I SPENT my last birthday the way I have spent the previous six — on a Zoom call with my siblings, separated by a few time zones and one weak connection. Between the off-key singing and a frozen screen, one of us did the math. We had marked six birthdays inside the same video window, and we only noticed because the years had quietly added up.
That is what most of us still use Zoom for. We turn to it for the family party, the reunion with relatives overseas, the class or medical consultation we could not travel for. In 2020, it became a verb because it was simple. You sent a link, people clicked, and the window opened. Nothing else was asked of you.
The company behind that window has been busy becoming something else. On June 1, Zoom announced ZoomMate, an “agentic” workspace built on artificial intelligence (AI). Strip away the label and the move is straightforward. Zoom wants to go from being the place where you talk to being the place where the talking turns into finished work.
Agentic is the industry’s term for AI that does not wait for a prompt at every step. Set it on a goal and it works out the next steps itself, whether that means drafting a message or updating a file. So when ZoomMate sits in on a call, it can reach directly into the systems a company already runs — Salesforce, Workday and ServiceNow — for the files and records that matter. It can draft a follow-up email and open a task. Whatever was said on the call can become a slide deck or a spreadsheet. All of that runs through Zoom’s AI Productivity Suite, home to tools such as Zoom Slides. Pricing starts at $20 per user per month in North America. Availability in other regions, including Asia-Pacific, is expected later this year.
Now think about how far that is from 2020, when Zoom meant three things to most of us: video, chat and screen sharing. We were simply glad it could hold the call together. The app now wants to sit inside the work itself. For a Manila sales team, that could mean ZoomMate retrieves a client’s account information from Salesforce before the call, then files the updated record and a draft proposal minutes after it ends, without anyone opening a second tab. For a back-office team or a contact center handling tickets, it could read the meeting and route requests automatically, 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 agentic capabilities in early 2025. ZoomMate is where that road was always heading. Russell Dicker, the chief product officer, said Zoom sits “at the center of every conversation where work decisions get made.” He is right that we settle a great deal on these calls. The new question is what the call does with those decisions after we hang up.
This is where I slow down. A tool that listens to meetings and acts on them is also a tool that keeps a record of those meetings. Zoom says its search function respects a company’s existing access controls and permissions, which matters. Even so, the same design that makes ZoomMate useful — its ability to read the room and move on its own — is the design a careful manager should scrutinize. When the assistant drafts the client email and updates the file without being told twice, someone still has to read it before it goes out. When it is confidently wrong — and these systems sometimes are — someone has to catch the error.
For Philippine companies weighing the technology, the questions are not abstract. An AI system that reaches into employee data in Workday and customer data in Salesforce is handling personal information. The Data Privacy Act of 2012 requires companies to protect personal information, and the National Privacy Commission enforces the law. Handing data to a new tool does not transfer the responsibility to safeguard it. The gradual rollout at least gives local buyers time to read the fine print before signing.
I am not against any of this. The hours it saves are real, and many Filipino teams lose entire afternoons copying and pasting between apps. But I keep coming back to that birthday call. What made Zoom matter to my family was that it asked almost nothing of us and did almost nothing in return. The version Zoom is selling now does a great deal. I hope the people building it remember the simpler thing my family was grateful for: that the window stayed open while we sang.
