I wish it weren’t true, but there are some shallow people in the world. They profess love, marry, then years later trade in a spouse for a trophy. Maybe the issues felt exhausting. Maybe the grass looked greener. Whatever the rationale, they move on and don’t want to hear criticism about it. That analogy keeps popping into my head as Zoom writes its next act.
Zoom is clearly pursuing a new relationship, an AI-first work platform that promises to move us from conversation to completion. The pitch is assistants that don’t just summarize meetings but fetch data, trigger workflows, and hand back finished steps.
On paper, that aligns with a world currently head-over-heels for anything labeled “AI.” The question isn’t whether the ambition is big enough. It’s whether Zoom is bringing its past relationships along for the ride—or quietly leaving them for the new trophy wife.
Romancing the Strategy
Let’s start with the ceremony around the strategy. From what I heard, as I wasn’t invited, this year’s Zoom Perspectives sessions were tight, confident, and future-focused. (The guest list did seem to lean more toward LEGO minifigures predisposed to singing “Everything Is Awesome” than anyone who would say, “Wait a second …”)
The serious point is that when access narrows, so does healthy friction. Minimize diverse voices and the hard questions don’t get asked, the awkward tradeoffs don’t get pressure-tested, and organizations can be blindsided. It’s happened plenty before.
On substance, the Zoom pivot has muscle. Zoom is stitching meetings, phone, contact center, events, docs, whiteboards, and employee engagement into one fabric—and then laying a memory and intelligence layer across it. Think assistants that can retrieve across Zoom and third-party apps, open tickets, nudge owners, and return artifacts instead of bullet points.
There are vertical offerings for clinicians and frontline workers. The channel motion is evolving from resale to services, encouraging partners to deliver post-sales value. Add to that the announcement that a seasoned CMO, Kimberly Storin, is finally back in the chair to reset positioning and “bring the swagger back.”
Taken together, that’s not tinkering. It’s a full-body transformation aimed at measurable productivity.
If Zoom can consistently close loops—here’s the decision, here’s the doc, here’s the ticket, here’s the customer update—enterprises will pay real money for that. If the AI layer proves both trustworthy and economical, it reinforces the whole stack.
That’s the best case, and it’s credible. But the first spouse—happy video collaboration—and all her many friends are puzzled. Not only do they feel dumped for the new relationship, but the annual celebration of that marriage has turned into an online TV show.
Mixed Virtual Signals
Zoomtopia, once an undeniable must-attend for customers, partners, and media, was now a 100% virtual event this year. Everything went virtual during the pandemic for obvious reasons, but Zoom seems to be one of the only entities that hasn’t whole-heartedly re-embraced the value of in-person time now that it’s safe again.
Virtual is efficient. It is accessible. But it’s not a substitute for community. You can simulcast a message; you can’t stream serendipity.
The old Zoomtopia formula—a dense mix of roadmap reveals, hallway debates, product petting zoos, and no small amount of showbiz—created momentum that carried into budgets and deployments. People came home with stories, not just notes.
Expanding into a broad work platform is the right ambition, but it risks narrative drift if the community senses that the core experience is now only a supporting actor in an AI blockbuster.
A purely virtual show, no matter how polished, reinforces the feeling that the first relationship was never really that important to Zoom. Did “work happy” mean they wanted us to work happy, or just that they were happy the hype was working long enough to embrace the next hype storm?
Virtual is fantastic for distributing announcements widely and quickly. But “planning” a “virtual celebration” reads as the opposite of celebration. Honestly, I made no plans to attend. If something noteworthy happened, I knew I could watch the replay. There’s no serendipity in a canned online event, especially when it feels like a second straight year of all-AI, all the time.
That shift also lands awkwardly next to the channel transformation Zoom discussed. Partners thrive on in-person time, the kind Zoomtopia used to enable. If you’re asking partners to carry a bigger revenue share and a richer services envelope, removing the best venue for shared learning and relationship-building sends a mixed signal. It says “we need you more than ever” and “see you on the stream” in the same breath.
There’s a message-discipline risk, too. Zoom’s magic wasn’t only codec efficiency. During its insurgent phase, teams could sneak Zoom into a pilot and look like heroes in an afternoon. That permission structure—fresh, pragmatic, fun—made it feel like a movement, not merely a product.
Expanding into a broad work platform is the right ambition, but it risks narrative drift if the community senses that the core experience is now only a supporting actor in an AI blockbuster. The antidote isn’t another keynote slide. It’s empathetic, hands-on encounters where the future is experienced, questioned, and improved in real time.
Pick Your Priority
To be crystal clear, this isn’t a plea to freeze progress. AI isn’t a side quest for collaboration vendors, it’s the main quest. The critique is about how Zoom is prosecuting it.
Right now, the most visible ceremonies feel optimized for message control, not movement building. Movements are messy. They require inviting people who poke holes, file bugs in the lobby, and say the naming doesn’t make sense and the workflow takes too many extra clicks. Movements produce fanatically loyal customers who go back to their organizations and make budgets happen.
There’s a version of this story where Zoom pulls off something rare: maintaining the best meeting experience and continuing to improve in-room experiences while also becoming a credible AI workflow platform. I want that version. It’s good for users, good for partners, and good for a market that needs competition to stay honest.
But the path runs straight through the community that got Zoom here. Don’t snub them. Invite them back into the room, literally and figuratively. Give them demos you can’t pause, questions you can’t pre-screen, and surprises that make people text their teams mid-keynote.
Ignoring the first spouse carries risk. Canceling the in-person celebration amplifies it. Claiming “collaboration is mature” when anyone who actually uses it knows it isn’t—that’s the biggest risk of all. It nudges customers toward competitors, and the data is starting to show it. “If it’s unimportant to them, why should it be important to me?” is a very logical decision being played out in enterprises today.
Zoom deserves genuine well-wishes on this transformation. The ambition is real, and done right, it could be important. But if the company keeps prioritizing AI over collaboration, broadcast over belonging, and sycophants over diverse thought, those not aligned with what’s labeled “new” will reasonably infer they’re being relabeled “old and unimportant.”
One of my industry contacts was recently mentioned in a Zoom chat room I’m in. When I asked him if he saw it, he said no, he didn’t see the notice amongst the dozens of other useless notices he gets and doesn’t use from Zoom, mostly about AI notes on his calls. Mature collaboration indeed.
