Zoom's AI-heavy push to own the office

Welcome to Runtime! Today: Zoom unveils its latest strategy to move beyond video meetings and become your work daily driver, the WordPress saga is getting even more heated, and the latest moves in enterprise tech.

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True companion

After Zoom became a household name during the pandemic lockdowns, CEO Eric Yuan hoped that momentum would allow the company to turn its strength in video-meeting software into a suite of enterprise software that could challenge Microsoft Office and Google Workspace for office supremacy. That has not happened, and this week Zoom vowed to try again with several new AI features and tools ranging from useful to creepy.

At Zoomtopia 2024, the company introduced the second version of its AI Companion, a copilot-like tool that comes along with a paid account to Zoom Workplace. Zoom Workplace was introduced in May as a redesign of the pre-meeting Zoom experience, and the new enhancements were designed hoping that customers will make that app the first place they turn to in the morning.

• AI Companion 2.0 will be more present on the Zoom Workplace home screen in a right-hand rail, and the company said it will deliver improved recommendations and suggestions from both your previous Zoom activity as well as from the web.
• For an additional $12 per user per month, customers can connect AI Companion to their own internal data sources as well as third-party apps from companies like Atlassian, ServiceNow, and Workday to customize its responses.
• That "custom add-on" also allows you to create a virtual avatar of yourself to convey a "video" message to colleagues when you're sleeping or watching the Mets game.
• This raises the possibility that everyone in a company using Zoom Workplace might never have to actually interact with their colleagues, which is just weird.

Zoom made it very clear that the new updates are designed to challenge Microsoft and Google, who are of course also cramming AI features into every nook and cranny of their office productivity suites. Those two companies control essentially the entire market for the basic tools used in knowledge work — email, documents, spreadsheets, and presentations — and have also directly challenged Zoom with video-calling software through Microsoft Teams and Google Meet.

• But Zoom CTO Xuedong Huang, who spent a long career at Microsoft before joining the company last June, said in an interview last week that "this is a great opportunity for Zoom to be the new leader in the generative AI era."
• He conceded that Microsoft forged this market decades ago with Office, and that Google put a fresh spin on the concept over the last 15 years by making it simple for colleagues to coordinate on office documents or spreadsheets with Google Workspace.
• Zoom and Huang think that by putting the AI Companion directly into the first screen Zoom users see when they fire up the application, they'll make Zoom's AI software more present and useful.
• However, Zoom Workplace will also integrate with customers' existing Microsoft and Google accounts to pull emails, documents and chat messages into AI Companion, rather than forcing customers to use the fledgling Zoom Docs and Team Chat products.

"Zoom is taking advantage of generative AI capabilities to focus on task completion," Huang said. "I just hope this is going to land. It's going to be hard."

• Analysts told Fortune that Huang is right about Zoom's challenge: "...I think they’re going to have to fight harder to win deals, despite whether they have some advantages with individual features," said Daniel Newman of Futurum Group, assessing its chances against Microsoft and Google.
• Old habits die hard, and it's difficult to imagine that technology buyers — even if they were wowed by Zoom's presentation — will be able to convince their employees to embrace a new workflow overnight.
• But Zoom's video-meeting software is already a big part of the daily experience at an awful lot of companies, and at $12 per user per month, its AI features come cheaper than either Microsoft or Google's.

Automattic for the people?

If it wasn't dead already from the parade of enterprise software companies scaling back their commitment to traditional principles, Matt Mullenweg is helping put the nail in the coffin of an era of open-source software. The co-author of WordPress and the founder of Automattic, a company built to host WordPress sites, raised the stakes this week in a prolonged dispute with WP Engine over its role in the WordPress ecosystem.

At some point this week users of WordPress, one of the most widely used tools for publishing on the internet, were required to disavow any affiliation "with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise" when logging into the open-source WordPress.org platform, according to 404 Media. WP Engine also offers WordPress hosting services, and Mullenweg has been on a multiweek tear accusing the company of failing to contribute back to the core WordPress open-source project and misusing the WordPress trademark by calling itself "WP."

Trademarks are an especially contentious and confusing part of open-source software, as we learned during Google's introduction of the Open Usage Commons (which now appears to be on hiatus). "Soft trademark policies and friendly usage helps grow a sense of community, but if you aren't actually committed to it being a mark that belongs to the community equally and fairly... you should close those marks, and let the community build their own," System Initiative CEO Adam Jacob posted on X.

Enterprise moves

Hiren Majmudar is the new president of NeuReality, joining the AI inference chip company after several years at GlobalFoundries and Intel.

Priya Lakshminarayanan is the new chief product officer at Recurly, following stints in similar roles at Brex, Facebook, and PayPal.

Johann Wrede is the new chief marketing officer at User Testing, bringing nearly 15 years of experience in marketing roles at SAP to the user experience company.

Chirantan "CJ" Desai is the new president of product & engineering at Cloudflare, following eight years in a similar role at ServiceNow.

Pilar Schenk is the new vice president of global sales operations at AWS, joining the cloud provider after several years in a sales operations role at Cisco.

The Runtime roundup

Matt Wood, vice president of AI at AWS and one of its most prominent speakers at public events like re:Invent, announced that he's leaving the company.

AWS added support for Redis fork Valkey to its ElastiCache and MemoryDB products and priced the new services significantly cheaper than their Redis equivalents.

HubSpot plans to buy billing software startup Cacheflow for around $100 million, according to The Information.

Oracle now plans to build a new data center complex in the UAE rather than Israel, according to Globes, a blow to the country's growing tech sector amid the expanding war in the region.

Thanks for reading — see you Saturday!

This post was updated Friday Oct. 11th to clarify the new Zoom avatar feature.