I spent my last birthday just like the previous six. I spent time on Zoom calls with my brothers, across several time zones and weak connections. Between the off-kilter songs and frozen screens, one of us did the math. As we marked six birthdays in the same video window, I noticed the years were quietly adding up.
That’s what most of us still use Zoom for. I use it for family parties, reunions with relatives overseas, classes I couldn’t travel for, medical consultations, etc. In 2020, it became a verb because it was simple. When you send a link, people click it and a window opens. I couldn’t ask for anything else.
The company on the other side of that window is intent on becoming something different. Zoom on June 1 announced ZoomMate, an “agent” workspace built on artificial intelligence (AI). Easy to move by peeling off the label. At Zoom, we want to go from being a place to have conversations to a place where those conversations turn into finished works.
Agentic is an industry term for AI that doesn’t wait for prompts at every step. When you set a goal, next steps are automatically taken, such as drafting a message or updating a file. So when ZoomMate joins a call, it can directly access the systems your company is already running (Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow) to retrieve important files and records. You can draft follow-up emails and open tasks. Everything said on the phone could end up in a slide deck or spreadsheet. All of this is done through Zoom’s AI Productivity Suite, with tools like Zoom Slides. Pricing starts at $20 per user per month in North America. It will be available in other regions later this year, including Asia Pacific.
So consider how far that has come from 2020, when Zoom meant three things to most people: video, chat, and screen sharing. We were really happy to be able to wrap up the call with this one. The app now wants to stay within the work itself. For a sales team in Manila, this could mean ZoomMate pulls client account information from Salesforce before the call and files updated records and proposal drafts minutes after the call ends, without anyone opening a second tab. For back-office teams or contact centers handling tickets, you can read meetings and automatically route requests. This is the kind of repetitive work that can fill an entire shift.
None of this came out of nowhere. The company dropped “video” from its name and now operates as Zoom Communications. Its AI Companion, introduced in 2023, gained agent capabilities in early 2025. ZoomMate is where that path was always headed. Chief Product Officer Russell Dicker said Zoom is at the “center of every conversation that makes business decisions.” He is right that we have resolved many things in these discussions. The new question is how that decision is made on the call after you hang up.
This is where I slow down. A tool to listen to and act on a meeting is also a tool to keep a record of the meeting. Zoom says its search feature respects a company’s existing access controls and permissions, which is important. Still, the same design that makes ZoomMate useful—its ability to read a room and navigate itself—is a design that careful administrators should scrutinize. Even if an assistant drafts a client’s email and updates the file without being prompted twice, someone still needs to read it before sending. If it’s clearly wrong, and these systems are sometimes wrong, someone has to find the error.
For Filipino companies considering technology, the questions are not abstract. AI systems that reach employee data in Workday and customer data in Salesforce process personal information. The Data Privacy Act of 2012 requires companies to protect personal information, and the National Privacy Commission enforces the law. Handing your data to a new tool does not transfer responsibility for protecting it. The phased rollout will at least give local buyers time to read the details before signing.
I don’t object to this. The time savings are real, with many Filipino teams spending entire afternoons copying and pasting between apps. But I keep coming back to that birthday call. What made Zoom important to my family was that it asked us very little and gave us very little in return. The version that Zoom currently sells has very good features. I hope the people who built this building remember something my family was grateful for something simpler: the windows were open while we sang.
