Futurum Live! From the Show Floor at Enterprise Connect 2023 with Zoom’s Gary Sorrentino

Thanks for having me.

I think it's great. Always great here, always great here in Orlando where it's 93 degrees.

So you know, before the pandemic, 2019, Zoom was the killer meeting app. As the pandemic started, we realized that it had to be more than just a meeting app, and so we developed this very unusual platform to help people have the solutions that they need, because it was more than just meeting. You know, we finally got people home, the ability to work disconnected. And so during the pandemic, as the needs started to change, we kept adding more and more solutions, and now we're just a fully rounded platform, including mail, integration with emails, you've got Gmail, you've got chat. So the platform consists of this: the first part of the platform is Zoom One, and Zoom One really including mail and chat is really for me. Zoom One is really how do we make the person productive, and that's what we focused on. But now as we're coming out of the pandemic, people are coming back into the physical offices, that's where Zoom Spaces came, because we needed different parts of the platform to make people work physically together again. So we had Zoom One really unleashing the human potential, then we had Zoom Spaces to bring people together, and then we had the contact center to make sure that the client experience is the same productive day with the equality and parity that they need and demand.

Enterprise Connect, there's only one word here this week, right? It's all AI. But in between that, what we're seeing also is our clients are trying to figure out, and we're working with them, is okay, we have the employee experience, we have them coming back together experience, now we have to work on the client experience. And so we've been working with Zoom to bring the contact center into the platform, something people didn't think about until after the pandemic. The employee experience was when I was an HR issue, and the customer experience was a sales issue. Finally, they have to be tied together, and that's what we're working on.

Well, I mean, people have to upskill, but there's a stat that says about 70% of employees today feel they're unsuited for the future of work. And so what we're trying to do is work with our clients to say, don't train them, training is your job. You have to teach them how to think, not what to think. And that's a big difference. We're asking major questions like, why do you do it that way? We have really bad answers, we keep saying because. And we're meeting in that balance now to say we're working asynchronously, they know how to do that. Chat's not something that a lot of people used before the pandemic, and now chat is part of our whole lives. We're all working asynchronous.

Yeah, because someone sent me a little note that said, so we're working with our customers to really rethink about the office. The office has to be more of a destination for collaboration. And please don't come in if you plan on just doing Zoom calls all day. You have to come into this building, we're going to set it up for collaboration, we're going to teach them, they're going to be appreciated, they're going to bond again, they're going to get those serendipitous moments. But it takes a lot because you have to teach people that going back into the office is a meaningful day. It might not be productive in the sense of you didn't answer 30 emails, but you had a great bonding experience and got good things done collaboratively, and both of those are equally as important.

Right. I think the difference with AI today is this: as providers, we use AI, we center you in the camera, we take care of your background, we give you translation, we give you transcription. I think what to do about AI now is we're putting it in the hands of the users, and now they're seeing the wonder of this function to say, wait a second, now I can get a little bit of assistance. I can make it so that I'm getting meeting summaries. I mean, think about it, we record a lot of meetings, but I don't know if I want to listen to a 60-minute meeting, but I'll definitely read a three-paragraph summary or action items. Or I can come in and say, hey, catch me up. I'm five, we're always 15 minutes late, but I don't have to stop the meeting to say, okay, who can catch me up? It's finally taking the power that we've always known was there, and now the users are actually able to see it themselves in a language they understand. They're just talking to it.

So I think Zoom was there at the beginning of the pandemic. I think we've morphed to meet the needs of customers through the pandemic. We are here. The future of work is going to change the way we work. We want to be part of that. We want to change the way people work. We want to improve the future of work. We want to work with our clients to figure out what they need to do that. We're going to evolve with it. It's the greatest time in the world. Thanks for having me.