Zoom Wants You to Forget Everything You Think You Know About Zoom

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The company that became a verb during the pandemic has a problem. Not a revenue problem, exactly, or a technology problem. A perception problem. And it’s spending serious money to fix it.

Zoom Communications — note the name change from Zoom Video Communications, executed quietly in late 2024 — launched its first-ever large-scale brand campaign this spring, a splashy effort called “Do More With AI” that represents the most aggressive repositioning attempt in the company’s history. The goal: convince the world that Zoom is no longer just a video-calling app. It’s an AI-powered work platform. The gap between that ambition and public perception is vast, and closing it will require more than a catchy tagline.

In a revealing interview with Business Insider, Zoom’s chief marketing officer Tom Puorro laid out the challenge in stark terms. “The ‘aha’ moment we see time and again is when people realize all that Zoom can do beyond meetings,” Puorro said. The company now offers an AI companion embedded across its platform, a customer-service product called Zoom Contact Center, document collaboration tools, and what it calls Zoom Workplace — an integrated package designed to compete with Microsoft Teams and Google Workspace head-on.

But most people still think of Zoom as the thing they used to talk to their grandparents during lockdown. That’s the box Puorro is trying to break out of.

The brand campaign, which rolled out across television, digital, social media, and out-of-home placements in major markets, marks a strategic departure for a company that historically relied on product-led growth and word of mouth. During the pandemic, Zoom didn’t need to advertise. The product sold itself — daily meeting participants surged from 10 million in December 2019 to 300 million by April 2020. The brand became synonymous with remote communication. Which was a gift. And now, arguably, a curse.

“We have near-universal brand awareness,” Puorro told Business Insider. “But awareness and understanding are two very different things.” He described internal research showing that while nearly everyone knows the Zoom name, a significant majority associate it exclusively with video meetings. The company’s newer products — many of which have been on the market for two or more years — remain largely invisible to potential buyers.

This is a familiar corporate dilemma. IBM spent decades trying to shed its “Big Iron” mainframe image. Slack fought to be seen as more than a chat app before Salesforce acquired it. Microsoft itself endured years of being dismissed as a legacy software company before Satya Nadella’s cloud-first strategy changed the narrative. Rebranding a company that people already think they understand is harder than building awareness from scratch. You’re not filling a blank space in someone’s mind. You’re overwriting something that’s already there.

Puorro’s approach leans heavily on AI as the connective tissue. The “Do More With AI” campaign positions Zoom’s AI Companion — a built-in assistant that can summarize meetings, draft emails, and surface action items — as the reason to reconsider the platform. It’s a calculated bet. AI is the hottest topic in enterprise technology, and Zoom is attempting to ride that wave to redefine itself.

The timing isn’t accidental. Zoom’s stock, which peaked above $550 during the pandemic frenzy, has settled into a range around $65 to $80 over the past year. Revenue growth has stabilized but slowed dramatically — the company reported $4.53 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2025, up just 3.2% year over year. Enterprise customers now account for roughly 59% of revenue, a proportion the company is actively trying to increase as it moves upmarket and away from its consumer and small-business roots.

The competitive pressure is relentless. Microsoft Teams, bundled with the ubiquitous Microsoft 365 suite, dominates enterprise communications. Google Meet is tightly integrated with Google Workspace. Cisco’s Webex continues to hold ground in large enterprises. Each of these competitors has something Zoom lacks: a broader productivity platform that makes the communications tool feel like a natural extension rather than a standalone purchase. Zoom’s answer has been to build that broader platform itself, piece by piece. Zoom Workplace bundles meetings, chat, phone, email, calendar, notes, clips, and the AI Companion into a single offering. Zoom Docs, launched in 2024, added collaborative document editing. The Contact Center product targets a massive market — customer service — that has nothing to do with internal meetings.

So the product portfolio has expanded considerably. The marketing just hasn’t kept pace with the engineering.

Puorro acknowledged this gap candidly. He told Business Insider that the company had been “heads down building” and hadn’t invested enough in telling the broader story. The brand campaign is meant to correct that imbalance. It’s also meant to support the sales team, which increasingly finds itself pitching products that prospects didn’t know existed. “When our sellers walk into a room and the customer already understands that Zoom is more than meetings, the conversation starts in a completely different place,” Puorro said.

The campaign’s creative execution focuses on real-world work scenarios — not the pandemic-era Brady Bunch grid of faces, but modern knowledge workers using AI to cut through the noise of their workday. It’s a deliberate visual break from the imagery that defined Zoom’s cultural moment. The company wants to look forward, not backward.

Whether the market will follow is an open question. Brand perception shifts slowly, especially when the existing association is as strong as Zoom’s. Consider how long it took Amazon to be taken seriously as a cloud computing company. AWS launched in 2006 and didn’t become widely understood outside the tech industry for nearly a decade. Zoom is attempting a similar expansion of identity, but in a more compressed timeframe and with competitors who are better resourced.

There are encouraging signs in the data. Zoom reported in its most recent earnings call that its AI Companion has been activated by hundreds of thousands of accounts, and usage is growing rapidly. The company claims it’s one of the most widely deployed AI assistants in enterprise software, partly because it’s included at no additional cost — a sharp contrast to Microsoft’s Copilot, which carries a $30-per-user monthly surcharge on top of existing Microsoft 365 subscriptions. That pricing strategy is central to Zoom’s pitch: AI shouldn’t be an expensive add-on. It should be baked in.

CEO Eric Yuan has been vocal about this philosophy. In recent public appearances, Yuan has positioned Zoom as the AI-first alternative to bloated, expensive enterprise platforms. He’s argued that companies are overpaying for Microsoft’s bundled approach and that Zoom offers a more focused, cost-effective alternative. It’s a compelling argument for CFOs watching their software budgets balloon, though it requires those same CFOs to believe that Zoom can genuinely replace — not just supplement — the tools their organizations already use.

The name change matters in this context. Dropping “Video” from the corporate name was a small but symbolically important move. It signaled internally and externally that the company’s identity is no longer tethered to a single product category. Puorro referenced this shift in his conversation with Business Insider, noting that the name change and the brand campaign are part of a coordinated effort to reset market perception.

Analysts have been cautiously optimistic. Several Wall Street firms have noted that Zoom’s AI strategy could be a meaningful differentiator if adoption continues to accelerate. The free inclusion of AI Companion removes a significant barrier — enterprises can experiment without budget approval, and once users become dependent on AI-generated meeting summaries and action items, switching costs increase. It’s a classic land-and-expand play, updated for the AI era.

But skeptics remain. The bear case is straightforward: Microsoft’s distribution advantage is nearly insurmountable. Teams is already installed on hundreds of millions of devices. IT departments default to Microsoft because it’s the safe choice. And as Microsoft continues to embed Copilot more deeply into its products, the AI gap that Zoom is trying to exploit could narrow quickly.

Zoom’s counter-argument rests on execution speed and focus. As a smaller, more nimble company, Zoom can iterate faster. It doesn’t have to coordinate AI rollouts across a sprawling product empire the way Microsoft does. And because communications is Zoom’s core business — not a secondary feature bolted onto an office productivity suite — the company argues it can deliver a more polished, integrated experience.

The brand campaign will ultimately be judged not by impressions or recall metrics but by whether it moves the needle on two concrete outcomes: enterprise deal sizes and platform adoption breadth. If customers start buying Zoom Workplace bundles instead of standalone meeting licenses, the strategy is working. If the Contact Center product gains meaningful market share against incumbents like Genesys, Five9, and NICE, the repositioning is real. If AI Companion usage translates into higher retention rates and lower churn, the investment in brand marketing will have paid for itself many times over.

Puorro seems to understand the stakes. “This isn’t just a marketing campaign,” he told Business Insider. “It’s a reflection of a fundamental shift in what this company is and where it’s going.” That kind of language is common in corporate repositioning efforts. What’s less common is the discipline to sustain it. Brand campaigns come and go. The companies that successfully redefine themselves do so through years of consistent messaging, product delivery, and market education. Not through a single ad blitz.

Zoom has the cash to sustain the effort — roughly $7.7 billion in cash and marketable securities as of the most recent quarter. It has the product portfolio to back up the claims. And it has a customer base that, while narrowly engaged, is enormous. The question is whether a company that became famous for doing one thing extraordinarily well can convince the world it now does many things just as well.

That’s the real test. Not whether people see the ads. Whether they believe them.