Zoom saw explosive growth during the pandemic, becoming a household name for video communication. But as the world shifted to hybrid work, the company quickly evolved into a broader communication platform. Debjani Gupta, Country Marketing Leader, Zoom Communications, Inc., in this exclusive interview with Anannya Saraswat, Reporter-Public Sector & Leadership at APAC Media and CXO Media, shares how Zoom has evolved beyond video to become an AI-first platform built for modern collaboration.
The conversation explores the company’s growth strategies, new product innovations like Zoom Phone and Zoom AI Companion, its approach to the Indian market, and how it’s using agentic AI to redefine productivity across industries.
Zoom experienced significant growth during the nationwide lockdown—how has the company sustained user traction and engagement in the post-pandemic era, and what strategies have been key to maintaining momentum in a hybrid work environment?
Zoom achieved tremendous growth in its customer base and has helped thousands of small businesses, entrepreneurs, enterprise organizations, and developers alike experience frictionless communications that foster greater human connection. Since then, the way organizations collaborate has continued to evolve, and Zoom has grown alongside these changes. While video conferencing remains a core part of our identity, we have expanded far beyond that to deliver modern, AI-first solutions built for hybrid work environments.
On June 11, we rolled out Zoom Phone—our cloud-based telephony solution—across four additional telecom circles: Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Karnataka (Bengaluru), and Andhra Pradesh & Telangana (Hyderabad), after previously launching in the Maharashtra (October 2024) and Tamil Nadu (Chennai) (February 2025) telecom circles. We plan to bring Zoom Phone to additional telecom circles across India. Alongside this, we launched Zoom Contact Center, an AI-first, omnichannel customer service solution with Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC) capabilities. These innovations mark a significant milestone in Zoom’s ongoing commitment to the Indian market, enabling businesses to streamline operations and enhance both customer and employee experiences through a unified Total Experience (TX).
To further enhance productivity and engagement in today’s flexible work setups, collaboration features like Zoom Docs, Zoom Whiteboard, and Zoom Scheduler are all accessible from within the same interface. Integrations with third-party apps reduce the “toggle tax,” while Zoom Mail and Calendar consolidate workflows to keep users within the platform. Zoom Rooms and Zoom Virtual Workspaces support inclusive collaboration across geographies and work modes.
Our vision has always been centered around human connection, and we are helping individuals and teams focus on meaningful work by simplifying tasks and unlocking time for creativity and collaboration with AI-first innovations.
Zoom has rebranded itself as an AI-first company. What drove the shift, and how does it redefine Zoom’s long-term strategy?
Zoom has always been known for helping people connect through video, but we’ve evolved far beyond that. In November 2024, we unveiled our new legal name: “Zoom Communications, Inc.” By dropping the “Video” from our former name, we are better positioned to reflect the breadth of our platform and signal our commitment to long-term growth. Our continued focus on delivering value is evident through the recent expansion of our platform in India.
To deliver on our mission over the long term, we must stay ahead of trends, innovate rapidly, and develop solutions that reflect our customers’ biggest needs, which go far beyond video in the future of work. This is most evident in the AI explosion that has disrupted the workplace over the past year. What may have been a “nice-to-have” is now a “must-have,” and we’ve responded with solutions to improve our customers’ day-to-day work experience.
At the heart of this shift is Zoom AI Companion, which reduces workloads by summarizing meetings, drafting messages, preparing users for discussions, and more. Now enhanced with agentic skills, AI Companion can perform multi-step actions, manage tasks, meetings, and calendar events, and interact with third-party applications. This enables users to focus on impactful work while AI Companion handles routine tasks.
Our AI-first solutions—like Zoom Docs, Zoom AI Companion 2.0, and the new Custom AI Companion add-on—are just the beginning. Our vision has always been centered around human connection, and by putting AI at the core, we’re helping people work happier, smarter, and faster, creating more space for meaningful collaboration, creativity, and productivity.
What is Zoom’s overall GTM strategy for the Indian market?
Zoom’s go-to-market strategy for India is grounded in a customer-first approach built on the strength of our platform, our brand’s trust and recall, and a clear value proposition tailored to the evolving needs of Indian businesses. We’re focused on driving meaningful engagement through a multichannel strategy, aligning product, marketing, and sales around the customer journey.
- Product-led growth: At the core of our strategy is product-led growth. Zoom’s seamless, intuitive user experience encourages organic adoption and exploration. With Zoom AI Companion included at no additional cost for eligible customers with paid Zoom user accounts, users are empowered to do more, whether it’s summarizing meetings, managing tasks, or drafting messages, freeing up time to focus on what matters most. This delivers immediate value and accelerates feature adoption and plan upgrades. Our recent launch of Zoom Phone across major telecom circles and the BYOC-enabled Zoom Contact Center are examples of how we’re building for long-term, scalable growth in the region.
- Targeted customer segmentation: We follow a targeted customer segmentation approach to address the diverse needs of India’s enterprises, Small and Medium Businesses, and frontline sectors. From IT and financial services to education and healthcare, we tailor our messaging and outreach to specific use cases, ensuring that we speak directly to customer pain points with solutions that are relevant and actionable.
- AI-first value proposition: Our value proposition is centered on simplicity, security, and scale. Whether it’s Zoom Phone for enterprise-grade voice, Zoom Contact Center for AI-first customer service, or Zoom Workplace for integrated collaboration, our platform delivers a better way to work, collaborate, and connect. We emphasize how our solutions reduce complexity, boost productivity, and integrate effortlessly into existing workflows.
- Omnichannel reach and partner ecosystem: Zoom’s omnichannel approach blends digital and in-person engagement. We connect with customers through online campaigns, product trials, and webinars, while also deepening our reach through ecosystem partnerships. In India, we continue to expand our network of channel partners to drive adoption across industries and geographies.
Ultimately, our strategy reflects our mission to deliver limitless human connection and create more meaningful experiences for customers by helping them work smarter, serve better, and grow faster in a hybrid, AI-first world.
How is Zoom leveraging agentic AI to go beyond traditional productivity and collaboration tools?
Zoom AI Companion for Zoom Workplace now includes agentic skills, enabling it to perform multi-step actions, manage tasks, meetings, and calendar events, and interact with third-party applications. Agentic AI enables artificial intelligence to go beyond simple prompts and responses, managing multi-step tasks autonomously. These agents can reason, plan, and learn from past actions, providing support for real-time decision-making and automation at scale. This helps users focus on impactful work while AI Companion handles routine tasks.
We’ve also introduced Zoom Workplace for Frontline with AI Companion, which is now generally available. It’s a purpose-built mobile-first solution that unlocks agentic Zoom AI Companion skills for frontline workers and managers with paid Zoom accounts. It streamlines on-shift communications and work management, helping frontline workers across industries like retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and emergency services get more done and strengthen relationships. Additionally, we are upgrading our Business Services by introducing more agentic capabilities. Zoom Virtual Agent will soon expand its reasoning abilities to handle complex tasks while maintaining conversational context for more natural and helpful outcomes.
Zoom continues to invest in AI across three key areas: supporting individual productivity, powering better collaboration, and helping customer-facing teams delight their customers. With our federated approach to AI development, we combine Zoom-owned and leading third-party models to make these capabilities more accessible and affordable for more organizations, without using customer content to train our or our third-party models. This responsible approach to AI helps ensure that our AI is accessible to as many people as possible, including those working in industries where trust and accuracy are paramount.
How do products like Zoom Tasks, Zoom Docs, Zoom Drive, Zoom Clips, and Zoom Virtual Agent integrate AI to streamline team collaboration within the Zoom Workplace? How do they add value for enterprises?
Zoom Workplace offers a unified, AI-first platform that brings together these products into a single, seamless workspace—designed to streamline collaboration, boost productivity, and simplify how teams work, all without the need to switch between multiple applications or platforms.
- Zoom Tasks: Integrated with Zoom AI Companion, Zoom Tasks automatically detects action items from meetings, chats, and emails, and organizes them in a centralized task tab. This helps teams stay aligned and on track, reducing manual follow-up and improving execution.
- Zoom Docs: Zoom Docs enhances real-time collaboration by transforming meeting content into living, AI-powered documents, wikis, and project plans. With built-in transcription, smart content population, and fact-checking through enterprise knowledge or the internet, it helps ensure that nothing gets lost in the moment.
- Zoom Clips: Zoom Clips enables impactful communication across distributed teams by allowing users to create short videos with AI-generated avatars. After recording a source video, users can generate clips in multiple languages—ideal for training modules, company-wide announcements, or cross-functional updates.
- Zoom Virtual Agent: Part of Zoom’s AI-first business services, Zoom Virtual Agent is being enhanced with deeper reasoning and contextual understanding. It can manage multi-turn conversations for both customer-facing and internal support scenarios, providing more natural, helpful, and efficient interactions.
Together, these tools are powered by Zoom’s federated approach to AI so enterprises can benefit from secure and cost-effective AI solutions tailored to their workflows. These innovations represent the future of collaborative work: seamless, intelligent, and purpose-built for modern teams.
What are the core benefits customers are seeing from Zoom’s Custom AI Companion and the AI Studio platform, especially in enterprise use cases?
With the Custom AI Companion add-on for Zoom Workplace plans, enterprises can tailor AI agents and skills to address their unique needs and drive efficiency across their organizations. Powered by Zoom AI Studio — a low-code, drag-and-drop builder — this offering allows admins to customize how AI Companion supports their teams, enabling expanded knowledge, automated workflows, and highly relevant meeting summaries.
It offers the ability to create custom knowledge collections using organizational data, making AI Companion more contextually aware and useful across functions. Customers can use the ability to create custom meeting summaries with templates that match specific business needs, whether it’s for one-on-ones, brainstorming sessions, or customer calls. Organizations can also add terms to a custom dictionary, enabling AI Companion to understand and use industry- or company-specific language, improving the accuracy and relevance of summaries and transcripts. Additionally, Zoom Clips allows users to generate personalized video clips using a custom avatar that looks and sounds like them, making internal communications and training more impactful, even across different languages and geographies.
Collaboration is also enhanced with features like personalized avatars for multilingual video clips. With AI Companion now supporting agentic skills — Zoom Workplace remains an open and flexible platform, and the Custom AI Companion add-on makes it even more adaptable — helping enterprises work the way they want, while enhancing productivity, streamlining communication, and delivering personalized experiences at scale.
Zoom Phone’s rollout in India, including six telecom circles, is a significant milestone. What is Zoom’s go-to-market strategy in the Indian telecom space?
Our go-to-market strategy for Zoom Phone in India mirrors our broader approach: we lead with product strength, customer empathy, and a deep understanding of local market dynamics. We’re focused on identifying and engaging with target customer segments, including enterprises, fast-growing digital-native businesses, and hybrid-first organizations, who stand to benefit most from a unified communications experience.
To drive adoption, we showcase Zoom Phone’s value proposition through practical use cases, live demos, and customer success stories that illustrate real business impact. Our goal is to help organizations simplify communication workflows, reduce costs, and improve flexibility, while maintaining the reliability and security Zoom is known for.
We’re also building consistent engagement across both digital and physical channels—whether through targeted campaigns, partner-led activations, or in-person experiences. By investing in our channel ecosystem and enabling our partners with the right tools and knowledge, we aim to expand our market footprint and drive long-term growth.
Above all, we continue to listen to our customers closely, using their feedback to evolve our offering and ensure Zoom Phone continues to meet their needs today—and in the future. Customer happiness remains central to our strategy, and we’re committed to delivering a reliable, flexible, and easy-to-use solution that drives long-term satisfaction and trust.
The Zoom Up Services Program adds new service layers for partners. How does this expand partner capabilities and customer outcomes post-sale? What differentiates Certified Services and Partner-Delivered Programs, and how are partners being enabled to scale with Zoom’s ecosystem?
The Zoom Up Services Program introduces new service layers that expand partner capabilities and enhance customer outcomes post-sale. By enabling partners to deliver differentiated post-sales services—including deployment, support, customer success, and managed services—Zoom is helping meet a broader range of customer needs across its platform.
The program includes three service models tailored to business needs and engagement levels. While partners can continue to resell or refer Zoom-branded services, the introduction of Certified Services and Partner-Delivered Programs adds depth.
Certified Services allow partners to deliver their own branded services to customers, endorsed by Zoom, upon completing the necessary accreditations and training. Partner-Delivered Programs enable certified partners to offer advanced post-sales services in partnership with Zoom, provided they meet standards around capability, scale, and performance.
To help partners scale, Zoom offers specialized enablement and hands-on training, unlocking new revenue streams, creating differentiation in the market, and allowing partners to deliver exceptional solutions and support. This strategic shift deepens partner engagement and drives customer success at scale.
As Zoom continues evolving its AI-first platform, what are the next big product or capability launches we should expect in the next 2 years?
As Zoom continues its evolution into an AI-first platform for human connection, the company is focused on delivering solutions that go beyond meetings—helping businesses and teams work smarter, collaborate better, and drive meaningful impact. Over the next two years, several advanced capabilities and products will further enhance the value of Zoom Workplace and Zoom Business Services.
Here’s what businesses can expect:
- Expansion of Zoom Phone across India: Zoom also plans to bring Zoom Phone to additional telecom circles across India beyond the six available telecom circles, accelerating its commitment to make modern telephony available to more organizations across key regions.
- Delivering AI-first “total experiences”: Together, the availability of Zoom Phone and Zoom Contact Center reinforces Zoom’s commitment to making customer journeys efficient, personalized, and delightful through a unified Total Experience (TX)—combining customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX).
- Expanded agentic AI capabilities across Zoom Workplace: Zoom AI Companion will continue to evolve with advanced agentic skills, enabling the platform to perform multi-step tasks, manage complex workflows, and integrate seamlessly with third-party applications.
- Enhanced customization with Custom AI Companion: With the Custom AI Companion add-on, organizations will be able to use Zoom AI Studio to build tailored AI agents that serve specific use cases, such as generating custom meeting summary templates, connecting to enterprise data, and more.
- Smarter customer engagement tools: Zoom Virtual Agent will be enhanced with deeper reasoning abilities and contextual memory, enabling it to handle complex customer or internal support queries more naturally and effectively.
