Day two of Enterprise Connect 2026, and the Zoom booth was one of the busiest on the expo floor.
That wasn’t an accident.
Fresh from a keynote packed with product announcements, Zoom arrived at EC 2026 with something that’s been quietly building for months — a coherent, ambitious vision for what the modern workplace platform should actually do. Not just connect people. Not just record meetings. But take everything that happens inside a conversation and turn it into finished, actionable work.
We sat down with Jeff Smith, Chief Product Officer at Zoom, to unpack what’s new, why it matters, and why the answer to your productivity problem might not be where you’ve been looking.
Watch the Full Interview
Rob Scott caught up with Jeff Smith on the show floor at EC 2026. Watch the full conversation below.
The Problem Nobody Was Solving
The insight behind Zoom’s latest wave of innovation starts with a deceptively simple observation.
Every day, knowledge workers have dozens of conversations — on Zoom, in coffee shops, in hallways, on other platforms. Those conversations are rich with decisions, ideas, actions, and context. And the vast majority of it disappears. Lost to memory, buried in a transcript nobody opens, or scattered across tools that don’t talk to each other.
“We have a lot of conversations, and there’s a lot of work that happens around those conversations. The work after the meeting is what we’re trying to facilitate.”
The problem Zoom identified wasn’t that people weren’t recording their meetings. It was that there was no consistent, unified layer capturing interactions across every context — and no intelligent system turning that captured data into something useful on the other end.
My Notes is Zoom’s answer to the first half of that challenge. Designed to deliver consistent transcription and recall across every type of interaction — regardless of platform — it creates what Jeff describes as perfect recall. A long-term memory layer that means nothing falls through the cracks.
“Anything that I’ve been a part of in terms of those interactions, I can pull up at any time.”
AI Companion 3.0: From Assistant to Agent
My Notes is the foundation. But the structure built on top of it is where Zoom’s vision gets genuinely ambitious.
At the centre of EC 2026’s announcements is the expanded rollout of AI Companion 3.0 — now available across the full Zoom Workplace app, Zoom Business Services, and Workvivo. Previously limited to the browser, the upgrade leverages Zoom’s federated AI platform to connect conversations, enterprise data, and third-party applications into a single, intelligent layer. Monthly active users more than tripled year-over-year in Q4 — a signal that adoption is accelerating, not just available.
The more capable tier lives in the Custom AI Companion add-on. Organisations can now build and deploy custom AI agents — without any coding — that act across systems including Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Box, Google Drive, and OneDrive. Prebuilt agents for Sales, IT, and Marketing are ready out of the box. A personalisation and memory layer means the assistant adapts over time, learning from a user’s role, preferences, and working patterns to surface increasingly relevant guidance.
This is the shift from AI as a reactive assistant to AI as a proactive agent — one that doesn’t wait to be asked, but anticipates what you need and acts across your entire enterprise stack to deliver it.
The Smarter Alternative to Your Office App Stack
Here’s where the conversation at EC 2026 got particularly interesting for UC leaders — and where Zoom’s ambition becomes impossible to ignore.
Alongside My Notes and AI Companion 3.0, Zoom launched a suite of AI-native productivity tools that, taken together, represent a direct challenge to the traditional office application stack: AI Docs, AI Sheets, and AI Slides.
“We don’t have meetings to have meetings. We have meetings to make decisions, to organise our work, to create new ideas. And all of that has to end up in something.”
That something — a presentation, a spreadsheet, a structured document — no longer has to be built from scratch after the fact. Zoom’s AI canvases allow teams to convert meeting conversations directly into structured work product without leaving the platform. It’s a fluid, flexible, ‘Notion-esque’ collaborative experience — but with AI doing the heavy lifting of translation from conversation to creation.
Where Microsoft Office apps require you to context-switch, open a new application, and start from a blank page, Zoom’s approach keeps everything inside one unified environment — with AI Companion connecting the dots between what was said, what was decided, and what needs to be built.
Jeff was direct about what this means in practice:
“You take all that rich data that happens all over the place, consistently capture it, and then layer on AI Companion to produce all of the work product on the other end. It is absolutely accelerating the daily work for knowledge workers.”
For organisations deep in the Microsoft ecosystem, it’s a proposition worth examining carefully. Zoom isn’t just competing on collaboration features — it’s competing on how work gets done.
From Conversation to Completion: The ROI Case
At Enterprise Connect 2026, AI ROI was the defining theme — and Jeff was well placed to address it head-on.
“You can get to the time savings, the speeding of decision making — all of those things will add up to substantial productivity gains.”
He used Zoom’s own product organisation as a live case study. The traditional product management process — a lone product manager doing weeks of research, writing a requirements document, then spending more weeks socialising it with stakeholders — has been completely overhauled.
Now, stakeholders are brought together from the start. AI generates the research report in advance. The team has the rich, informed discussion. And when the meeting ends, AI Companion writes the product requirements document — using the right template, understanding the role, incorporating everything discussed.
“You’re walking out with the document you would have spent days preparing for. Better outcome, faster, more engagement — and the teams are working much better together.”
The implication for UC leaders is significant. This isn’t marginal productivity improvement. It’s a fundamental restructuring of how knowledge work gets done — and how quickly organisations can move from conversation to decision.
Rounding out the platform update is Zoom AI Services — a suite of enterprise-grade APIs that opens Zoom’s proprietary transcription, translation, summarisation, reasoning, and image-processing technologies to developers. It’s a clear signal that Zoom sees itself not just as an application vendor, but as an AI infrastructure layer — opening a new route to market through developer and partner ecosystems and positioning the platform as a foundation other products can build on.
What This Means for Employee Experience
Beyond the technology, Jeff’s vision for what this transformation looks like from the employee side of the screen was refreshingly human.
“Happier, more engaged employees. You’re spending a lot more time on the human interaction, the things that are of high value — and a lot less time writing documents and doing research.”
This is the employee experience argument for AI that too often gets lost in ROI conversations. It’s not just about hours saved or decisions accelerated. It’s about what people actually spend their working day doing — and whether that work feels meaningful.
“Spending time on the high value tasks instead of spending a lot of time on repetitive work — that’s not the big brain stuff.”
When administrative burden reduces, cognitive space opens up. Teams engage more deeply, collaborate more effectively, and produce better outcomes — not because they’re working harder, but because the work they’re doing is worth doing.
For HR and IT leaders jointly responsible for employee experience in hybrid environments, that’s a compelling proposition. The tools people use every day shape how they feel about their work. Zoom is making a clear bet that AI-native tools — ones that eliminate friction rather than add complexity — will become the standard for how engaged, productive teams operate.
Why This Matters for UC Leaders
For technology leaders evaluating Zoom’s strategic direction, the EC 2026 announcements tell a coherent and increasingly hard-to-ignore story.
My Notes, AI Companion 3.0, AI Docs, AI Sheets, AI Slides, and Zoom AI Services aren’t isolated features competing for attention in a product update. They’re interconnected building blocks of a unified AI platform — one that sits across every interaction, every workflow, and every work output in the Zoom ecosystem.
The strategic implications are clear:
- Meeting data becomes a lasting organisational asset, not a disposable record
- Decision-making cycles compress from weeks to hours
- Knowledge workers reclaim time from admin and redirect it to high-value work
- AI ROI becomes measurable through time savings and decision velocity
- Employee engagement improves as cognitive burden reduces
- Developer and partner ecosystems gain access to Zoom’s AI infrastructure layer
- Organisations gain a credible, AI-native alternative to traditional office app stacks
At a conference where AI accountability was the central theme, Zoom showed up with something increasingly rare: a grounded, coherent story about how AI changes the way work actually gets done — not just what it might eventually be capable of.
The post-meeting black hole has been a problem for as long as meetings have existed.
Zoom just closed it.
More Enterprise Connect 2026 Coverage
This interview is part of UC Today’s full Enterprise Connect 2026 coverage, including analyst roundtables, executive interviews, and deep-dive features on AI, collaboration, voice, and the future of unified communications.
Explore all of our Enterprise Connect 2026 stories and interviews to continue the conversation.
