those organisations. I see that level of dedication. Now again, as I've mentioned before, I know there is good growth, and there's still a lot of organisations out there that have not converted yet.

All in all, when it comes to phone as a tool for work, you would see most of the knowledge workers are actually not using phones. I think it's mostly the outside facing roles and personas. I can tell you about myself. I don't remember when the last time I really used phone. The last thing that someone called me over… We have also RingCentral from different reasons within the company. Someone called me and was just, "Why are you calling me there? Why are you not just calling me over Zoom? What are you doing using a phone? I need to see you." If I use phone, I usually phone to my family. I think this is also some cultural things and usage. As I've mentioned, I think a lot of those phone licences would hide also within the Contact Center. There's an overlap there when it comes to the addressable market around ports.

[[00:26:45]]
I've often thought of telephony as a commoditised area in terms of features and functionality. What competitive differentiation do you see in Zoom Phone vs leading competitors such as Microsoft Teams or RingCentral? Is the mid-teens growth that we discussed sustainable going forwards? You mentioned that we are likely to see some deceleration in growth going forwards, given the dynamics of the telephony market.

[[00:27:35]]
Yes. I think when it comes to features, functionalities, I think it's really marginal at this point. What else can you do? You've mentioned the commoditisation of Phone. You still have all of those features that you may find in large organisations when it comes to executive assistant and the superior and all of those large key systems and how do you park and how do you pick it up and all of those types of interesting features within the Phone that even were already checked off when I was there. You're getting into those nitty-gritty type of things. Again, this is really marginal. I think when you're competing against organisations like Microsoft or RingCentral. Again, as I said, I'll bring in even Cisco to the mix. I think at the end of the day, becomes more of a how it integrates… The value is not really around the nitty-gritty features and functionalities, but it's around scaling, how it integrates with your productivity tools, how you use them and maybe some specific things around compliance and how do you capture things.

It's really a play of good deal, good support, quick adoption and showing you the ROI. Again, and I'm seeing it, by the way, in other things as well, especially in meetings. It went from a CTO decision to a CFO decision. Again, it's still a spectrum. It's not like 100%, but the importance of the commercials, is significant, while more of the technical side of things is really around how it integrates with your existing solutions. For example, Zoom has invested significant amount of effort in making sure that Zoom Phone can integrate into Microsoft Teams from UI perspective. Many organisations, surprisingly enough, have chosen that, even though it's like, "Hey, why, I already have Teams, why not to do things?" Then the things around the scalability, the availability, the price, the experience, things of that nature have swayed some organisation. As I've said in the past, in many organisations, the organisations that are focused on Phone are still a separate IT organisation than the one that is… That owns workplace and productivity. That is the other thing.

[[00:31:09]]
Currently, CCaaS is one of Zoom's fastest-growing emerging products. Customer accounts have expanded to more than 1,100 enterprises. Selling CCaaS requires deep integration knowledge and several other features that are often built up over the course of a decade, not merely 3-4 years, which is how long Zoom Contact Center has been around.

Could you walk us through the growth trajectory of the Zoom Contact Center business going forwards? What excites you most about this business? What features allow it to capture market share? How should we position this business? It seems that, right now, the selling point lies with existing enterprise customers. How successful can Zoom be in RFPs [requests for proposal] against companies such as Nice or Genesys? Is the sweet spot likely to be the mid-market, say 500-1,000 seats, as opposed to deployments of 1,000-10,000 seats?

[[00:32:39]]
Yes. That's a loaded question. A lot of info behind it. Let me try and break it down. Yes. First of all, you're absolutely right. It takes time to create rapport when it comes to Contact Center. It's also, in many cases, is mission-critical because it touches your clients, your customers. You cannot do all kinds of experiments over there. You feel and many organisations feel like the notion of you cannot fail by buying IBM type of thing. To bootstrap Contact Center, I think it was a major investment within Zoom. I know that for some time, actually earlier on, when it started to… Probably, I would say, like one year or even less than one year after this initiative started, Eric did not like the velocity and basically became like the site CEO for that or basically said, "Look, from the product and engineering team, on Contact Center now report to me." Yes. It was like for half a year. It was significantly changing.

Again, I know Eric has that ability to motivate people and focus on the things that would make the difference, especially when it comes to the user experience. User experience for Eric is like… People said like he's like the best QA in most cases within the organisation. I think that just tells you the level of investment and focus over there. In many cases, you'll see Eric is capable, at least at teams that Eric leads are capable of actually turning out a solution that usually took tens of years to perfect and squeezing it. I think at this point in time, initially, there was a lot of challenges. There was a lot of… How do you sell it and there was… That's the reason it was started as more of a mid-market type of thing or working with large existing customers, playing a lot of expansion using your good relationship with organisations that you currently have in order to start some type of pilots, especially on internal call centres like for internal tech support and things of that nature, HR internally before turn it out into customers where that was like many organisations did not feel the level of comfort to do that.

Again, with time comes the level of comfort, with the organisation. That's the reason you're starting to see the pickup. There's a lot of investment, a lot of work, a lot of investment, not just from the product and engineering side of things. It's also to identify the sales organisation, bringing the right people. You cannot just take an individual that has been selling Meetings and telling him tomorrow to start selling Contact Centers. It's easier on the phone, by the way, even though you may need some overlay that gets into the nitty gritty, especially when it comes to the phone talk that people… Some people may expect to see, so you bring good overlay people, but it's much harder to do with Contact Center. Contact Center, it's not meeting. It's not in the same industry. Yes, it's the same name but you're seeing right now, most of the organisations are really focusing on productivity and let's say, that's better said, unified communication and collaboration were not really considered as a Contact Center vendor.

You have also to overcome that level of notion in the market and fight really against some very good incumbents. It's not like you get into the call, yes, I'm fighting against on-prem stuff and whatnot. Not everything is on-prem. You go to Nice, you go to other, they've not stopped their focus on development. Some may carry worse reputation than the others but you certainly see organisations that were 100% focused on Contact Center. It's really tough to start getting that penetration. Seeing the growth within Zoom. Again, starting slow, starting within… Or starting small rather, starting with more of the internal pilots, getting the level of trust and reputation that you would need and start to win yourself deals, not just experimental pilots, but actual deals, I think it speaks volume both on the product and the go-to-market. I truly believe that the Contact Center is really the best hope at this point for the next… Not the next hope, the next growth engine revenue-wise for Zoom. Again, it's not easy and the incumbents are not going to stay behind all the time. It's still going to be tough getting up market.

Again, I'm trying to putting it vs the challenges that we had with Phone that, again, initially, nobody on the enterprise level really looked at it. Again, with very tedious and detailed work to really make sure that we cover all bases, carrying the Zoom reputation about scalability, about the engineering abilities, gives people the level of trust. It's not like a start-up from nowhere that is starting to go in and do a Contact Center. It is Zoom, Zoom that delivered both on Meetings and Phone that are going there. There is some better level of comfort for larger and larger organisation to go there. All in all, I think this is the growth engine. Now I truly believe that at least from what's referred to as like the next-gen type of Contact Centers, the different way that people are actually communicating with Contact Center, that has started to change not just recently. The multimodal Contact Center… Especially you look at the… Who are the addressable market and who is actually calling a lot of millennials and the Z gens, nobody calls.

Everybody is texting or doing something else. The ability to create those additional modalities and expand that. This is how Zoom create. Zoom started multimodal from the get-go. It's not like a legacy Contact Center that was focused entirely on phone and now needs to reinvent himself by adding more modalities. Zoom has some level of advantage over there. Also, when it comes to the level of the communication, they do have more than a few feathers on their hat when it comes to being able to deliver. Last on Contact Center, I think AI is a significant part, and you're seeing it right now with other vendors, it's not just Zoom. The embedding of AI within the Contact Center brains, whether it's from the front-end side, whether those are virtual agents, whether those are smart workflows at the back end, whether those has to do with telemetry analysis, guidance, training and on and on and on. There are so many places within Contact Center that AI can provide you significant value more than just hype is key. I know that Zoom is really doubling down when it comes to using AI within Contact Center.

[[00:42:11]]
On one hand, AI is 100% interwoven into the Contact Center narrative. It seems to be driving a lot of the inflection in growth over the past several quarters. In 2025, Zoom Contact Center eclipsed USD 100m in ARR. It has grown at a high double-digit rate over the past several quarters. Given your comments on AI, do you view that level of growth as sustainable? Would you be surprised if, 12 months from now, Contact Center ARR were in the USD 200m range or somewhere near that?

[[00:43:13]]
Yes. I guess I wouldn't be surprised. Besides being surprised, I think this is… I don't want to get to do or die, but for Zoom, as we've previously said, I think Meetings is flattened and even decreasing. The Phone business and pure customer and revenue is I think the acceleration is decreasing. It's still going up. For Zoom, they need the next thing in order to sustain growth across the board for them. The significant investment that was done in Contact Center was just for that. I truly believe that at the shorter term, that's the main growth engine for Zoom. To your question, yes, if we are here next year and it's not grown significantly, I think that's going to be a really negative sign. For Zoom moving forward. It's… Again, do or die, I guess I said, it's a little bit harsh, but I think this is a significant piece of their success. I do believe this is something that would lead the growth moving forward. That's the reason I said initially, again, when I said there is my… What's my high-level expectation and from Zoom going forward, I've mentioned it's neutral, but I said there is a significant potential and the significant potential is really around Contact Center and potentially AI. I think AI is secondary, meaning as a direct monetisation revenue-generating SKU for them. Contact Center is the next wave they must ride.

[[00:45:52]]
One of the fears in the CCaaS and UCaaS market is that AI will essentially cannibalise seat-based business models. We are likely to see less need for agents in the Contact Center world. Hence, companies such as Nice, in particular, have suffered in terms of market share price or performance. Why do you think Zoom does not view itself as having the same legacy technology that these incumbents in the CCaaS world have? The company also doesn't seem to view AI-driven seat reductions as a material threat. Should that be viewed as a risk to the CCaaS growth story that we have been discussing?

[[00:46:48]]
Yes. I think a very good point. I think AI is more of a threat to more of the legacy incumbents that are absolutely seeing… They're playing the play that Zoom is playing within Meetings right now. It is just how you are able to renew it, what is your value over there and how you don't lose your seat because it's moved elsewhere or you have another alternative over there that is more appealing and have better cost of ownership type of… At the end of the day, can also reduce the number of people that you need. I think Zoom is really positioned well. I don't think it's even impacts you. I think it's on the contrary. I think the Zoom's approach of, "Hey, this is the new era. This is the next gen."

It's not just a name that everybody plugs… Adds to their new product that's called its next gen, and that's it. I think the new approach that Zoom has taken when it comes both to the multimodality as well as the interwoven AI within the product. I don't think they care about, "Hey, it's less of an addressable market for me at this point." I think the addressable market is still significant from Zoom, both greenfield as well as taking business from incumbent. For them, I don't see it as an issue, the fact that AI may replace existing agents. It's for sure, the existing vendors are more open to this threat because it actually can impact their current business. I don't think Zoom has that issue whatsoever. I think they see it actually as a winning point for them.

[[00:48:58]]
On the theme of AI, Zoom took a federated approach by partnering with companies such as Anthropic, while also building an ecosystem of AI providers. What are your thoughts on Zoom's strategic approach to AI over the last 18-24 months? Regarding the monetisation path, AI Companion was offered to the installed base at no additional cost for a long time. Zoom has recently introduced Custom AI Companion, priced at roughly USD 12 per user per month. How much success do you think this alternative monetisation approach can have in the market? What do these monetisation strategies ultimately look like? If Zoom asked you to return to the organisation, what would you be trying to drive?

[[00:50:13]]
Yes. A lot of questions. I have a lot of information. By the way, I can go over a little bit if we need to, but let me try to be brief as much as detailed also on AI. All in all, again, AI for Zoom was more of a reaction. I think it's the ChatGPT moment really, I know you have caught them off guard, and the fact that you start seeing other vendors doubling down on that. Now the fact that you have the big question about where would people use AI. Are they going to use AI within their productivity and communication suites or they're going to use AI natively with those hyperscaler providers like OpenAI and Anthropic and others that are building integration back into your productivity and communications. How would that work? I think I've seen some good numbers lately. I think the bottom line, we're talking to an analyst about that. I think nobody knows, again, how that is going to evolve and where those AI tools, how are they going to be used?

Are they going to be used by, as I said, the communication solutions, collaborations productivity solution that Zoom is actually focusing on right now, as you can see from their latest announcement about introducing like spreadsheets and presentations and so checking off many boxes when it comes to the full collaboration suite, which I think is more of a mid-market play, but I'll put it on the side for a second. When it comes to AI, Zoom took the federation. Zoom doesn't have… Not too many organisations have the deep pockets and the investment to train full models and compete with Anthropic and OpenAI and Google. Zoom initially were more or less forced to do that. Again, as you said, just created more of a new type of interesting federation market when you basically, they pick for you the best and the most efficient models. You don't have to say, okay, what do you use today, use Anthropic? It just reduces some of the… The more choices, the more problem you have at least for some set of personas.

Having something that will reduce your cost, provide the best solution, they did invest in training their own models. They started with different open source models and open weight models and fine-tune them for very specific tools like meeting summaries. Even till today, the go-to models when it comes to meeting summaries is actually Zoom's model. If it's for availability, whatever, in regards to being able to scale because Zoom, it's… You also need deep pockets in order to support all of those data centres. Zoom can scale beyond that. all in all, I think federation was a good decision by them, still being able to optimise and train some models for very specific tasks that does better job than the off-the-shelf models and potentially provide them better margins on usage. The challenge was, again, Eric said, "Look, I'm doing it free." I don't know if it's a good or bad decision. It actually impacted a lot of other vendors in the market. Once you start giving stuff for free, how do you then start monetising it?

There were multiple tries back and forth about trying to monetise it. There was significant investment within the AI organisation within Zoom. The last I've heard, there are more than 600 people within the AI team, not just outside and I'm talking the core AI team, product and engineering and data science are more than 600 individuals. There's significant investment in salaries right there, and compensation. They've done multiple rounds of trying to monetise by adding more features, by creating better bundles and the custom AI was another try from them, which, to a degree, my understanding, did not work. They may have had a few organisations that bite on that, but it wasn't the expectation and the monetisation, all in all, was not there. They had to do more of a… Throughout the time, they basically created some level of functionalities, especially when it comes to connecting with external tools and creating workflows, automation, I don't know if you had a chance to see it, but they basically announced their ZoomMate.

ZoomMate basically replaces the… It's a brand change for Zoom. It totally replaces AI companion altogether. AI companion was removed altogether from their UI and from their documentation. Now they basically have two types of AI solution. One is basically the generic Zoom AI, which it's embedded functionality within your experience, whether it's meeting summary, transcriptions, reply on e-mails, polish my text, summarise text. Those embedded functionalities that sit within the product, those will continue to be free.

[[00:56:54]]
What are your thoughts on Eric and Zoom's broader management team? When thinking about the multiple growth vectors from newer products alongside the core Meetings business, how do you see the growth of the business going forwards? Right now, growth is in the mid-single-digit range, having previously ranged in the low-to-mid-single-digit range. Do you think that can move closer to the high-single-digit range or low-double digit range going forwards considering the promise of new product growth vectors?

[[00:57:53]]
Look, I'm a true believer in Eric. Again, at the end of the day, Eric is not a magician. Again, there are some market forces around him. One of them is around the Microsoft Teams uphill battle every time, I've seen a lot of churn over there and large, large organisation churning because it becomes, at the end of the day, about money, not about features. This is one thing that I'm a little bit concerned about. The other is around really, as we've just discussed, the success and their ability to drive forward Contact Center. That, for me, really is the litmus test for the growth. If they are to grow beyond that and stop staying more or less flat, this is the key. AI, I don't know. I'm not sure that their approach is the approach. I'm looking at myself at other organisation, talking a lot of people on AI about this.

Many organisations are actually are going to invest within the Anthropics and the OpenAIs of the world and not necessarily put things within Zoom because again, just to summarise that, ZoomMate is more of a competition to think about this as Anthropic Cowork or the recent announced OpenAI Work. It's more or less something like that. I feel that Zoom would have significant uphill battle, even though they may be using some of the models behind and their pricing, they now moved into more of a credit pricing, which is very similar to tokens. It's new. I'm very, very questionable if that is going to be a success. To put it all together, I think Meetings decreasing, Phone growth is decreasing, but still there. Main focus would be Contact Center and let's say, Workvivo, let's tag those together. AI, big question mark if that is going to provide significant bottom line for them for next year.

[[01:00:28]]
Yes. We didn't even get a chance to talk about Workvivo, but truly, it was a wonderful conversation today, and we're going to have to end here. Let me just close by saying thank you so much, for the really wonderful input and insights. Thank you, clients as always for choosing Third Bridge. We do hope you enjoy today's content. Lastly a big thank you to all the team members who help put this discussion together today. Goodbye.

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