It’s been half a decade since the beginning of the pandemic, which also means it’s been half a decade since Zoom exploded into the mainstream as one of the most essential and sophisticated UC and collaboration platforms on the market.
As society continues to wrangle with post-pandemic policies on remote and hybrid working, there’s no such equivocation with Zoom. It has continued to go from strength to strength, evolving dramatically from the pandemic era’s favourite video-calling tool to become an advanced all-in-one collaboration and enterprise platform.
Zoom Workplace’s solutions encompass the likes of Contact Centre, Docs, Tasks, Team Chat, and Workvivo, all empowered by the two versions of AI Companion running through them. It dropped the “Video” from its name late last year to rubberstamp its metamorphosis into something grander than just a video calling platform.
What could possibly come next?
“Expanding more within Europe, and understanding what that looks like,” Helen Hawthorn, Head of Solution Engineering at Zoom, told UC Today at ISE 2025. “When I say expanding, I mean into the customer base, like really, really getting our customers to understand more than video.”
That means empowering EMEA partners and customers to maximise the ROI on their Zoom subscriptions and their potential for seamless collaboration and enhanced productivity beyond just the video conferencing in which Zoom made its name.
“I think you have probably seen us become a lot more regionalised, a lot closer to our customers outside of the UK within France and Germany and Saudi and the investments that we are making out there, getting them to understand the full power and what they can achieve,” Hawthorn continued.
Hawthorn joined near the start of the pandemic and has been with the company for four-and-a-half years, which, as she put it, “in Zoom terms is like an eternity”.
Hawthorn has witnessed Zoom’s evolution from a video conferencing platform to a broader UCaaS solution first-hand. With a background in UC at BT, Cisco, and Polycom, she now leads solution engineers, channel teams, and specialists.
Initially a direct-sell company, Hawthorn highlights how Zoom has expanded into the channel, focusing on deep customer discovery and partner enablement. With rapid innovation, her team supports specialists in voice, contact centre, and APIs, ensuring Zoom integrates seamlessly into business processes for customers.
While she highlights Docs as the underrated star of Zoom’s portfolio (more on that later), she underlines the focus on educating and collaborating with Zoom’s European customers as what she’s particularly excited about in 2025.
Critical to this regional focus has been Zoom’s two data centres in Germany, one of which is a collaboration with Deutsche Telekom and the other that Zoom drives itself and is wholly owned by the company.
“There’s not enough visibility of that, and there’s not enough understanding of what that means for our European customers,” Hawthorn explained. “So we’re really trying to drive the understanding that there is a solution now that we can sit down and talk to them when we talk about AI. We have Zoom-only mode running in there, so none of the data is going outside of the EU. We’ve also got our data centre over in Saudi as well.”
“A lot of our customers do know about what we are doing. What they don’t seem to know is about some of this stuff that we probably haven’t promoted as heavily, which is the European concerns, specifically around AI; what it means for our users, whether are they going to be comfortable using this, how do we move them to a new way of working.”
Zoom AI companion 2.0 is now live in Europe with Zoom models only, meaning customers can keep their data in the region. It is also fully compliant with the EU’s recently passed AI Act, so European Zoom customers can be confident in the security and compliance of their business data while leveraging the technology.
It’s not just about reassuring customers and partners about the security of their data, however. It’s about enabling them to experience all the new capabilities and features Zoom has recently brought to the table.
“I think going into 2025, we’re now coming into Europe with these awesome new products, awesome new innovations, and now it’s about showing people, people testing out the products, I think that’s at the top of the year,” Hawthorn said. “It was announced in October (at Zoomtopia), but a lot of the Zoom model-only local options are launching in Europe now, as of very recently in the last couple of weeks.”
“What we’re seeing at the moment is we have so much that we’ve launched, even over the last six months, we’ve got enough to try and get our customers up to date. It’s about really getting them to understand how they can harness that and push it out into their business. That’s the big thing, like AI is AI, it’s useless unless people are using it. It’s useless unless the customers are happy to use it, to be able to turn it on, to want to turn it on, to understand it’s going to help them in their day-to-day.”
Among those AI-powered innovations is one product that Hawthorn returns to with great enthusiasm. Having been with Zoom for so much of its remarkable journey, why is Docs such an underrated game-changer?
“Honestly, I love video, love voice, love contact centre, but just internally, what’s changed our lives is Zoom Docs, and that is at the forefront of how we work day-to-day and how we work with our customers and with our partners as well,” Hawthorn explained. “For me, it saves so much time on a day, it’s unbelievable.
“I can go in there, and I can look really intelligent in a very short period of time, and I can say, ‘Okay, I know where all the information is coming from. I don’t have five hours to sit there and pull this all together. I can take summaries from calls, information from websites, the last five months of updates we’ve been having on the project, dump it all in and say, help me create a business plan from everything you see in this,’ and generally, 60-70 percent of the time, it’s spot on.”
“That in itself has changed the way that we’re working as a business, how we’re collaborating, teams coming together, actually how we’ve been collaborating with our channel partners because we’re really trying to get them involved and ensuring everything’s being pushed through that piece.”
For Hawthorn, summarisation and Tasks are great, but she talks about Docs so much because it’s a true use case.
“I can get Steve, our new Sales Leader, and talk about the fact that he was able to come into a business and do business plans on five different areas and cut that down to two hours of work rather than spending a couple of months. For me, that’s an easier, tangible thing to present to a business. I can tell you I think our summarisations are better, the way we do them is more effective, and the language is more effective. But the tangibles, for me, is centred around the more recalibration-type stuff we’re doing.”
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