When Louise Newbury-Smith joined Zoom as Head of UKI last May, she came with two decades of industry experience, a track record of building high-performing teams, and a healthy dose of self-awareness. “Taking on a new role is both exciting and scary,” she says, echoing the Meg Whitman philosophy she’s long admired: that a new job should scare you a little. “Primarily because you want to do the right thing by all the people that have invested their careers here.”
What she didn’t fully anticipate was just how much Zoom would surprise her.
“I thought I knew Zoom from the outside, from competing with Zoom over a number of years,” she admits. “But what really blew my mind was the scope of the platform beyond the traditional chat and phone and video that I was fully expecting.”
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Zoom: Moving beyond the meeting room
It’s easy to think of Zoom as a meetings company. It’s a perception Newbury-Smith is dismantling, one customer conversation at a time. The platform’s AI Companion, bundled free with any paid licence, does far more than summarise calls: booking meeting rooms, managing desk reservations, handling visitor check-ins, creating agendas based on past discussions, and converting meeting notes directly into tasks.
“For me, it makes my life easier even from desk booking,” she says. “Our visitor management, automatically checking me in, finding meeting rooms for me, creating agendas, turning meeting notes into tasks. The list goes on.”
That breadth is increasingly shaping Zoom’s go-to-market strategy in the UK. Newbury-Smith’s teams are now organised around specific verticals like manufacturing, retail, and logistics: industries that represent the next frontier for the platform.
“Frontline worker solutions are really powerful in scenarios such as large-scale retail, manufacturing, logistics, where you’ve got people out in the field being able to use the Zoom platform and be truly connected to the rest of their organisation.”
The front office and back office, she argues, don’t really have hard boundaries anymore. At least not on Zoom.
AI as colleague, not overhead
The conversation around AI in the enterprise can often feel abstract. Newbury-Smith prefers to keep it grounded. When asked whether AI tools like meeting summaries risk becoming a crutch, something people absorb uncritically rather than engage with meaningfully, she reframes the question.
“Are you seeing less mistakes as a result of using an AI tool across your working day? What’s the benefit?” she says.
“People have got a great deal of confidence in meeting summaries because that’s been around for a while: you can see the summary, you can see all the detail, you’ve got the recording.”
The more interesting frontier, in her view, is agentic AI: systems that don’t just report on what happened, but actively make decisions within workflows. Here, trust is earned through partnership.
“What our customers are doing is looking at how they’re operating today, looking for the opportunities to improve, working on that with us in a true partnership, leveraging the tools within the platform, and then checking and validating the outcomes together so that everyone has confidence before we go live.”
She reaches for a phrase that’s been circulating within Zoom’s leadership. “Automate the predictable and humanise the unpredictable. I think that’s a really great way of looking at the use of AI generally.”
The council that changed the conversation
Theory only gets you so far. For Newbury-Smith, the most compelling arguments for AI-powered communication come from the field, and one recent example has clearly stayed with her.
A local council visited Zoom’s London Executive Briefing Centre in Holborn, under pressure to cut costs and do more with stretched resources. The Zoom team expected the usual brief: efficiency gains, headcount rationalisation, cost reduction. What they heard was different.
“What they actually said was they needed to spend more time talking with their citizens that truly needed it,” she recalls.
The council described a vulnerable resident, an elderly woman with memory difficulties, who called the contact centre almost every day to check whether she’d paid her council tax. Under the old model, an agent would spend two minutes confirming her payment and move on. The council wanted something different: to free up agents from routine, transactional queries so they could spend fifteen minutes or more with people like her. Checking in, and making sure she had the support she needed.
“For me, that was just the perfect scenario of when technology is making a difference,” Newbury-Smith says.
“It’s not about spending less time on a call with someone. It’s about spending more time with the people that need it.”
Competing with the stack
Zoom operates in an interesting competitive position. Microsoft and Google both offer collaboration tools embedded within vast ecosystems they own end to end. The instinctive read is that they hold a structural advantage. Newbury-Smith disagrees.
“Our differentiator is how much of an open platform Zoom truly is,” she says. “We can complement Microsoft and Google. We can support the customer’s endpoint, whatever they choose that to be.”
Rather than positioning itself as a replacement for Teams or Google Workspace, Zoom presents itself as a layer that works across all of them, delivering AI Companion capabilities regardless of where a customer’s digital estate sits. The fact that AI Companion is included at no extra charge with any paid licence is, she argues, a genuine commercial differentiator in a market where AI features are increasingly being charged as premium add-ons.
“The value that a customer can gain from the platform is a true differentiator — but we’ll operate wherever the customer needs us to be, with their chosen endpoint, whether that’s Microsoft, Google, or Zoom. It doesn’t matter to us.”
Five years out: The personalisation of work
Ask Newbury-Smith what a genuinely good outcome looks like for the average UK worker in five years, if agentic AI delivers on its promise, and she does something unexpected. She asks her own AI Companion the question first.
Its answer:
“A good outcome is where AI becomes an empowering colleague, invisible when not needed, invaluable when it is, creating more fulfilling, equitable and sustainable working lives across the UK.”
She’s pleased with the response, but adds her own dimension.
“The difference is in the personalisation of the outcome. Your preferred outcome in five years time is going to be different to mine. That’s where it can get really exciting, you’ve got to decide what good looks like for you with your AI tools, and I’ve got to decide that for me. We’ll only be limited by our imagination.”
For an industry that sometimes struggles to connect its technology story to lived human experience, it’s a refreshingly personal note to end on. Zoom, under Newbury-Smith’s leadership in the UK, seems to understand something that gets lost in the race to announce the next AI feature: the point of all of this is still people.
“Technology is really exciting when it’s doing things to help people,” she says. “That’s why we’re all here.”
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