There are probably a million places you’d rather be than stuck in meetings—and Zoom’s founder and CEO, Eric Yuan, understands this. He’s working on an AI avatar, or “digital twin,” to handle your tedious tasks while you enjoy life.
“We are looking at your entire schedule and figuring out how to use Zoom Workplace to help you,” Yuan told The Verge. “You can essentially leave Zoom Workplace, and it will handle most of your work. That’s our pitch.”
A key part of this plan is creating a digital clone that can make business decisions on your behalf during meetings.
“I can send a digital version of myself to attend meetings so I can go to the beach,” said Yuan, adding that your avatar would also be able to respond to most emails and take phone calls.
“Today, we spend a lot of time making phone calls, attending meetings, sending emails, deleting spam, and replying to messages—still very busy,” Yuan continued. “How do we leverage AI and Zoom Workplace to fully automate that work? That’s very important to us.”
Robots will handle 90% of your meetings—making possible a 3-day workweek?
You’re not just imagining the life draining out of you during back-to-back video calls. Research shows that your brain activity actually decreases during Zoom meetings.
However, Yuan predicts that workers will soon only need to attend 10% of the meetings they do today. The rest of the time, you’ll be able to pursue activities that ignite your passion.
“Let’s fast-forward five or six years to when AI is ready,” said the engineer-turned-executive. “AI will likely be able to handle about 90% of the work.”
“You won’t need to spend so much time in meetings. You won’t have to have five or six Zoom calls every day. You can use AI for that.”
In Yuan’s vision, AI will take over much of the administrative work, allowing people more time for enjoyable human tasks, like lunch meetings. Additionally, they will only need to work three to four days a week.
“Today, we can’t do that because every day is busy, five days a week. It’s monotonous,” said the CEO.
“You and I could have more time for in-person interactions, but not necessarily for work,” he added. “Why not spend more time with your family? Why not focus on more creative activities, giving you back your time, and contributing to the community and society to help others?”
When can I sign up?
The CEO described how Zoom’s digital twin technology would likely start as a voice assistant and gradually become more immersive, akin to Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3.
“This is just the beginning,” he said, envisioning a future where your digital twin is so lifelike that “you can’t tell if it’s a real person or just a 3D version.”
In fact, it might even surpass the real deal since you could theoretically have multiple versions of yourself for different needs.
For instance, you might create a more confident or outspoken version of yourself specifically for sales meetings.
“Sometimes I know I’m not good at negotiations. Sometimes I don’t join a sales call with customers,” Yuan explained. “I know my weakness before sending a digital version of myself. I can adjust the parameters a bit.”
However, for those eager for this technology, Yuan emphasized that Zoom’s digital twin technology is still a long way from becoming a reality.
“For now, the main issue is that AI isn’t there yet, and it will take some time,” he said.
