As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption surges across Asia, Zoom is setting its sights on one of the region’s most critical yet underserved groups: frontline workers. With the rise of generative and agentic AI, the company sees immense potential to enhance productivity, streamline communications and empower employees on the ground.
“Asia is home to many of the world’s most populous countries, namely China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Pakistan,” said Lucas Lu, Head of Zoom Asia, in an exclusive interview with BusinessToday Malaysia.
“Studies show that up to 80% of employees in Asia are frontline workers. That means a significant portion of the global frontline workforce is right here in our region.”
While linguistic, cultural and geographic diversity adds complexity, Lu believes it also highlights Zoom’s value proposition: “Zoom succeeded during the pandemic because we remained easy to use even when people moved from office settings with strong Wi-Fi to homes with limited connectivity. That same principle applies to frontliners. Whether they are on the road or in remote areas, Zoom is built to perform under less-than-ideal conditions.”
“Zoom Workplace for Frontline is a big thing for the world. What’s different about frontliners is they are not sitting in the office. Most likely they do not have a PC and may not necessarily be able to communicate in English,” he said, highlighting that the solution also has the ability to perform real-time translations across multiple Asian languages.
Studies have indicated that about 57% of frontline workers feel that corporate IT systems do not cater to them very well. “Most of the time, even though the company says, ‘Hey, you should be using the approved company chat system, email, or whatever — even SMS’ — certain people somehow revert to using unapproved and not-so-secure messaging apps. When the employee leaves the company, whatever is in their devices goes with them. That’s why we have come up with a professional way to manage that using, among others, MDM (mobile device management) to wipe the data if someone has left the company.”
As is the case with all of the company’s products, Zoom Workplace for Frontline is an ‘AI-first’ application built for mobile devices such as smartphones, with built-in shift management, task distribution, and a feature called ‘Push to Talk’, which in effect turns all mobile devices into walkie-talkies.
The use of AI in Zoom’s solutions dates back to the creation of its first product, Zoom Meetings, said Lu. “If you think back, the virtual backgrounds and the noise cancellation were both AI at work. All these features were built into Zoom.”
“In the last 2 – 3 years, however, AI has come to the forefront, and Zoom very quickly realised that this was a big opportunity for us to differentiate ourselves. We already have great products which have an amazing user experience.
“Now, when enhanced with AI, our products are further differentiated from the rest of the pack.”
‘AI-first’, and not just ‘AI-enabled’
Zoom is going all-in with its embrace of AI, moving from calling its products ‘AI-enabled’ to being ‘AI-first’.
“With ‘AI-enabled’, you have a product and then you build the AI to support it. But our new products coming out now are spearheaded by AI,” explained Lu. “All Zoom products now have AI. Zoom’s AI Companion now works with many third parties — essentially, whatever an enterprise customer needs to use in the company.”
He cited Deloitte studies which indicate that at least 70% of young employees and students in Southeast Asia are already using generative AI, with usage expected to grow by 230% over the next five years.
“Importantly, their studies also show that by using AI, there is a productivity gain of six hours over the work week. That is the thing that everyone is looking for — both at the company and the personal levels. The company wants to do more with fewer employees, while for the employee, it’s a case of work-life balance.”
In keeping with its aspiration of being an “AI-first platform for human connections”, Zoom views its AI Companion as being able to assist employees and employers alike in handling mundane, repetitive administrative tasks, allowing users to focus on high-value work, while still maintaining Zoom’s hallmark simplicity, quality and scalability.
“At the end of the day, we are here to enable human connections with the best experience. Just within the space of over two years from when we came up with the first generative AI use case, Meeting Summary, we came up the following year with Zoom AI Companion 2.0. We have one AI system supporting all Zoom products across the whole platform, and are now starting to work with third parties, such as ServiceNow, Atlassian, Microsoft, Google and others.”
“There are 16 apps that are already working with Zoom AI Companion.”
Lu thinks of Zoom AI Companion — especially in the agentic AI space — as the user interface for other AI systems and enterprise applications.
“Everyone is coming up with their AI, which can add to the chaos and confusion of which is the ‘right’ one. Our approach is that we [AI Companion] will be the interface you go through. Let our AI do the work of talking to all the others. With the agentic part now, it can actually do all these tasks for you. It’s no longer just pulling information. Based on a call, for instance, the agentic part of AI Companion can automatically populate various tasks that have been assigned.”
Zoom has made three key decisions regarding the development and deployment of its AI capabilities in the interests of its users.
Firstly, it decided to take a federated approach — using several different AI models such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta (Llama 3), as well as its own — and allowing customers to bring their own models too.
“By working with others, we will look at the use cases, the economics, and the performance, and then we decide on which one is the best.”
Zoom has also decided not to train its models using any customer data.
“We provide all the capabilities — AI and so on — but the control is in the user’s hands or in the admin’s hands. You decide what to switch on, or not to switch on.”
Thirdly, Zoom has made AI Companion available at no additional cost to all paid Zoom subscribers, with the notable exception of its Custom AI Companion, which is a new paid add-on. Custom AI Companion allows larger organisations to use their own AI models and training data.
Thanks to its simplicity, quality and reliability, Lu notes that Zoom’s presence in Asia — since he joined in 2022 — has gone from strength to strength, with a physical presence in many of the region’s key markets.
“Probably 8 out of 10 customers will tell you that the Zoom experience is superior. We have been making traction from our strength in the consumer space traditionally to SMEs, and are moving up more into the commercial, mid-market space, along with the enterprise and government markets as well. We have made significant progress. However, the opportunities are immense, and there’s a long, long way to go.”
Lu recommends both new and existing customers to prepare for the upcoming Zoomtopia 2025 APAC in September.
“Every year, that is the prime time where we make announcements. Expect more, especially around AI, because you’ve seen us move from Meeting Summary to AI Companion 2.0 to Agentic AI in just a few short years.”
