Zoom’s next act: From video company to AI data platform

Since its launch, Zoom has been defined by one word: video. Customers, consumers, investors and competitors have long known Zoom as the industry’s easiest-to-use and best video platform. However, even before the pandemic, the company had been evolving into something much bigger than the unified-communications-as-a-service and contact-center-as-a-service buckets that analyst firms put it in.

Those efforts culminated at this week’s Zoomtopia 2026, where Zoom’s second act was on display and about much more than video. Zoom’s “conversation to completion” vision, anchored by a new Unified Context Layer, positions Zoom as an artificial intelligence data platform, with its most valuable asset being the conversational data flowing through meetings, phone calls, chat, contact center interactions, events, interviews and sales calls. Video and other communications tools are the capture mechanism. The data and actions are the product.

That’s a significant shift, and it changes both where Zoom can play within an enterprise and how it needs to go to market.

Why conversational data is the prize

I’ve said many times that AI is only as good as the data it can access, and that data without context can be misleading. The problem with connecting AI to documents, tickets and databases is that documented knowledge is always out of date. Decisions are made in conversations and are written down later, if at all.

Zoom’s Unified Context Layer is designed to close that gap. In the analyst prebriefing, Zoom explained that it combines three sources: general knowledge from the model itself, documented knowledge from files and connected applications such as Salesforce, ServiceNow and Workday, and dynamic context from live conversations. Zoom builds a graph that maps people, topics and decisions and keeps it updated in near real time.

During his portion of the keynote, Chief Executive Eric Yuan (pictured) explained, “AI models are only as powerful as their understanding of your business, and that context makes all the difference.”

The strategic implication for Zoom is that it no longer needs to win the meeting to win the account. It needs to be the system that captures and understands conversations wherever they occur. That’s why it’s extending My Notes to other meeting platforms and in-person discussions, and why it now offers 15 MCP servers, Search and Ask application programming interfaces, and connections to Claude, Codex and Copilot. Zoom is making its context available to any AI tool a customer prefers, a clear signal that it sees itself as a data layer, not just an application.

Following the conversations into new business units

This transformation positions Zoom as much more than a communications vendor serving a narrow audience. Once Zoom defines itself by conversations rather than meetings, the addressable market expands. Every business function runs on conversations, and several of the most valuable ones have historically been out of reach for a communications vendor. Zoom has used acquisitions and product investments to follow those conversations into new buying centers.

Revenue operations. Zoom Revenue Accelerator, or ZRA, captures and analyzes sales conversations to deliver coaching, deal intelligence and forecasting. Zoom said in the prebriefing that 65% of ZRA users report a significant or transformational impact on their sales. The company’s fiscal 2026 shareholder letter noted that ZRA customers grew by 50% over the year.

The acquisition of Common Room, which closed in July, pushes Zoom further upstream. Common Room unifies CRM, product, marketing and engagement data with real-world buying signals to build person-level buyer intelligence, with AI agents handling research and prospecting. Chief Strategy Officer Abhisht Arora described the deal as “extending Zoom’s system of action upstream.”

At Zoomtopia, the combination appeared as ZRA enrichment and prospecting that surfaces decision makers not yet in the CRM, plus signal-based orchestration that routes in-market buyers to the right rep with full context. Zoom now covers the revenue journey from the first buying signal through the sales call to the forecast. That puts Zoom in the conversation with chief revenue officers and RevOps leaders, buyers who have never had much reason to talk to Zoom beyond licensing seats.

Human resources and hiring. The same logic applies to talent. Zoom acquired BrightHire in December 2025 for $98 million in cash. BrightHire records and transcribes interviews, generates candidate summaries, structures evidence against hiring criteria, and automates first-round screening with an AI interviewer. Millions of job interviews already take place on Zoom, making the fit natural. With Workvivo, Zoom now spans the talent lifecycle from interview to engagement.

BrightHire also demonstrates how Zoom’s trust capabilities create value across functions. Zoom’s Deepfake Risk Detection is already being used by BrightHire in interviews, where candidate fraud is a growing concern. Zoom said it will extend the feature to workplace meetings in December.

Typically, I’ve never been excited about human resources software because companies rarely invest in transforming this area. However, the hiring process is something every department cares about. If a sales leader, chief information officer, head of marketing or anyone else can hire faster and with better-qualified people, that will appeal across companies.

Customer experience. Zoom is relatively new to the customer experience space, but customer and partner feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and the context story reinforces that. The context layer feeds the virtual agent, live agent, and back-office expert, so customers don’t repeat themselves. Zoom cited Cricut, which cut customer wait times by 89%.

The common thread is that each of these products generates conversational data that feeds the context layer and benefits from the context generated by the others. That’s the flywheel Zoom is building, and it’s what makes the AI data platform positioning more than marketing.

The go-to-market challenge

The technology story is compelling. The challenge for Zoom is more of a commercial problem. Zoom’s salesforce and channel partners were built to sell meetings, phone and contact center to information technology and communications buyers. Historically, nearly everything Zoom sold was an add-on to the meetings relationship.

Revenue Accelerator, Workvivo, Common Room and BrightHire are different. The economic buyer is a chief revenue officer, a RevOps leader, a head of talent acquisition or a chief people officer. Those buyers have different priorities, budgets and evaluation criteria, and they already have established relationships with vendors such as Gong, Clari, ZoomInfo and Greenhouse.

I asked about this directly during the prebriefing: Are partners leading with products like ZRA in greenfield accounts, or mostly adding them to the existing Zoom installed base? Chief Product Officer Russell Dicker (below) said Zoom is seeing a mix of both but didn’t share numbers. He noted that even companies standardized on another meeting platform often have sales and recruiting teams running external conversations on Zoom, creating a real opening.

When I followed up on whether there’s a prescriptive guide for the field and channel, Dicker emphasized that Zoom aims to solve problems in a best-of-breed way and isn’t trying to force customers into a wall-to-wall suite. At the event, I asked Chris Barwick, head of Americas sales and channel, about this, and he explained that the company is orienting sales and partner enablement around specific buying centers: knowledge workers, CX, go-to-market (RevOps and marketing ops, including events and ZRA), talent and HR (BrightHire and Workvivo), and a growing developer ecosystem.

That’s the right approach, but it understates the difficulty. Selling to a new business unit requires the right messaging, sellers who speak the language of pipeline coverage and quality of hire, and references in those functions. Most Zoom partners are UC and CX resellers whose contacts sit in IT, so walking into the CRO’s office is a big leap. Many won’t succeed without specialist overlay teams, new incentives or new partner types, such as RevOps consultancies and HR tech integrators. But partners that do invest should reap the rewards: bigger deals with higher margins that are significantly stickier.

One partner that has made the leap is Converged Technology Professionals, one of Zoom’s top resellers. At Zoomtopia, I spoke with Joe Rittenhouse, co-CEO of CTP, who said ZRA is becoming a gateway to accounts. “We may start with ZRA before we do UCaaS or CCaaS, just replacing Gong,” he told me. “As soon as they see the intangibles and the data, there’s a hunger and a thirst for more, and that’s how we get into notes and the other aspects of the platform. That flips the traditional Zoom motion on its head, with the meetings business following an application sale rather than leading it.”

Rittenhouse was also candid that the partner business model must change to support it. “Traditionally, we were there to help with the sales motion, handle the implementation, and probably sell a maintenance contract. It was break-fix,” he said. “That has completely changed. We have to get involved with the business, sign an NDA, understand what they’re trying to do and where the low-hanging fruit is, and put together a pragmatic plan.” That kind of discovery lengthens sales cycles, but, as he noted, it also produces better, more strategic deals.

Zoom CMO Kim Storin believes Zoom’s best opportunity lies in the line of business. When I spoke with her at Zoomtopia, she explained why sales and recruiting naturally align with the core platform. “When you think about conversations that matter, nothing matters more than your customer conversations and sales,” she said. “Nothing matters more than your hiring conversations.” She added that she and Yuan see the revenue organization as “the wedge back into these companies that may be standardizing on Teams or Google,” with the sales, talent, or marketing leader serving “as the gateway to break through into those organizations.” I agree.

Microsoft Corp. has a lock on the CIO’s calendar, and Zoom won’t outmuscle it there. But Storin was also realistic that going around IT isn’t a free pass. She noted that IT has been tightening purchase controls over the past nine months because of unpredictable token and consumption costs. That’s where the governance capabilities Zoom announced become a sales asset. The line-of-business buyer may start the deal, but Zoom will need to give IT a reason to say yes.

Final thoughts

Zoomtopia 2026 marked the moment Zoom stopped asking to be valued as a video company. The Unified Context Layer, the headless platform approach and the acquisitions of Common Room and BrightHire add up to a coherent strategy: Own the conversational data, make it available to any AI, and use it to complete work across every business function.

The strategy is right. Zoom is one of the few companies with the reach to capture business conversations at scale, and its growing presence in RevOps and HR makes it more relevant to the business than ever.

But relevance and revenue aren’t the same thing. Zoom’s success over the next two years will depend less on what it ships and more on whether its salesforce and partners can earn a seat at the table with buyers who haven’t considered Zoom a strategic vendor. If Zoom can build that motion, the “video company” label will finally fade. If it can’t, it risks having a great platform story that only IT hears.

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

Photos: Zoom/livestream (Yuan) and Zeus Kerravala (Dicker)