Zoom’s July 2025 Perspectives event made one thing clear: this is not the Zoom of early-pandemic fame. While the company’s roots in video conferencing remain strong, Zoom is evolving into a comprehensive workforce productivity platform, powered by AI, tailored to specific verticals, and closely aligned with partner ecosystems. From SMBs to global enterprises, Zoom aims to be not just a communications tool, but the connective tissue across workflows.
Zoom’s Evolving Strategy: Workforce Productivity, Not Just Meetings
At the core of Zoom’s vision is its shift from being a “meetings company” to a workforce productivity enabler. This is embodied in Zoom’s concept of “Conversation to Completion,” where Zoom can help customers extend the value of meetings from the call itself through to actions that result from it.
Zoom is investing to extend its utility across the full work lifecycle and customer lifecycle. That means turning conversations into transcriptions, summaries, tasks, CRM entries, or customer support tickets. Zoom isn’t just tacking on these capabilities, but integrating them into the product experience across Zoom Meetings, Phone, Contact Center, Workvivo, and Workplace.
Zoom’s midmarket focus is also intensifying. In this segment, companies value flexibility, unified platforms, and AI-powered automation, but may not have the resources to integrate disparate tools. Zoom is betting that its unified, AI-powered platform will help midmarket customers resolve this dilemma.
Channel Overhaul to Fuel Growth
Zoom’s go-to-market overhaul is central to its growth aspirations. Under Chief Sales and Growth Officer Graham Geddes and Global Channel Go-to-Market Head Nick Tidd, Zoom is addressing long-standing channel pain points. Key progress includes:
- Quote-to-cash transformation: Zoom rebuilt its tools to streamline quoting, provisioning, and billing for partners—and what once took eight days now takes one minute.
- Partner enablement: A revamped partner portal will soon provide persona-based content, easy access to marketing assets, and AI monetization guidance, which is Zoom’s #1 partner request.
- Zoom Up program: A points-based RTM framework, set to announce this fall, gives every partner type a tailored path, with transparency and measurement across a single pane of glass.
- Service support: With new self-service portals, ServiceNow integration, and SLAs, Zoom has created an enterprise-grade partner support experience.
Recognizing the need for partner profitability and program consistency, Zoom has eliminated volume brackets, adopted local currencies, and introduced rebates tied to base protection and churn reduction.
The result: 2,000+ partners, six new service provider additions in Q2 alone, and early signs of increased partner-driven revenue. Partners like TD SYNNEX, CDW, and Avant attended the event, and were bullish on Zoom’s trajectory, citing its responsiveness, innovation cadence, and margin-friendly models.
Innovation and AI Strategy: The Agentic Era
Zoom CTO XD Huang outlined an innovation roadmap built on the concept of agentic AI—systems that reason, plan, and act on a user’s behalf. This strategy is built on three pillars:
- AI Everywhere: Embedding AI across line-of-business functions and vertical solutions.
- Work lifecycle intelligence: Enabling action at every point in a workflow—from meeting agendas to follow-ups to customer support tickets.
- Customer lifecycle enablement: Turning every customer touchpoint into an opportunity to deliver better, faster, and more personalized service.
In addition to using publicly available large language models (LLMs) in its products. Zoom is building small, specialized models—for example, to create clinical SOAP notes in healthcare. These small language models (SLMs) work alongside larger models, in a “layer cake” architecture, serving as guardrails to enhance safety and reduce hallucinations. Zoom’s AI Studio enables customers to build custom agents, tailor instructions, integrate third-party apps and data, and orchestrate multi-agent interactions.
Key differentiators include:
- Custom AI Companion: Recently launched, this premium version ($12/user/month) supports integrations beyond Zoom’s ecosystem.
- AUI (Agentic UI): Combines graphical and conversational interfaces to interact naturally with AI agents.
- Voice Intelligence: Real-time translation with voice selection, voiceprint isolation for clarity in noisy environments, and agentic meeting skills like agenda tracking and multi-modal analysis.
Zoom’s approach is practical and user-centric—as one customer attending the event put it, “Zoom lets humans be more human.”
AI Platform and Developer Ecosystem
Zoom’s AI platform is an open ecosystem designed to play well with others. Brendan Ittelson, Zoom’s platform lead, laid out the company’s commitment to extensibility:
- APIs and SDKs: Enable customers to integrate real-time Zoom content into their workflows (e.g., by feeding meeting data into CRM or ITSM systems).
- Common authentication and protocols: Developers can easily build and deploy across Zoom’s stack.
- Orchestration Layer: Prevents AI sprawl by coordinating agent behaviors—“teaching elephants how to dance,” as XD Huang quipped.
Developers are charged for streaming data access, reflecting Zoom’s strategy to balance openness and monetization. Integration examples include ServiceNow, Epic, Salesforce, and others, enabling contextualized workflows and tailored automation.
Product Portfolio Highlights
UCaaS and Zoom Phone
Zoom UCaaS continues to get high marks from analysts and users for TCO, flexibility, and innovation. The company is tackling what it calls “disconnected moments” that fracture work by delivering functionality such as voiceprint tech to optimize noisy environments; proactive agentic meeting skills for agenda tracking, asset generation, and follow-ups; and real-time language translation with voice selection.
According to Zoom, deep integration between Zoom’s UC and CC improves cost and customer experience. These combine for great cross and upselling opportunities—and competitive wins and win-backs. New industry features, including additional mobile capabilities, billing codes for billable hours, and sector-specific integrations, are also spurring adoption.
Zoom Workplace and Spaces
Zoom’s Workplace serves as a centralized platform to manage collaboration, communication, and physical workspaces, bringing together tools intended to improve productivity and coordination across distributed teams.
The platform integrates features like AI Companion, analytics, and scheduling tools to support more efficient meetings and task follow-up. Zoom has embedded AI capabilities, including meeting summaries, action item tracking, and real-time translation, across the platform to streamline workflows and reduce manual effort.
With Zoom Rooms and Workspace Reservation, Zoom Workplace also integrates meetings, phone, whiteboard, chat, and space management within a single environment. This approach supports a more consistent and efficient work experience across remote, hybrid, and in-office settings.
Workvivo for Frontline Workers
As part of its strategy to enhance its employee experience capabilities, Zoom acquired Workvivo in 2023. The Ireland-based employee communications and engagement platform, which includes a social intranet, employee apps, and communications tools, had seen triple-digit growth at the time of the acquisition.
Built for deskless workers, with mobile-first design and real-time WhatsApp integration, Workvivo enables Zoom to extend beyond traditional collaboration to help organizations keep employees informed, engaged, and connected.
Zoom positions Workvivo as the “digital heart” of frontline workforces, and sells it both as a standalone or integrated offering within Zoom Workplace.
Workvivo has introduced over 445 new features in the past year, including livestreams, AI-powered insights, and automated onboarding journeys. Workvivo’s user base has more than doubled since Zoom acquired it, and it has become the de facto standard for many large enterprises. As Meta Workplace sunsets, Zoom is poised to capture its share of that transitioning customer base as well.
SMB Strategy
Zoom’s SMB strategy focuses on providing a simple, cost-effective, and integrated platform tailored to the needs of SMBs. Zoom emphasizes ease of use, fast onboarding, and bundled solutions that combine meetings, phone, team chat, whiteboarding, and AI Companion features.
Zoom recently revamped its SMB offerings with simplified purchase flows, localized pricing, and bundled capabilities (Meetings, Phone, Chat, AI tools, etc.), designed to make it easier for small businesses to adopt and derive value. Other key investments have included billing-code support for professional services, localized pricing for global SMB markets, and ongoing improvements to the website experience. Zoom has also made many AI capabilities—such as meeting summaries, task creation, and virtual assistants available to SMBs at no additional charge.
It looks like these efforts are paying off: In FY25, Zoom reported record-low SMB churn, reflecting progress in delivering sustained value to small business customers.
Vertical Markets
Zoom is leaning into verticals, including healthcare, education, government, and financial services, with purpose-built features, integrations, and partner collaborations specific to each sector’s needs, workflows, and regulatory requirements
This approach includes embedding Zoom into key operational systems to support sector-specific use cases such as telehealth, virtual learning, and secure remote collaboration. Examples include electronic health records (EHRs) in healthcare, student engagement platforms in education, and compliance frameworks in government.
The company is also developing customizations, usage-based pricing models, and localized offerings to dovetail with the needs of specialized markets.
Perspective
Zoom’s 2025 Perspectives event highlighted how far the company has come from its origins as a video conferencing tool. Its vision—anchored in workforce productivity, AI integration, and industry-specific solutions—maps to where the broader communications and collaboration market is headed.
Zoom is doing more than adding features—it’s connecting them into purposeful workflows that drive outcomes. The company’s focus on agentic AI, open platform architecture, and tailored go-to-market approaches for different customer segments reflects a strong and differentiated strategy in a competitive space.
If Zoom can continue to deliver on its promises—especially around agentic AI, ease of doing business, and platform extensibility—it stands to not only retain relevance in the evolving hybrid work landscape but lead it.
© SMB Group, 2025