Zoom is rebranding, dropping the “Video” from its name and instead pitching itself as an AI company.
The video chat company was one of the biggest winners from the pandemic and the move to working from home. While most people know it by the one word, its official name is “Zoom Video Communications Inc”.
Now it says that brand no longer reflects the company as it is today. “While that is still a priority, Zoom is now about so much more than video meetings,” wrote chief executive Eric Yuan in a blog post.
Zoom is now “an AI-first company delivering modern, hybrid work solutions that enable you to collaborate seamlessly”, he wrote. That is part of a broader move that it named “Zoom 2.0” and which it says goes “far beyond video”.
It suggested that the changes could be so dramatic that they could help lose a day from their working week. People might be able to generate “digital twins”, he suggested, “freeing up a whole day’s worth of work and allowing you to work just four days per week”.
Some of those technologies are already available to customers, he said. That includes the Zoom AI Companion, which offers a range of features including the ability to summarise messages with a view to letting people “get more done”.
While Zoom presented the change as being focused on new AI technologies and the vision of a changed company, it also comes amid questions over the future of work. Some have questioned whether the move towards working from home that accounted for its expansive growth in recent years will continue, and whether the future of the workplace could be hybrid.
Zoom has also come under increased pressure from other, more established workplace communications companies. Microsoft now offers similar video chats in its Teams app, for instance, and there are competing tools in Slack and other platforms.
