Pandemic-era go-to video meetings and online collaboration platform Zoom is leaning heavily into artificial intelligence (AI) in its expanding product suite as it serves a growing number of enterprise clients.
During the company’s fiscal 2023 fourth-quarter earnings call Monday (Feb. 27), Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan said, “the age of AI and large language models has arrived, and we want to empower smarter experiences and workflows that truly enable our customers to benefit from these transformational tools.”
Yuan said embedding AI into more workflows will help provide users with “richer, more actionable insights that empower them to work smarter and serve their customers better.”
He said Zoom IQ, Zoom Virtual Agent, and its translation, captioning, and meeting summary tools “are just the beginning. We will layer more AI technologies into our products to truly help our customers maximize their ROI on our platform and thrive in this new era of computing.”
Yuan called out key customers including Aramco, NASDAQ, and financial services firm Raymond James as having recently expanded their relationships with Zoom across its suite of voice, video, chat, events, and collaboration tools and bundles.
Illustrating how AI is being built into more of Zoom’s tools, Yuan responded to an analyst’s question saying, “we announced a feature called Zoom Smart and Meeting Summary where we already leverage GPT-3 to augment our ML to improve that experience. We are going to double down and triple down on AI in a lot of features” including Virtual Agent, Zoom IQ for Sales, and its chat solution.
All this advancement and expansion comes at a price.
Zoom CFO Kelly Steckelberg told another analyst that Zoom has announced a price increase for monthly users that takes effect March 1, adding that “on the Enterprise side, we did a pricing update all-inclusive with Zoom One, the bundle that we came up with last year. We believe that reflects the best way for our customers to buy and to get full value out of the platform.”
In terms of product innovation feeding growth, Steckelberg added that “from a product perspective, we had strong growth in Zoom Phone, coupled with contributions from Zoom Rooms and other products. Online average monthly churn decreased to 3.4% from 3.8% in Q4 of FY ’22 and increased slightly from 3.1% in Q3 as expected due to seasonality. The number of Enterprise customers grew 12% year over year to approximately 213,000.”
Read: Zoom’s Caution Points to Work-From-Home Headwinds
Coming near the first anniversary of the launch of the Zoom Contact Center product, Yuan said that Zoom needs to do a better job of communicating features — he noted that 1,500 product features were developed last year alone — saying “one thing we did not do well, I think we should improve … after we finish the development of features, we also need to remember that customers may not know it,” indicating that more customer education is in its roadmap.
While Zoom reported that revenues were up roughly 4% year over year in the quarter ended January 31, 2023, the company is no longer seeing the massive adoption of the pandemic years, which led to the recent downsizing of its workforce by 15%, equating to roughly 1,300 employees.