It's been a crazy year for our Virtual Meetings partner Zoom. The Covid-19 pandemic took the platform to stratospheric new heights, and people no longer video call their friends and colleagues. No, in 2020 they "Zoom" them instead.
However, in the very crowded marketplace of video calls and virtual meetings, how do you stay relevant? For Zoom it appears that the sooner they can merge reality with the virtual, the better.
Speaking at the Web Summit tech conference, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, said he believed artificial intelligence would bring a physical aspect to virtual meetings. He also predicted that in future, Zoom users would be able to feel their hands being shaken and smell the coffee in their virtual space.
This insight might seem a little far fetched when many day-to-day consumers have undoubtedly struggled with connection issues during the pandemic. Still, Mr Yuan believes that video meetings will be here to stay, despite the global rollout of Covid-19 vaccinations.
For office-based staff, the Zoom CEO believes coming in for one or two days a week could become the norm.
"The world will become a hybrid [workplace], and I think that's a world we have to embrace," he said.
Zoom is forecast to have hosted three trillion minutes of meetings by the end of 2020. This wildfire of growth was unexpected, and Mr Yuan admitted it had been challenging to attract start-up funding when Zoom began life in 2011.
"I don't remember how many rejections there were - too many," he said.
"If I were a VC [venture capitalist] I'm not sure I would have funded this either."
But when Zoom launched on the New York stock market in April 2019 - Eric Yuan admitted ringing the iconic bell had been a lifelong dream - it was valued at $9.2bn (£6.8bn).
Despite recent estimations of a personal fortune of over $18bn, Mr Yuan says he doesn't believe his life has changed all that much.
"I look at myself, my family, the way I work or play and I don't think anything has changed," he said.
"Zoom is still Zoom, I am still myself - I work more hours, but I enjoy that."
If you'd like to find out more about taking your organisation to the next level with our Enterprise Zoom solutions, then please book at a meeting below.
