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Zoom made a name for itself during the pandemic, becoming synonymous with video conference calls. But the company recently changed its name from “Zoom Video Communications Inc.” to simply “Zoom Communications Inc.,” a sign that its pushing beyond video. Other Zoom offerings include a Team Chat product comparable to Slack, a collaborative document platform that integrates with Zoom meetings, business phone features, and an AI companion. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan spoke to Fast Company about the company’s offerings and ambitions beyond video, his vision for the future of AI-powered work, and what the return to the office has meant for how people use Zoom. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. You recently dropped “video” from your company name. What does that mean for the future of Zoom? When I started Zoom in 2011, the mission was very simple: to make video communication frictionless. And that’s pretty much what we did. So, when we started, everything centered around video. Now, you look at what we’re doing today: Way beyond video, we have a full workplace platform. We have Zoom Phone, Contact Center, Team Chat, Whiteboard, Zoom Docs. Essentially, our new mission is to build an AI-first work platform for human connection. It’s not only centered around video anymore. And what role is AI going to play in all that? Before everyone talked about generative AI, we already heavily invested into AIsome traditional AI and some generative AI. We have a smart team and built our own large language model as well, even before ChatGPT. Today, I open up my Zoom Workplace and I still spend a lot of time to manually do so many things. I check my email, look at my channel messages, phone calls, calendars, meetings, and sometimes I need to write in meeting notes. A lot of manual work. I think AI can completely change that. Essentially, AI will become my personal assistant. As a step one, to free up a lot of time and make my work more productive and help coordinate so many thingsbooking travel and managing travel plans, making scheduling meetings much easier, leveraging agentic technology to improve productivity. Step two is even more interesting. We all work for five days a week. I think in the next 10, maybe 15 years, I think the four-day working week might become a standard because of AI technology. Step two of digital assistant technology is more like my digital twin. A personal large language model with my personal contacts, knowledge, skills, and everything. I can even send my digital twin to join a meeting. Say you and I are working on a contract. You and I need to look at all the terms, negotiate, spend hours, days, or weeks to finalize the contract. In the future, I send my digital twin, you send your digital twin, and we let them work together and come up with a preliminary contract and just sign off. Plenty of companies are working on AI, office software, and video conferencing. What sets Zoom apart? I think on many fronts we definitely differentiate ourselves. One thing is our innovation velocity. We stay very close with the customers, really understand their pain points, to be the first one to come up with a solution. Number two is really about our philosophy. We want to build a project that just works. When you look at our customers, when they’re using Zoom versus competitors’ products, their feedback is, I really enjoy using Zoom because it’s a very simple intuitive experienceno learning curveand any network environment and all kinds of devices, it just works. The third thing is really about AI. We just finished our Q4 and we’re working on creating our quarterly board slide deck. Quite a few team members have to get all the information from all our systems and work on our slidesmany days work just to get a quarterly slide deck. What if we leveraged AI and could tell the AI, please create our Q4 slide deck? The AI agent will take action proactively, look at all the systems, grab the information and our board slide deck template and create slides automatically. It used to be every meeting, our chief of staff would write down all the notes and create a Zoom Doc to share. Today, we leverage Zoom AI and, after each meeting is over, we automatically create Zoom Docs with all the action items and insights, and also leveraged our agent to create some tasks assigned to me or assigned to you. It’s a kind of AI-first experience. How has the return to the office affected how people are using Zoom? First of all, the way they use the conference room is very different. Prior to COVID, say you and I joined from a conference room, and some people joined remotely, probably they’re in listening mode, because the conversation is driven by the people in the conference room. Now, it’s very different. Even if people join remotely, they want to have the same experience as the ones sitting in the conference room. Let’s say there are five people in the conference room. From the remote side, they want to see each of those people. The conference room experience is different, and we are much better positioned than other competitors. Another change is, when you work remotely, there’s probably more conferencing meetings and phone calls. Now that it’s back to the office, especially for internal meetings, sometimes it’s just a walk to your desk or your office, and we can talk. Asynchronous collaboration is used more frequently. We have a Zoom Team Chat solution. People use, more and more, Zoom Team Chat and create more Zoom Docs. If you cannot reach out to your teammates in real time, create a Zoom Doc, share it to the Team Chat. Other people can look at it later on. These async collaboration capabilities are becoming more and more popular, together with the AI. And Zoom is often associated with office work, but you also recently built Zoom Workplace for frontline workers. What motivated that and what does that expansion look like? We build a workplace platform. However, there’s different use cases for some vertical marketsfor educators, the financial industry, healthcare, and frontline workers. The use case is different and the feature set is also different. You can’t build one feature set to serve all these different use cases. The frontline workers’ market is big. A lot of our customers already deploy the Zoom platform. However, they gave us feedback that they need some features for their frontline workers. So, back to our innovation philosophy, when customers share with us the pain point, what can we do? Listen to them and build a new service. That’s how we built a Zoom Workplace for frontline workers, for educators, and for healthcare as well. I think the market is big and we wanted to build more vertical solutions for these different use cases. And as you listen to customer needs, how do you decide which features to build out?
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E-Commerce
Activists have decried Shein for years, calling out its devastating impact on the environment and exploitation of workers. But with a stroke of his pen, President Donald Trump appears to have upended Sheins business model, making it harder for the Chinese fast-fashion brand to keep selling clothes at rock-bottom prices. During the pandemic, Shein and online marketplace Temu exploded in popularity in the United States. Both companies manufacture low-quality goods in Chinese factories using cheap labor, then sell them to American consumers at extremely low prices. But Shein and Temu also had a distinct advantage over their competition. While American companies like Gap ship large quantities of inventory from overseas factories into U.S. warehousespaying all the requisite taxes and tariffsthese Chinese companies ship products directly from factories to consumers’ houses. This allows them to take advantage of an obscure loophole in the U.S. tax code called de minimis, which allows packages containing less than $800 of merchandise to ship duty-free. In 2022, Shein and Temu paid $0 in import taxes, whereas Gap paid $700 million and H&M paid $205 million. American and European brands pass their costs on to customers in the form of higher-priced goods, which has sent many shoppers looking for deals elsewhere. This was their basic advantage, says Kinshuk Jerath, a Columbia Business School professor. [Shein and Temu] built their entire business model on de minimis. This week, that competitive advantage vanished, as Trump imposed a 10% tariff on all goods imported from China and also ended the de minimus tax exemption. Given how quickly these tariffs were rolled out, there’s a lack of clarity about exactly how much companies will have to pay. Logistics agents who import goods to the U.S. are already asking vendors to pay an extra 30% on the retail price of goods shipped from Hong Kong and China. Depending on the actual tariffs U.S. Customs imposes, these agents will either return part of that fee or seek additional payments. Experts say Shein and Temu will have to raise their prices in response. And since these companies’ main selling point is their low prices, consumers may be less inclined to shop with them. This, in turn, could shake up the retail landscape in the U.S. Garment packages at a textile factory that supplies clothes to fast-fashion e-commerce company Shein in Guangzhou, China [Photo: Jade Gao/AFP/Getty Images] Could Shein and Temu find a way keep costs down? While many were taken aback by how quickly Trump abolished the de minimus exemption, lawmakers from both parties have been trying to get rid of the loophole for several years. The rule first came about in 1930, when most small-value packages were sent between individuals, and the government didnt think it was worth the administrative cost for the tax revenue it would collect. In 2016, the exemption limit was raised from $200 worth of goods to $800, to further reduce the administrative burden. But then Shein and Temu entered the scene. They were almost single-handedly responsible for increasing the number of such shipments from 140 million in 2014 to 1 billion in 2023. Many experts believe that Shein and Temu will have no choice but to raise their prices. These companies have already found ways to slash costs throughout the supply chain, leaving little room for cuts elsewhere. Shein has been accused of exploiting workers, forcing them into 17-hour shifts to make hundreds of garments a day at a base salary of $20, which would then be slashed by $14 if they made any mistakes. While it is possible for Shein and Temu to absorb the cost of these taxes for a short time, Jerath doesn’t believe thats a viable long-term strategy. These companies do have big pockets, he says. But they will not be able to absorb costs indefinitely while keeping the company profitable. And the question is, if you have to keep selling at a loss forever, at what point is the business model no longer successful? Giacomo Santangelo, senior economics lecturer at Fordham University, says American companies like Amazon and Uber were willing to take a loss for some time in order to put their competitors out of business. This strategy won’t work for Shein and Temu because there’s no chance they will be able to successfully wipe out their competitors, he says. [Photo: Nikos Pekiaridis/NurPhoto/Getty Images] Shaking Up Consumer Preferences Forcing Shein and Temu to pay taxes levels the playing field for other brands. But perhaps more important, it changes the market, says Itamar Zur, CEO of Veho, a shipping company that serves brands like Macy’s, Sephora, and Stitch Fix. With these ultracheap Chinese players on the market, many brands felt forced to compete on price. But as prices even out, brands can start competing across other dimensions, like the speed of delivery and quality. Shipping products from China took seven to ten days, but consumers were willing to wait to get their products at such low prices, Zur says. But if it costs the same or just a little more to buy from a U.S. brand that can ship the products in two days, many consumers might opt for the U.S. brand. Shein does have some warehouse spce in the U.S. that allows it to ship products faster. It has already started driving American customers to buy products shipped locally by prioritizing these items in search results. Zur says that Shein may shift more of its inventory to U.S. warehouses, but this would effectively upend its business model. Until now, Shein has made products on demand based on consumer preferences. It adds 2,000 to 10,000 new items to its website every day, and mass-produces only the items that consumers seem to like. But if the company chooses to warehouse clothes in the U.S., it will need to predict what consumers will want to buy weeks in advance and send that inventory over. And, of course, this inventory would be taxed. Brands might also start to compete on the make and longevity of a product, Zur says. Shein and Temu are known for selling very low-quality products, and if they raise their prices, consumers may opt to shop for items that are more durable. As a consumer, your entire calculation changes when these ultralow prices are off the table, he says. If you’re going to spend more money, you might not want your T-shirt or dress to be disposable. In fact, you might choose to spend a few dollars more for a shirt you can wear for years. While Trump’s tariffs have the capacity to transform the market and consumer behavior, Fordhams Santangelo warns that things are changing quickly and its still possible that the administration will reverse its decisions. Trump was going to impose a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada on Tuesday, but decided to postpone for 30 days; its unclear whether those tariffs will eventually take effect. It’s a very fluid situation, Santangelo says. We can’t really make predictions because everything might change again overnight.
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E-Commerce
Imagine youre an academic researcher. Youre writing a pitch for funding to the National Science Foundation (NSF), the independent agency of the federal government that funds projects designed to advance our understanding of the world. But you cant use the words excluded, historically, socioeconomic, systemic, or women. Go. Thats the quandary that researchers across the country find themselves in thanks to a misguided attempt to try to eliminate what President Donald Trump and lackey Elon Musk would likely describe as woke research. The Trump administrations drive to tamp down studies that promote an agenda pushing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) involves hitting small nails with very big, very blunt hammers, with all ongoing and future research projects reportedly being analyzed to see whether they contain any number of newly forbidden words. Among them are terms that Trump and others might dislike, such as diversity, inequities, or multicultural. But there are also words that almost certainly get caught in the dragnet inadvertently, including women and historically. The mood is pretty glum here, says one academic, granted anonymity because of a fear of reprisals. While my work has implications for DEI, its not explicitly DEI in writing. For academics who do work in this space, its a death knell. It really seems like a huge mess, says a second academic researcher, also granted anonymity to be able to speak over fear of reprisals or their research being targeted as a result of speaking out. The list is long and vague enough that all kinds of research will potentially be harmed. Everything from biomedical research to engineering to research in the social sciences. That researcher says they believe the guidelines have been drawn vaguely by design, not an accident, in order to give the governmentthrough the NSFenough leeway to block anything they want to. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the worlds largest technical professional organization for tech research in academia, declined to comment for this story. ACM supports technology research in a wide array of areas and understands that priorities for funding of research can shift for a variety of reasons, Jody Westby, vice chair of the Association for Computing Machinerys US Technology Policy Committee, wrote in a statement to Fast Company. ACM hopes, when this happens, that funding from other sources also shifts to fill gaps so needed research can continue. Researchers will still likely pursue their work under the current administration, even if the NSFs list of forbidden words stymies them. It just means they may have to take a page out of the book of online content creators, and understand how to deploy algospeakor the rephrasing of words in order to avoid blocks put in place by online platforms, most commonly found on social media. There have been many examples of researchers using different terms to try to get their work funded by different organizations, particularly private philanthropic foundations which often have an only slightly hidden political or ideological alignment, the anonymous researcher says. Euphemistically referring to subjects that might otherwise be seen as sensitive using a crude check of content in order to evade censorship could well be a path that researchers have to follow, fears Carolina Are, a researcher at the Center for Digital Citizens at Northumbria University. Are has studied platform censorship and how rank-and-file users avoid its clutches. With the broligarchs in power greatly affecting and influencing the way the U.S. is run, bolstered by Trumps politics, [what content creators had to do] is being broadened out to research. It’s possible to use doublespeak or euphemism to dance around contentious phrasing, Are explainsbut it does significantly impact the ability to disseminate that content, and finding work-arounds taxes thinking that could otherwise be put to the broader problem that needs addressing. Are also worries that researchers will end up in a cat-and-mouse game with the NSF in the same way that creators are, where terms and words that are being used euphemistically are added to block lists and the effect is nullified, meaning people have to find new ways of subverting barriers. Its not a long-term solution for people, she says. One of the researchers Fast Company spoke to is more pessimistic than that. Im not sure were going to see people successfully using different terms for the banned research terms because when you cant even use words like female or systemic, theres not really a way to get around that, they say. All biomedical research that looks at more than men is potentially out of bounds, and thats by design.
Category:
E-Commerce
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