On this episode of Futurum Live! From the Show Floor, The Futurum Group’s Craig Durr talks about growth drivers with Kelly Steckelberg, CFO of Zoom. This insightful discussion encapsulates some of the exciting announcements from the mainstage keynote of Zoomtopia 2023.
Their discussion covers:
- Zoom AI Companion: An AI-driven advancement redefining virtual meeting experiences.
- Zoom Phones: A look at its steady growth trajectory and its pivotal role in Zoom’s suite of offerings.
- Zoom’s Contact Center: Despite being in its nascent stage at less than two years, it’s demonstrating significant potential for business expansion.
Join us as we unpack the strategic directions Zoom is embarking upon alongside its noteworthy product developments and innovative platform synergies.
We invite you to view our informative session with Ms. Steckelberg. Additionally, we recommend subscribing to our YouTube channel to remain abreast of industry insights.
You can view the video of their conversation here:
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Transcript:
Craig Durr: Hey everybody, this is Craig Durr, research director with The Futurum Group at, we are still here live at Zoomtopia 2023. There’s a lot of excitement coming just off the main stage seeing the keynotes. I’m excited to share with you some insights from Kelly Steckelberg, Chief Financial Officer at Zoom. Kelly, how are you doing?
Kelly Steckelberg: I’m great. Thank you so much for having me today.
Craig Durr: We just saw the keynote. There was a lot of energy and a lot of excitement. There’s a lot of great things they talked about on stage, but I’m curious to get your take on this and how these are going to impact the business going forward. Well, one of the first things that was really notable is we talked a lot about AI companion. Right? But interestingly, Eric and team put on the stage information that said Zoom’s not charging for this, we want to give this to everyone. Tell me about how that works in terms of making this available to everyone.
Kelly Steckelberg: We’re really excited about Zoom AI companion, and it is going to permeate, really if you think about it, all aspects of our platform, so chat compose, meeting summary. It’s something that we believe is really going to become an integral part of our platform. We want all of our paying customers to have access to that.
Craig Durr: Right.
Kelly Steckelberg: It’s going to be such an important component of it. It’s going to have benefit to the financials, which of course I care a lot about.
Craig Durr: Right, right.
Kelly Steckelberg: When you think about free to pay conversion, so we have a large free user base and this is going to be another way to differentiate the paid version of our product and provide compelling reasons for them to upgrade. It also becomes another reason why customers love our platform and want to retain and stay with Zoom forever.
Craig Durr: I’ve had a chance to be on the beta program for that, and the meeting summary is really good. It works really well.
Kelly Steckelberg: It’s great, isn’t it?
Craig Durr: I’m really excited about that. Now, there was a lot of other things that were up there as well too. With this AI companion being part of what’s available to everyone is free as part of the paid platform, I’m sure you’re thinking about, what are the other drivers going forward with the other quarters? With a lot of this new technology coming out, where do you see the growth areas right now in the Zoom portfolio?
Kelly Steckelberg: A really important part of our growth strategy is Zoom phone, our cloud PBX solution. That product is about four years old now and it’s doing really well.
Craig Durr: Eric mentioned 47 countries now, something like that.
Kelly Steckelberg: Yeah, exactly. It’s over 10% of our revenue, so that’s really, really exciting. You’re going to continue to see growth. We talked about India’s going into beta for example, so that’s really exciting. Then of course, we have Zoom contact center and that is a relatively new product. It’s about a year and a half old, but very exciting. We announced that we have over 500 customers using it today.
Craig Durr: Wow.
Kelly Steckelberg: That is just going to continue to expand in terms of features and functionality, and allow us to start to compete and win some of those really large amazing enterprise deals. Definitely be a growth effort.
Craig Durr: Some of the AI features I saw integrated into the CX experience, everything from the intelligent assist within the call experience, that’s a really powerful, compelling story. I think you guys are going to be really well positioned for that as well.
Kelly Steckelberg: Yeah. Then built around that, we also have workforce management, quality management.
Craig Durr: Right, it’s a lot of great stuff. But, you know what really caught my eye? This is probably not so much in terms of your area, but it was something I was really excited about. I was really excited about Zoom docs.
Kelly Steckelberg: Yeah.
Craig Durr: Seeing that product come to bear. Tell me your thoughts about this, Zoom playing in this document space, but it’s not documents, it’s different.
Kelly Steckelberg: No, it’s way more than documents, first of all. Right?
Craig Durr: Yeah.
Kelly Steckelberg: It will have documents, but it also has capabilities around wikis, around project management. This is really continuing building out this vision of having Zoom be the platform where you spend your day. Making it really easy to do that, to collaborate with your colleagues without having to toggle back and forth, and also do it within a meeting without having to even share your screen. Really excited about that future vision of Zoom docs.
Craig Durr: The workflow that we saw up there on stage, from a document being created, to being shared in chat, to being brought up in the meeting …
Kelly Steckelberg: It’s incredible. Right?
Craig Durr: It was really dynamic. It was really wonderful. Well, Kelly, this has got me really excited for this upcoming year. I think you guys have a lot of things to help you in your growth trajectory going forward.
Kelly Steckelberg: Thank you.
Craig Durr: I’m looking forward to seeing what we can see.
Kelly Steckelberg: Great.
Craig Durr: Thank you for your time and your insights.
Kelly Steckelberg: Thanks.
Craig Durr: Everyone, this is Craig with The Futurum Group. Thank you again for tuning in to hear from this. Stay tuned, we’ll have some more exciting updates from Zoomtopia 2023.
Author Information
As Practice Lead - Workplace Collaboration, Craig focuses on developing research, publications and insights that clarify how the workforce, the workplace, and the workflows enable group collaboration and communication. He provides research and analysis related to market sizing and forecasts, product and service evaluations, market trends, and end-user and buyer expectations. In addition to following the technology, Craig also studies the human elements of work - organizing his findings into the workforce, the workplace, and the workflows – and charting how these variables influence technologies and business strategies.
Prior to joining Wainhouse, now a part of The Futurum Group, Craig brings twenty years of experience in leadership roles related to P&L management, product development, strategic planning, and business development of security, SaaS, and unified communication offerings. Craig's experience includes positions at Poly, Dell, Microsoft, and IBM.
Craig holds a Master of Business Administration from the Texas McCombs School of Business as well as a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Tulane University.
