After attending Zoom’s Zoomtopia 2025 Americas event last week, I find myself in a curious position: being more impressed by what the company announced than by how it was presented. While the virtual event format felt somewhat underwhelming, lacking the energy and connection that made previous in-person Zoomtopias memorable, the strategic moves Zoom unveiled reveal a company that’s thinking carefully about its future in an increasingly competitive landscape.
The Disconnect Between Presentation and Substance
Let me be frank: Zoomtopia 2025’s virtual-only format did the company no favors. For a brand that built its reputation on delivering happiness and connecting people, the decision to go fully virtual felt like a missed opportunity to showcase the very human connections that make Zoom special. The “follow-the-sun” approach across different regions was logistically sound but created a fragmented experience that lacked the cohesive narrative that elevates great product announcements. I found the live comments to be beyond distracting, and it was clear that many attendees were either solopreneurs and/or folks who had never attended an industry event of this nature, feeling they were being marketed to rather than informed. I also felt the in-studio “audience”, which was regularly panned by the camera crew, and the applause track detracted from the event as a whole. It is also wildly optimistic to think that you’re going to somehow manage to keep the attention of any audience for three hours of a virtual event without distractions pulling them away. It was, for me anyway, a salient reminder that while virtual is great, in some instances, there is no substitute for in-person gatherings. This was one such instance.
That said, if you could look past the presentation challenges, there were some genuinely smart strategic decisions on display.
AI Companion 3.0: Finally Moving Beyond Meeting Summaries
Zoom’s headline announcement, AI Companion 3.0, represents the kind of evolution this market needs. While competitors have been stuck in the “AI assistant that takes meeting notes” paradigm, Zoom is pushing toward something more substantive: agentic AI that can actually take action on your behalf.
The latest iteration of AI Companion is designed to do what workers need: get them out of the weeds, streamline their work, and reduce the time we all waste on managing tasks. The “Free Up My Time” feature particularly caught my attention. Yes, most managers know which meetings they could skip, but having an AI system that can analyze your calendar, recommend alternatives, and even suggest proxy attendees? That’s the kind of practical automation that actually moves the productivity needle, on a couple of fronts. I especially like the innovative thinking showcased by Zoom’s proxy attendee suggestion capabilities. As leaders, we sometimes get wrapped up in the day-to-day insanity, and it’s easy in that chaos to forget that there are other capable people on our teams. The proxy suggestion capability can serve as a reminder to leaders on that front and help bring others up and along on their career journeys in the process. I’m a fan.
Other attractive core features include extended note-taking capabilities across Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, as well as agentic retrieval that searches across Zoom Workplace, as well as within Google and Microsoft environments, along with a new web-based work surface launching in November 2025.
Zoom’s Business Services Enhancements
Zoom unveiled significant upgrades to its Customer Experience (CX) Suite and Zoom Virtual Agent (ZVA), focusing on elevating both customer interactions and agent performance while delivering actionable intelligence to CX leadership teams. The standout addition is Zoom CX Insights, a conversational intelligence platform that analyzes customer interactions to deliver targeted recommendations and strategic actions. This integration creates a compelling competitive advantage for Zoom’s CCaaS offering, providing organizations with data-driven guidance that optimizes outcomes across the entire customer experience ecosystem.
The Agentic AI Expert Assist will help automate support agent tasks, as well as provide what I believe will be much-needed oversight (and customer peace of mind) to virtual agent interactions with its Automated Quality Management capability. AI Expert Assist can pull context from a customer session, use that context to reason, then complete workflows on the rep’s behalf (with supervision). I really love the capability of “bringing your own voice” to ZVA, which allows organizations to personalize more deeply, which resonates in myriad ways with customers. Not only can organizations find the voice they seek for their customer interactions, they can also help create consistency across the brand as a whole.
Zoom introduced agentic AI to its Zoom Virtual Agent (ZVA) customer assistance solution this past June. The virtual agent features reasoning capabilities that can pull answers from knowledge bases and data stores to better personalize responses. It can also adapt over time, automating more complex queries the more it learns. Zoom also announced new ZVA capabilities including Unified Quality Management and Autonomous Scheduling and Feedback Collection, along with expanded use cases and templates (e.g. Healthcare-specific templates with custom dictionaries, integration with Amazon Connect, and concierge with Zoom Phone).
The Zoom Revenue Accelerator (ZRA) is something I see sales teams getting excited about, as it provides the ability to use AI to help carry the load when it comes to prospecting, follow-up, and scheduling. The ability to leverage AI to help identify high-potential prospects and personalize outreach across various outposts can help make the drudgery part of the prospecting and sales process infinitely less onerous.
Zoom’s partnerships with CRM providers aren’t new, but what is news is Zoom’s move to make real-time transcription, AI assistant tech, and unified routing available in Salesforce Service Cloud, serving up a unified agent experience. Likewise, Zoom’s launch of an agent-to-agent integration as part of its relationship with ServiceNow allows AI Companion and Now Assist Agents to work together solving customer issues.
Zoom’s Video Management Solution
Zoom’s Video Management Solution addresses the reality that video content creation on Zoom is rapidly growing. Whether it’s meetings, customer conversations, webinars and events, training sessions, etc., the business of wading through video content to find what’s most valuable to you personally is a chore. Zoom’s Video Management Solution aims to solve that, providing automatic transcription where every word is searchable and intelligent recommendations can help locate the most relevant content from an organization’s video libraries. The AI Companion is integrated into the product, enabling the creation of transcripts, summaries, smart chapters, and prompts.
Vertical Strategy: Finally Getting Serious About Specialization
Zoom’s commitment to vertical-specific solutions follows a trend we are seeing across the tech industry as a whole, and with good reason. For too long, collaboration platforms have treated healthcare workers, educators, and frontline staff as afterthoughts, offering one-size-fits-all solutions and generic tools with minor customizations slapped on top.
A vertical focus with AI-powered solutions and integrations addresses real workflow challenges in uniquely-tailored ways. For example, the Zoom Virtual Agent for Healthcare, with its custom medical dictionaries and EHR integrations, isn’t just a nice-to-have; it addresses real workflow challenges that generic solutions simply cannot match. For example, when a nurse can get hands-free updates through certified Bluetooth headsets while maintaining patient care, that’s technology serving people rather than the other way around.
The Avatar Question: Innovation or Distraction?
I’ll admit, the photorealistic meeting avatars might have generated some buzz, but they also raised the most questions for me. Yes, there are legitimate use cases: international calls where cultural norms around camera usage vary, or situations where you’re mobile but need to maintain a professional presence.
However, I still can’t shake the feeling that we’re solving the wrong problem here. Instead of creating increasingly sophisticated ways to avoid authentic human interaction, shouldn’t we be working to make virtual meetings less exhausting and more effective in the first place? The avatar technology is undeniably impressive, but I worry about the message it sends about the future of workplace connection. And I would be remiss not to ask: at this point in time, when virtual meetings are a business norm, is it really too much to expect people to show up ‘camera-ready’ in the vast majority of situations? I don’t think so. Video is an integral part of our lives today, professionally and personally
Small Business Wins in a Big Way
One aspect that didn’t get enough attention during the event was how these updates benefit smaller organizations. Simplicity and ease of use have always been Zoom’s superpower, and whether SMB or enterprise, this resonates deeply with Zoom’s customer base. The company’s commitment to ongoing enhancements to AI Companion, delivering AI features that are easy to understand, access, and use (across all Zoom apps), is a stark contrast, for example, to the messiness of Microsoft Copilot.
For small and medium-sized businesses without dedicated IT teams, this consistency that Zoom has long embraced matters enormously. While Microsoft continues to proliferate different Copilot offerings across its ecosystem, Zoom is keeping things simple and integrated. That’s smart positioning in a market where complexity often kills adoption.
The Competitive Reality Check
Despite these positive moves, is there an elephant in the room — namely, the shifting workplace dynamics that threaten Zoom’s pandemic-era dominance? Despite the return-to-office momentum building, the realities of a hybrid workforce mean that collaboration, both in person and virtually, is the norm. As deeply entrenched as the ability to meet and collaborate virtually is in our world of work today, I don’t see any reason to think people will cut back to any meaningful degree on relying on Zoom (or other collaboration platforms).
That said, Zoom’s vertical strategy is significant here. By embedding itself into the specific workflows of healthcare, education, and frontline industries, Zoom is building defensive moats that go beyond the traditional video call use case. These aren’t markets that will suddenly decide to abandon remote collaboration; they are industries where Zoom can become indispensable infrastructure.
Innovation Velocity Still Impressive
Credit where it’s due: Zoom’s development pace remains remarkable, which is another superpower the company has deeply entrenched in its DNA. The breadth of updates across AI Companion, vertical solutions, hardware certifications, partnerships, and platform integrations shows a company that’s not sitting still. The company’s continued focus on ease of use — a simple, intuitive interface — remains a key differentiator in an increasingly complex collaboration landscape.
The Bottom Line: Substance Over Style
Here’s my take: Zoomtopia 2025 was a tale of two experiences. The virtual event itself felt flat for me personally, and based on the audience interaction and comments I saw throughout, it failed to generate the kind of excitement that drives increased awareness and adoption. But the substance of what Zoom announced reveals a company making smart, strategic bets on its future. No revolutionary promises, but instead a very clear focus on delivering practical improvements that solve real problems for real users. Equally important is Zoom’s commitment to making AI Companion capabilities available to its paid Zoom Workplace customers at no additional cost. At a time when it feels like every other organization is nickel-and-diming customers to death (looking at you, Microsoft), that remains a significant differentiator.
Zoom’s AI Companion 3.0 capabilities genuinely advance the state of workplace automation. The vertical solutions address markets that have been underserved by generic collaboration tools, and the consistent user experience benefits smaller organizations struggling with technology complexity.
These aren’t headline-grabbing moonshots, but they’re the kind of steady, strategic progress that builds lasting competitive advantages. Sometimes the smartest move isn’t the flashiest one; it’s the one that quietly makes your customers more successful, one workflow at a time.
Watch Zoomtopia 2025 on demand here.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn.
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