As hybrid work becomes the norm and AI reshapes how we collaborate, Zoom has quietly evolved from a household name in video meetings to an AI-first work platform competing head-on with tech giants like
Microsoft and Google. In this exclusive conversation with FPJ's Tech Editor Tasneem Kanchwala, Sameer Raje, General Manager and Head of India & SAARC at Zoom, discusses how the company is betting on agentic AI, modern telephony, and an open ecosystem to win over Indian enterprises—while staying true to its core belief that AI tools should enhance, not replace, human connection.
FPJ: How has Zoom’s strategy in the India SAARC region evolved since its entry in 2019, considering the rapidly changing digital collaboration landscape?
Raje: Since we’ve established our footprint in India, Zoom has evolved from being known primarily as a meetings platform to an AI-first, open work platform. 2025 was an important year for Zoom for India, marked by the launch of Zoom Phone and Zoom Contact Center in India. As hybrid and distributed work became the norm, our strategy shifted to unifying communication, collaboration, and customer engagement on one platform, bringing together modern telephony, omnichannel customer service, AI-first workflows, and deep ecosystem integrations. This evolution is driven by the needs of Indian businesses that want to reduce fragmentation, modernise legacy PBX systems, and elevate employee and customer experience simultaneously.
Today, our conversations with customers in India are no longer about individual products but about outcomes. Whether it’s a Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) company in a Tier 2 or Tier 3 city or a global enterprise, our focus is on how they can enhance their customer experience (CX) and employee engagement (EX) through our AI-first, open work platform. Zoom Phone and Zoom Contact Center together help these organizations consolidate customer and employee communication, streamline agent productivity, and improve service quality—all powered by AI and automation.
India is one of Zoom’s key markets globally, and we have built our roadmap around the region’s digital acceleration. We expanded Zoom Phone to six key telecom circles and recently launched Zoom Contact Center in India, giving organizations an AI-first, omnichannel CCaaS solution delivered through local data centers. What sets Zoom apart is that it is not an “either-or” solution—our platform brings together calling, messaging, video, and customer engagement seamlessly to drive a total experience.
To meet these expectations, Zoom has doubled down on ecosystem interoperability by integrating with platforms including ServiceNow and Jira — something many competitors do not offer natively or at scale. We are also enabling “Bring Your Own Model” (BYOM) capabilities with Zoom AI Companion 3.0, allowing organizations to leverage their own or third-party AI models securely within Zoom’s open platform. This reflects how we see AI—as a tool for enhancing human connection and empathy, not replacing it. We continue to evolve our market strategy around one core principle: empowering organizations to work smarter, serve better, and build deeper human connections across both customer experience and employee engagement journeys.
FPJ: What leadership principles guide your approach in steering Zoom’s growth across such a diverse and dynamic market as India?
Raje: One major insight I’ve worked on, with my mentors’ guidance, has been learning how to win with diplomacy – it is a delicate balance of staying professional, maintaining harmony, and still driving outcomes. I’ve also learned to navigate workplace relationships with clarity and focus, staying committed to the work, ignoring distractions, and always keeping the larger goals in sight.
When it comes to mentoring, I see it as both a privilege and a responsibility. It’s not about giving answers or making decisions for someone; rather, it’s about sharing possibilities, providing the right information, and empowering the individual to make decisions that align with their own goals and values.
The most important aspect of mentoring is respecting that fine line – ensuring that my guidance doesn’t influence the decision itself but instead builds the mentee’s confidence to move forward on a path that may not be the most obvious or easiest but is right for their own growth.
It’s about creating a space where they feel supported, yet independent in their choices. When mentoring colleagues at work, I focus on helping them explore options, encouraging critical thinking, and reinforcing their belief in their own potential.
True mentorship, in my view, is about enabling people to find their own direction and walk it with clarity and confidence. These principles have been equally important in steering Zoom’s growth across a diverse and dynamic market like India – ensuring that we remain focused, balanced, and resilient, while empowering teams to innovate and lead with confidence.
FPJ: In the current environment where platforms like Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx, and Google Meet are strong contenders, how does Zoom differentiate itself for Indian enterprises and SMEs?
Raje: Zoom Workplace is built to evolve continuously with the changing needs of businesses and the modern workforce. It’s not just a tool for meetings, it’s a unified, AI-first, open work platform that integrates phone, chat, meetings, scheduler, whiteboard, docs, and more helping users streamline collaboration and productivity on a single platform. This seamless integration allows teams to stay connected and productive without switching between multiple apps, making Zoom Workplace central to everyday work.
What sets Zoom apart is its AI-first strategy. This approach to Zoom Workplace allows individuals and teams to free up time and focus on what matters most: engaging, connecting, and delivering creative and insightful work. At the heart of this is Zoom AI Companion, a tool which helps in focusing on higher-impact work. A key differentiator is how we have made Zoom AI Companion available at no additional cost with the paid Zoom user accounts. As we continue to build out features and capabilities for Zoom AI Companion, we’re extraordinarily mindful of how our products can help empower our customers and are committed to delivering the highest quality results so that they can be efficient and successful in their work. We recently outperformed other vendors in real-time caption translation accuracy by 11 to 28 percent for English to French, Spanish, and Japanese in testing commissioned from TestDevLab, reflecting our commitment with quality.
We compete based on the quality of our “best-in-breed” products and services. Our focus has always been on innovating for our customers. What really sets us apart is the experience: people choose Zoom because it makes connecting, collaborating, and getting work done simpler and more engaging.
We know our customers want an open ecosystem that gives them choices. Our open ecosystem empowers them with our APIs, SDKs, and over 3,000 integrations in the Zoom App Marketplace. This makes it easy to integrate Zoom into their existing tech or bring their favourite apps and data into Zoom. We pride ourselves on constantly innovating to help our customers, and Zoom Workplace is just the next step in helping our customers reimagine teamwork, streamline communications, and increase engagement and productivity.
FPJ: What trends are you noticing specifically in Indian customers across verticals —be it in education, enterprise, or consumer segments—that inform your product roadmap?
Raje: India is one of the world’s most dynamic and rapidly evolving digital economies, and we are seeing incredible momentum around AI adoption, digital transformation, and customer-centric innovation across sectors. Across education, enterprise, and consumer segments, organizations are embracing AI-first tools to modernize workflows, enhance collaboration, and deliver seamless experiences for employees, students, and customers alike. From fast-growing SMBs to large enterprises, there is a clear appetite for solutions that simplify work, unify communication, and drive measurable outcomes.
Within the enterprise segment, we are seeing a strong focus on hybrid work, employee engagement, and AI-driven productivity. Companies such as Bajaj Capital, Amul India, Lenskart, Emeritus, upGrad and Shradul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co are using Zoom to improve operational efficiency, optimize workflows, and foster deeper human connection. In the education sector, institutions are increasingly leveraging Zoom to deliver virtual learning experiences that are interactive, inclusive, and accessible. Our platform supports real-time collaboration, breakout sessions, and immersive video learning, enabling educators to reach students in remote and underserved regions. Organizations such as College Vidya, Learning Lingo, Talentgum, BossCoder Academy, GeeksforGeeks, Tetr College of Business, Codeyoung, Khan Academy, and upGrad are using Zoom to transform virtual learning, counseling, and mentoring experiences.
Across consumer and SMB segments, we are seeing growing demand for cost-effective, AI-first collaboration tools that simplify day-to-day operations. According to a global Zoom survey on small and medium size businesses (SMBs), even though 41 percent of SMBs say controlling or reducing costs is one of their top three business challenges, 81 percent are willing to pay a premium for AI capabilities showing just how much businesses are prioritizing AI as a necessary tool. This validates the market opportunity for AI Companion and partner-led services, informing our continued investment in agentic AI, task automation, and cross-platform integrations to help India’s SMBs—a core audience for Zoom’s innovation roadmap to scale efficiently while maintaining high-quality customer and employee experiences.
We see opportunities in helping more businesses digitally transform by reimagining customer and employee experiences with our platform and will continue to support the growing enterprise and SMB segments across multiple industries, including banking, healthcare, and education, as well as government and citizen services. The country’s role in Zoom’s growth story will only deepen as we continue to help businesses here drive digital transformation, foster hybrid work, and deliver AI-first experiences that elevate both customer and employee outcomes.
FPJ: Zoom has heavily invested in agentic AI, including AI-powered Zoom Phone and Contact Center solutions. How is AI helping Zoom address India-specific collaboration or customer experience challenges?
Raje: Zoom’s investment in agentic AI is helping organizations across India transform collaboration and customer experiences by combining human empathy with AI-first efficiency. With the recent announcement of AI Companion 3.0, Zoom is aiming to enable Indian businesses—ranging from fast-growing SMBs to large enterprises—to streamline workflows, unify collaboration, and make every interaction more productive.
Our vision is clear: to deliver an AI-first, open work platform built for human connection, reimagining productivity, collaboration, and customer experience. The latest announcements from Zoomtopia 2025 will bring this vision to life — Zoom AI Companion 3.0, the next generation of agentic AI that turns conversations into insights, automates busy work, and helps drive better outcomes. With new note-taking across supported meetings, proactive AI skills, and a Custom AI Companion add-on for tailored workflows, we’re extending AI’s power across every workstream. Beyond the workplace, Zoom Business Services innovations like Zoom Virtual Agent and Revenue Accelerator bring this agentic AI to customer interactions, unifying how organizations connect, support, and grow.
AI-first Zoom Phone and Contact Center solutions support multilingual, omnichannel customer interactions, allowing agents to surface real-time insights, retrieve contextual information, and receive next-best-action suggestions, ensuring seamless, personalized experiences for customers. Zoom Phone has now surpassed 10 million seats globally, reflecting the growing adoption of modern, AI-first telephony solutions that simplify management, reduce costs, and enhance collaboration across organizations. AI Companion’s agentic skills: reasoning, memory, task action, and orchestration allow it to act across Zoom Workplace, integrate with third-party tools and automate repetitive tasks such as meeting summaries, follow-ups, and knowledge retrieval.
By embedding AI deeply into collaboration and customer engagement, Zoom is empowering Indian organizations to elevate productivity, strengthen human connections, and deliver seamless Total Experience (TX) outcomes at scale.
FPJ: As Zoom pivots to being an “AI-first” company, what are the major AI-driven features you see resonating most with Indian organizations or individual users?
Raje: India continues to be one of the most exciting markets for AI-first collaboration, with organizations and individuals rapidly embracing tools that make work simpler, smarter, and more human. We’re seeing strong traction for features that help users save time, boost productivity, and enhance inclusivity.
Meeting summaries and smart chapters, for instance, have become indispensable for busy teams who want to stay aligned without needing to replay full recordings. Zoom AI Companion now supports more than 30 languages for in-meeting capabilities and Team Chat, including Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and Telugu, among others, and adds automatic detection of supported languages for meeting summaries, fostering greater equity and inclusivity in a diverse market like India. These capabilities are helping users bridge communication gaps while ensuring that hybrid and distributed teams can stay equally informed and engaged.
We’re also seeing growing interest in AI-first innovations across our broader platform from Zoom Phone’s intelligent call routing, voicemail summaries, and meeting-ready recaps to new document creation and editing features within Zoom Docs that help teams co-create content seamlessly. Together, these capabilities reflect our larger vision: to bring AI directly into the flow of work, where it can act as a trusted collaborator that reduces cognitive load, simplifies workflows, and empowers users to focus on what truly matters.
FPJ: With data security and privacy concerns prominent in India, how is Zoom adapting its infrastructure or feature set in response to regulatory requirements and local expectations?
Raje: As we continue to integrate AI throughout the Zoom platform, we remain committed to developing AI responsibly, with security and privacy at the core of the innovations we provide to our customers. Zoom offers several tools to protect meetings, helping manage participant activity, information sharing, and more. Communications are established using TLS, and meeting, webinar and messaging content is encrypted using 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), with optional end-to-end encryption. We've designed policies and controls to safeguard the collection, use, and disclosure of your information.
Zoom does not use any customer audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, and other communications-like content to train Zoom’s or its third-party AI models. We provide thoughtful controls for administrators to manage AI Companion features for their accounts, with in-product notifications for Zoom Meetings providing transparency for participants.
Our federated approach to generative AI allows Zoom to incorporate innovations from both Zoom’s models and trusted third-party providers, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, while maintaining compliance with local regulations. Zoom encrypts customer data in transit on supported connection methods between customers and Zoom and between Zoom and third-party AI model providers. By giving account administrators and users granular controls, maintaining transparency, and educating customers on AI features, Zoom helps Indian organizations adopt AI-driven workflows confidently, balancing innovation with security and privacy.
FPJ: You mentioned a "dynamic partner ecosystem" as key to Zoom's success in India. With the recent launch of the Zoom Up Services Program, how are you empowering Indian partners to drive post-sales success? What specific opportunities do you see for Indian system integrators and channel partners in Zoom's expanding product portfolio beyond traditional video conferencing?
Raje: Our diverse partner network is core to our foundation and plays a critical role in delivering exceptional solutions to customers. We are actively expanding our India & SAARC partner ecosystem, including through partnerships with Sysgrate Technologies, Gurusons and Aiontech. We have extended our partner programs to Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal to drive business growth across the region. Channel acceleration within Zoom is key to our success, and we are accelerating our transformation into a channel-centric company, with upcoming developments to strengthen our ecosystem.
The Zoom Up Partner Program has continuously evolved to support partners by removing barriers and unlocking new opportunities. Partners can unlock new revenue streams through post-sales services by leveraging the Zoom Up Services Program, which provides specialized enablement and hands-on training to drive partner success at scale. This program empowers partners to scale their Zoom Services practice, create differentiation in the market, deliver exceptional solutions, and support their customers.
Through participation in the Zoom Certified Services and Partner-Delivered Programs, partners can monetize high-value services such as deployment, support, and customer success—generating ongoing revenue beyond the initial sale. The program also enables partners to offer additional services like implementation, training, and managed services, opening up new revenue opportunities beyond traditional reselling. By evolving from transactional sellers to strategic service providers, partners can grow recurring revenue while deepening long-term customer engagement across the Zoom ecosystem.
Ultimately, the Zoom Up Services Program not only strengthens partner capabilities but also enhances the overall customer journey—from deployment to ongoing support—ensuring that every customer touchpoint is impactful, seamless, and driven by a trusted partner.
