Day two of Enterprise Join 2026, and the Zoom sales space was one of many busiest on the expo ground.
That wasn’t an accident.
Contemporary from a keynote filled with product bulletins, Zoom arrived at EC 2026 with one thing that’s been quietly constructing for months — a coherent, bold imaginative and prescient for what the fashionable office platform ought to really do. Not simply join folks. Not simply document conferences. However take every part that occurs inside a dialog and switch it into completed, actionable work.
We sat down with Jeff Smith, Chief Product Officer at Zoom, to unpack what’s new, why it issues, and why the reply to your productiveness drawback may not be the place you’ve been wanting.
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Rob Scott caught up with Jeff Smith on the present ground at EC 2026. Watch the total dialog under.
The Drawback No person Was Fixing
The perception behind Zoom’s newest wave of innovation begins with a deceptively easy remark.
Day by day, data employees have dozens of conversations — on Zoom, in espresso retailers, in hallways, on different platforms. These conversations are wealthy with selections, concepts, actions, and context. And the overwhelming majority of it disappears. Misplaced to reminiscence, buried in a transcript no person opens, or scattered throughout instruments that don’t speak to one another.
“We’ve got a variety of conversations, and there’s a variety of work that occurs round these conversations. The work after the assembly is what we’re making an attempt to facilitate.”
The issue Zoom recognized wasn’t that folks weren’t recording their conferences. It was that there was no constant, unified layer capturing interactions throughout each context — and no clever system turning that captured knowledge into one thing helpful on the opposite finish.
My Notes is Zoom’s reply to the primary half of that problem. Designed to ship constant transcription and recall throughout each sort of interplay — no matter platform — it creates what Jeff describes as excellent recall. An extended-term reminiscence layer which means nothing falls by way of the cracks.
“Something that I’ve been part of when it comes to these interactions, I can pull up at any time.”
AI Companion 3.0: From Assistant to Agent
My Notes is the muse. However the construction constructed on high of it’s the place Zoom’s imaginative and prescient will get genuinely bold.
On the centre of EC 2026’s bulletins is the expanded rollout of AI Companion 3.0 — now out there throughout the total Zoom Office app, Zoom Enterprise Companies, and Workvivo. Beforehand restricted to the browser, the improve leverages Zoom’s federated AI platform to attach conversations, enterprise knowledge, and third-party purposes right into a single, clever layer. Month-to-month energetic customers greater than tripled year-over-year in This fall — a sign that adoption is accelerating, not simply out there.
The extra succesful tier lives within the Customized AI Companion add-on. Organisations can now construct and deploy customized AI brokers — with none coding — that act throughout techniques together with Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Field, Google Drive, and OneDrive. Prebuilt brokers for Gross sales, IT, and Advertising and marketing are prepared out of the field. A personalisation and reminiscence layer means the assistant adapts over time, studying from a person’s position, preferences, and dealing patterns to floor more and more related steering.
That is the shift from AI as a reactive assistant to AI as a proactive agent — one which doesn’t wait to be requested, however anticipates what you want and acts throughout your whole enterprise stack to ship it.
The Smarter Various to Your Workplace App Stack
Right here’s the place the dialog at EC 2026 obtained notably attention-grabbing for UC leaders — and the place Zoom’s ambition turns into inconceivable to disregard.
Alongside My Notes and AI Companion 3.0, Zoom launched a collection of AI-native productiveness instruments that, taken collectively, symbolize a direct problem to the standard workplace utility stack: AI Docs, AI Sheets, and AI Slides.
“We don’t have conferences to have conferences. We’ve got conferences to make selections, to organise our work, to create new concepts. And all of that has to finish up in one thing.”
That one thing — a presentation, a spreadsheet, a structured doc — now not needs to be constructed from scratch after the very fact. Zoom’s AI canvases enable groups to transform assembly conversations instantly into structured work product with out leaving the platform. It’s a fluid, versatile, ‘Notion-esque’ collaborative expertise — however with AI doing the heavy lifting of translation from dialog to creation.
The place Microsoft Workplace apps require you to context-switch, open a brand new utility, and begin from a clean web page, Zoom’s strategy retains every part inside one unified surroundings — with AI Companion connecting the dots between what was stated, what was determined, and what must be constructed.
Jeff was direct about what this implies in follow:
“You’re taking all that wealthy knowledge that occurs far and wide, constantly seize it, after which layer on AI Companion to provide all the work product on the opposite finish. It’s completely accelerating the every day work for data employees.”
For organisations deep within the Microsoft ecosystem, it’s a proposition price analyzing rigorously. Zoom isn’t simply competing on collaboration options — it’s competing on how work will get executed.
From Dialog to Completion: The ROI Case
At Enterprise Join 2026, AI ROI was the defining theme — and Jeff was properly positioned to deal with it head-on.
“You will get to the time financial savings, the rushing of resolution making — all of these issues will add as much as substantial productiveness beneficial properties.”
He used Zoom’s personal product organisation as a dwell case research. The standard product administration course of — a lone product supervisor doing weeks of analysis, writing a necessities doc, then spending extra weeks socialising it with stakeholders — has been fully overhauled.
Now, stakeholders are introduced collectively from the beginning. AI generates the analysis report prematurely. The group has the wealthy, knowledgeable dialogue. And when the assembly ends, AI Companion writes the product necessities doc — utilizing the proper template, understanding the position, incorporating every part mentioned.
“You’re strolling out with the doc you’ll have spent days getting ready for. Higher end result, sooner, extra engagement — and the groups are working a lot better collectively.”
The implication for UC leaders is critical. This isn’t marginal productiveness enchancment. It’s a basic restructuring of how data work will get executed — and the way rapidly organisations can transfer from dialog to resolution.
Rounding out the platform replace is Zoom AI Companies — a collection of enterprise-grade APIs that opens Zoom’s proprietary transcription, translation, summarisation, reasoning, and image-processing applied sciences to builders. It’s a transparent sign that Zoom sees itself not simply as an utility vendor, however as an AI infrastructure layer — opening a brand new path to market by way of developer and accomplice ecosystems and positioning the platform as a basis different merchandise can construct on.
What This Means for Worker Expertise
Past the expertise, Jeff’s imaginative and prescient for what this transformation appears to be like like from the worker facet of the display screen was refreshingly human.
“Happier, extra engaged staff. You’re spending much more time on the human interplay, the issues which might be of excessive worth — and loads much less time writing paperwork and doing analysis.”
That is the worker expertise argument for AI that too usually will get misplaced in ROI conversations. It’s not nearly hours saved or selections accelerated. It’s about what folks really spend their working day doing — and whether or not that work feels significant.
“Spending time on the excessive worth duties as an alternative of spending a variety of time on repetitive work — that’s not the large mind stuff.”
When administrative burden reduces, cognitive house opens up. Groups interact extra deeply, collaborate extra successfully, and produce higher outcomes — not as a result of they’re working tougher, however as a result of the work they’re doing is price doing.
For HR and IT leaders collectively chargeable for worker expertise in hybrid environments, that’s a compelling proposition. The instruments folks use every single day form how they really feel about their work. Zoom is making a transparent wager that AI-native instruments — ones that eradicate friction quite than add complexity — will grow to be the usual for a way engaged, productive groups function.
Why This Issues for UC Leaders
For expertise leaders evaluating Zoom’s strategic path, the EC 2026 bulletins inform a coherent and more and more hard-to-ignore story.
My Notes, AI Companion 3.0, AI Docs, AI Sheets, AI Slides, and Zoom AI Companies aren’t remoted options competing for consideration in a product replace. They’re interconnected constructing blocks of a unified AI platform — one which sits throughout each interplay, each workflow, and each work output within the Zoom ecosystem.
The strategic implications are clear:
Assembly knowledge turns into a long-lasting organisational asset, not a disposable document
Resolution-making cycles compress from weeks to hours
Information employees reclaim time from admin and redirect it to high-value work
AI ROI turns into measurable by way of time financial savings and resolution velocity
Worker engagement improves as cognitive burden reduces
Developer and accomplice ecosystems achieve entry to Zoom’s AI infrastructure layer
Organisations achieve a reputable, AI-native different to conventional workplace app stacks
At a convention the place AI accountability was the central theme, Zoom confirmed up with one thing more and more uncommon: a grounded, coherent story about how AI modifications the way in which work really will get executed — not simply what it would finally be able to.
The post-meeting black gap has been an issue for so long as conferences have existed.
Zoom simply closed it.
Extra Enterprise Join 2026 Protection
This interview is a part of UC Immediately’s full Enterprise Join 2026 protection, together with analyst roundtables, govt interviews, and deep-dive options on AI, collaboration, voice, and the way forward for unified communications.
Discover all of our Enterprise Join 2026 tales and interviews to proceed the dialog.
