Zoom has changed its name – and now it wants to change the way the whole world works

“It was as if a photograph had suddenly come to life and begun to talk, smile, nod its head and look this way and that,” the New York Times wrote in 1927, following a demonstration at Bell Telephone Laboratories in which Herbert Hoover appeared on a screen. The early research that Hoover was showing off at Bell Labs eventually gave rise to the “Picturephone” in 1964; the public were encouraged to try them out at a stand at that year’s World’s Fair where they could make calls to Disneyland while engineers evaluated their response, but it was largely negative. From the start of 2020 to October of that year, when its share price hit an all-time high amid ongoing pandemic restrictions, Zoom’s value shot up by 730 per cent. He pointed to the “Zoom AI Companion”, which he says is “the heartbeat of our evolution into an AI-first company and is critical in helping our customers uncover new opportunities for greater productivity”. “Over time, we believe these capabilities will translate into a fully customizable digital twin equipped with your institutional knowledge, freeing up a whole day’s worth of work and allowing you to work just four days per week,” wrote Eric Yuan in Zoom’s blog post.