Zoom used to help us work – now it thinks it can help us work less

Zoom was the big winner of the pandemic in helping us work from home. But with the advent of AI, the company wants to create digital twins that can do at least some of our work for us. Andrew Griffin reports

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“It was as if a photograph had suddenly come to life and begun to talk, smile, nod its head and look this way and that,” the New York Times wrote in 1927, following a demonstration at Bell Telephone Laboratories in which Herbert Hoover appeared on a screen.

The headline called it a “test of television” but noted that it was unclear how it would be used; “commercial use in doubt” one of the sub-headlines read, and the creators – the American Telephone and Telegraph Company – were not actually sure either.

For the nearly 90 years that followed, those skeptics didn’t seem to have been entirely wrong. The early research that Hoover was showing off at Bell Labs eventually gave rise to the “Picturephone” in 1964; the public were encouraged to try them out at a stand at that year’s World’s Fair where they could make calls to Disneyland while engineers evaluated their response, but it was largely negative. Those behind it tried repeatedly – the Picturephone became the VideoPhone, through repeated revisions well into the 1990s – but nobody much wanted it.

It was the internet and the smartphone that finally helped the video call take off – but even then it was primarily between two people. It wasn’t until 2018 that Apple added group calls to its FaceTime service, for instance. In professional settings, an array of different services – BlueJeans, WebEx, and others –launched tools that were used, although not habitually.

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And then the pandemic arrived. Whole new services suddenly came to prominence as working from home became the default. People hung out on Houseparty; they conducted work meetings on BlueJeans. Videoconferencing went from being a niche technology to the primary and often only way that people could live and work together.

Within a couple of years, however, the likes of Houseparty and Bluejeans were dead. The arguments about working from home continue, but the technology companies that led the original lockdowns seem to have come to a consensus around a hybrid model that sees many workers come in for a couple of days each week.

Google and Microsoft were noticeably late and forgotten during the initial switch to video conferencing, but both have caught up and offer meeting software of their own. Other platforms, such as Slack, have built in new video calling tools in an attempt to take some of that market.

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And yet standing among all that disruption and change is one name, now so prevalent as to be on its way to become a generic verb: Zoom. The video conferencing app became the place in which much of our lives happened.

The company was founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, who remains its chief executive, who left conferencing pioneer WebEx in the hope of building a new video chat company. Its first early version arrived a year later, and at the start of 2013 it launched in its first form. It was doing fine – until the pandemic came, when its fortunes took off. From the start of 2020 to October of that year, when its share price hit an all-time high amid ongoing pandemic restrictions, Zoom’s value shot up by 730 per cent.

Today however, Zoom’s shares trade around the same price they were in early February 2020. Some of that plunge the result of a move away from working from home, not least at Zoom itself, which now expects hybrid working from staff who live near its offices.

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Its announcement came long after similar changes at Google and Apple. Business Insider reported the change with the headline “the remote-work revolution is officially dead”, and while those reports might have been exaggerated, the sense of doom felt appropriate.

Zoom now has a plan to deal with that doom. First is a name change. The “Zoom” will stay, but it was previously officially followed by a “Video Communications Inc”. Now the company is just “Zoom Communications”. The rebrand comes with a move away from focusing on its video communications software, and towards a new way of working.

“Zoom 2.0” is about, of course, artificial intelligence. “To deliver on our mission over the long-term, we must stay ahead of trends ... This is most evident in the AI explosion that has disrupted the workplace over the past year,” wrote Yuan.

He pointed to the “Zoom AI Companion”, which he says is “the heartbeat of our evolution into an AI-first company and is critical in helping our customers uncover new opportunities for greater productivity”. For now that is a relatively limited technology that can perform functions such as summarising chats on Zoom’s messaging platforms.

But Yuan has much grander ambitions. Eventually, he says, the technology could be so powerful that it allows people to work one fewer day each week; that extra work would be done by a digital copy of yourself that could, for instance, answer common questions that colleagues might ask.

The idea of a “digital twin” is almost as appealing to those managing tech companies as artificial intelligence. It refers to systems that create a precise and real-time model of a real-world object – anything from a bacterium to a city – so that it can be used for testing or other purposes. Like AI it is both an important development and an easy go-to for a consultant in a rush.

But Yuan’s claims about the digital twin are more specific, and already embodied in some of what Zoom is offering. The idea is that people’s knowledge will be integrated into a virtual, AI agent version of themselves – and that much of the data used to train it will come from those people themselves. That could, eventually, mean them spending less time at work.

“Over time, we believe these capabilities will translate into a fully customizable digital twin equipped with your institutional knowledge, freeing up a whole day’s worth of work and allowing you to work just four days per week,” wrote Eric Yuan in Zoom’s blog post.

Zoom 1.0, as the company didn’t call it, found its fortunes in people leaving the office and working from home. Zoom 2.0 seems to be staking its fortunes on an even more radical idea: that people might not need to go to work at all. Both the future of the company – and all of all companies – might depend on whether that happens.