Zoom CEO Shares AI Plans
Zoom founder Eric Yuan revealed his big, ambitious AI plans for Zoom, the videoconferencing platform.
- Yuan is hoping to introduce AI “digital twins” to attend meetings on behalf of users.
- He envisions this approach freeing up time for personal activities.
Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan revealed his plans to have Zoom AI clones to substitute users in conference meetings, possibly killing what little socialization we have left at work.
During The Verge’s Decoder with Nilay Patel podcast, CEO Yuan discussed his ambitious plans for his videoconferencing application, Zoom. The application has been around since 2013, but it wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic that it really shined. We were all stuck inside figuring out what our new normal was looking like for the next year or so, deciding how we would work, learn, and see family. Zoom was a user-friendly and very convenient solution. However, after everything calmed down and we started our sad shuffles back into the office, Zoom’s users declined.
The Vision
CEO Yuan shared with Patel his vision for the future of the application, which includes Zoom AI “digital twins” of the user attending meetings and making decisions on behalf of the human user. He believes that such a feature would increase productivity and free up time for the user to enjoy being human.
“I do not need to join. I can send a digital version of myself to join so I can go to the beach,” he said. “Or I do not need to check my emails; the digital version of myself can read most of the emails. Maybe one or two emails will tell me, “Eric, it’s hard for the digital version to reply. Can you do that?”
During the conversation, the CEO expanded on his digital twins concept, stressing that it will be authenticated to avoid people pretending to be other people.
“I don’t think there’s a limit [on how many digital twins of yourself you can deploy].” Ideally, the user would be able to control all digital twins deployed into several conference meetings. He describes how each twin would have a specific set of skills amplified, like one’s a sales expert while another’ ‘s an engineering expert.
The Reality
Throughout the podcast’s hour and three minutes, Patel and CEO Yuan discussed this futuristic AI vision the latter has for Zoom. And through it, I kept thinking of this X post:
CEO Yuan is making a great point that AI should take care of the things that burden us, except there’s an element inherent to conference meetings that we would be missing out on socialization. If you are an employee working remotely, the only time you ever ‘rub elbows’ with others is during meetings.
The world is so big that most days feel lonely, but for the brief time it takes to go through the day’s agenda, you share with others a sense of camaraderie.
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