The communications industry is filled with vendors that once dominated one aspect of the “stack” but have been focused on building a unified platform that includes voice, video, meetings, contact center and much more. But the most interesting vendor in the market is Zoom Communications Inc.

Zoom has not only broadened the scope of what one would expect from a communications provider but expanded outside the footprint of the traditional unified-communications-as-a-service/contact-center-as-a-service market. In addition to the core communication capabilities, it has added e-mail, document sharing, front-line worker tools, small business apps and more.

This makes Zoom the company with the broadest set of work functions integrated into one back-end stack. Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC have similar products, but they were built when siloed applications were the norm. Historically, silos of apps were never ideal as workers wound up being the integration point between them, but people managed to do their jobs albeit with a heavy “toggle tax.” This is why users are constantly having to copy and paste information between the core work apps they use.

It’s through this lens that Zoom has been building its platform. Today at at Enterprise Connect, Zoom made a series of announcements that shows the fruits of these efforts as it transitions from the “video company” to work orchestration. It is positioning itself as an artificial intelligence-first, agentic platform designed to move conversations to completion by leveraging its back-end platform.

The shift to agentic intelligence

On its analyst pre-briefing, the company focused heavily on its evolution into a system of action. This isn’t just about summarizing a meeting but rather about “knowledge creation” — taking the output of a conversation and other forms of work and feeding it into downstream workflows.

The highlights of the announcements center on:

• My Notes: Work isn’t limited to meetings. People are on the go, run into co-workers at lunch, in the hallway and other places. When we see them, we take notes, but these are often disconnected bullet points. With My Notes, workers can type quick bullets and then AI Companion will expand on these using transcripts and build summaries, action items and next steps.
• Zoom Virtual Agent (ZVA) 3.0: This is a significant step forward in customer experience. By employing a new execution architecture, ZVA can handle complex, multi-step customer interactions that previously required a human agent to intervene. One big milestone for ZVA 3.0 is the integration with Workvivo, Zoom’s tool for front-line workers, which make up about 80% of the overall workforce. This is an audience that has had to rely on consumer tools to help them do their jobs, but Zoom is bringing ZVA to them through their mobile apps.
• Intelligent Retrieval and Third-Party Integration: Zoom is making it easier for AI Companion to “know” your data. By connecting to 10-plus major enterprise apps — suchas Salesforce, Slack, ServiceNow and Jira — the AI has access to the data needed to surface answers without the user needing to switch between tabs or hunt for files. Toggle tax kills productivity, but almost all workflows require data from multiple applications. Zoom is removing the typical human integration required to share data.
• AI Docs, AI Slides and AI Sheets: Zoom is launched Zoom Docs as a collaborative document tool but customers that use Zoom aren’t just writing, they’re having conversations with a goal of creating finished deliverables and they want to use AI to do it. To meet this new way of working, Zoom announced AI Docs, AI Sheets and AI Slides, which aren’t your legacy productivity apps with AI bolted on, but rather AI canvases that can understand the context of work, meetings, email and chats as well as the outcomes the team is looking to achieve and then leverages AI to create the rest of the deliverables such as a spreadsheet or presentation.

The wrapper for these applications is obviously agentic AI. By automating end-to-end tasks, Zoom is expanding its agentic capabilities to reduce all that busy work that get in the way of doing and finishing work.

Why this matters for customers

The biggest friction point in the modern enterprise isn’t the lack of tools; it’s the fragmentation of those tools. Customers are suffering from “context switching” fatigue. In fact, my research shows that workers spend 40% of their time managing work instead of doing their jobs.

Zoom’s focus on “Conversation to Completion” directly addresses this. By embedding AI Companion into Workvivo, and allowing it to pull from third-party tools, Zoom is essentially trying to become the “connective tissue” of work, solving the problems I highlighted.

For a business, this means a meeting isn’t just an hour spent talking to people only to have 90% of the information lost once we got back to our other tasks. The meeting and any other interaction become the launchpad for automated follow-ups, document creation and customer relationship management updates.

I’ve used the analogy that high-level executives have chief of staffs to connect the dots between the work they do, but the other 95% of the workforce doesn’t. With the scope of work that Zoom has access to, it should be able to use agentic to bring that kind of capability better than its peers. The proof will come through customer wins and use cases, but the strategy is sound. As Zoom has entered some of these nontraditional communications markets, many industry watchers have criticized Zoom for trying to compete in areas such as e-mail and docs, but that does give Zoom access to data it would not have had.

Furthermore, its focus on “verticalization” — with specialized integrations for healthcare (Epic), financial services and retail — shows that Zoom understands that a “one-size-fits-all” AI isn’t good enough for enterprise-grade deployments.

Long-term, products such as Zoom’s agentic agents will need to interface with agents from other companies. Though Zoom can address a wide number of end to end processes, it can’t do them all, and that’s where Agent-to-Agent or A2A and Model Context Protocol or MCP will become important.

Zoom mentioned on the call something I have been hearing that though MCP and A2A make great media headlines, the reality is that demand for multi-agent is still nascent. Though not part of the Enterprise Connect payload, Zoom did confirm it’s experimenting with it. This shows a grounded, realistic approach to product development: It’s building the capability, but it isn’t forcing the market before it’s ready, which is typical Zoom.

Licensing the next frontier

As Zoom continues to broaden its scope of work, it will also need to evolve how customers pay for the product. One of the great things about Zoom is that buying the product has been simple, with just a few bundles. However, with AI coming, Zoom is looking at a mesh of possibilities with a core license and then several add-ons. Zoom came to prominence during the pandemic because “Meet Happy” included “Purchase simply.”

It’s worth noting that this problem of licensing complexity is not unique to Zoom but something the industry is grappling with. Customers don’t want to manage a sprawling inventory of bundles for workplace, contact center and various AI builders. There’s a valid concern about whether Zoom’s packaging can keep pace with its rapid innovation and that was brought up in the analyst Q&A.

Zoom’s response was promising but a work in progress. It’s moving toward:

1. Segmentation-based packaging: Tailoring toolsets for small and medium-sized businesses versus enterprise needs.
2. Standalone SKUs: By launching a standalone “Custom AI Companion” SKU at the end of this month, Zoom is providing flexibility for users who want the power of their agentic AI without necessarily being locked into the full suite.

The bottom line

The “meeting app” label is officially dead or at least should be. Zoom is now an AI-orchestration platform and arguably broadest one in the industry. The next phase for the company will be execution — simplifying licensing and proving that its agentic workflows can deliver consistent return on investment across different verticals.

The move into productivity apps is the one I find the most compelling. When Zoom first launched Docs, people questioned why we needed another document platform and gave Zoom zero chance of success. The fundamental thesis of my research has always been that share shifts happen when markets transition and AI is causing people to work differently, which gives Zoom an opening.

Canva has disrupted Adobe in the creative market, and generative AI has moved eyeballs away from the once untouchable Google Search business. Decades ago, people said, “Who needs Microsoft Office?” because we had Lotus 1-2-3. The Office productivity suite is a de facto standard, but the user experience has always been subpar, so Zoom does have an opportunity to extend its expertise in “ease of use” to this space.

To be clear, Zoom’s ability to “win” is not tied in building a better document, e-mail or chat, but rather it’s the value users get when they go “all in” on Zoom. The company needs to be able to demonstrate that, as I add Zoom components, a worker’s job becomes exponentially simpler. This will get more users yelling, “I use Zoom!” as they do with communications today.

Zoom continues to beat to the march of its own drum by focusing on areas that are not typical to communications. Zoom came to market by focusing on ease of use, which, for whatever reason, was not a focus for this industry. The company isn’t trying to enable us to communicate better but addresses the larger scope of work, which has been broken for a long time. So a bigger shot of nontypical might be what’s needed to move us into the agentic era.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE. 

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