Bawa joined the US-headquartered company in 2018, when it was a relatively little-known enterprise video conferencing startup competing against far larger rivals. The Eric Yuan-founded company subsequently went public, in April 2019, and its explosive expansion during the Covid-19 pandemic pushed its market capitalisation from about $9.2 billion at listing to a peak of $159 billion by October 2020. However, since the pandemic, it has seen modest revenue growth, with the market cap falling to $27 billion, as of early 2026, even as it remained profitable.
Bawa, who sits on the board of the leading cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, also said that Zoom’s core focus remains on improving productivity and collaboration as it expands its AI capabilities Edited excerpts:
Q. You joined in 2018 and have seen the pandemic surge, the slowdown after that and now a business with roughly $8 billion in cash. How do you reflect on that arc for Zoom?
My perspective is that this company succeeded because it was able to deliver a collaboration service that was easy to use. It’s the same platform that services Fortune 1 all the way to my mother-in-law. It delivers incredible ease of use and dependable quality.
We’ve leveraged that into a full suite of products that work together underpinned by AI to deliver tremendous value to customers.
If you step back, the core proposition has always been about providing value and productivity gains with a human connection. Leveraging AI to enhance productivity for users, both enterprise and individual, continues to be central. That remains consistent.
Q. How do you see workplaces evolving in the context of AI with so much talk around job losses?
There’s definitely an impact. I can’t predict everything, but I can say that at Zoom, we focus on making AI enhance human capability – improving productivity and allowing completion of workflows directly from conversations so users can focus on creative and decision-making tasks.
If AI can automatically convert a meeting into action items, set up follow-ups, assign tasks and complete workflows, that drives immense productivity. Even internally, AI-assisted coding helps us ship more features, not fewer. We see this as augmenting humans, improving productivity and strengthening human connection.
Q. But with work itself being automated, and not just workflows, could the essence of what Zoom provides to enterprise customers be impacted?
The world has to rethink how to approach AI. The biggest thing for me personally, even beyond my work at Zoom, is how to open my mind to embrace this technology. I think what ChatGPT did a couple of years ago when it first came out is show how natural language can drive some of these gains.
For example, Zoom AI Companion supports four languages in India with real-time transcription and translation. In a country with 22 official languages and thousands of dialects, a farmer in Visakhapatnam can leverage their own language and derive productivity gains.
You may not even need traditional interfaces as things evolve… voice alone can drive compute. In some ways, everyone is going to have to adapt to change. This marries very well with Prime Minister Modi’s vision of driving inclusivity and economic progress.
Our focus is to make our AI Companion powerful, simple to use and easy to adopt. That can advance society tremendously.
Q. With AI-first companies disrupting legacy players, how challenging has it been for Zoom to turn the ship around?
It hasn’t felt like a pivot. We’ve been utilising AI and machine learning for quite some time. Even something as simple as virtual background detection, knowing where your hair stops and the background begins, is AI-driven. Noise reduction is AI.
What has changed the game is the ability of natural language processing to drive productivity gains. In some ways, it democratises capability. Of course, the requirements of large language models and the fact that it is expensive to drive some of this analysis is something to think about, but you don’t need to know how to code to use these tools.
Q. Your offerings such as VoIP, contact centre and even events are areas where incumbents like Microsoft and Salesforce are deeply entrenched. How does Zoom stand out?
Two things: delighting customers and focusing on user experience. Even if we sell to enterprises, the end-user experience matters deeply. Our platform architecture drives value. The same meeting product works seamlessly for an individual user and the Fortune 1 company, delivering high-quality audio and video even in bandwidth-constrained environments.
That simplicity and performance extend across the platform. We focus intensely on ease of use and delivering value at competitive cost.
Q. But when Microsoft can afford to lose money on Teams to protect its Office suite, how do you compete against a product that doesn’t need to be profitable?
Over time, the cost of having a very strong product that drives productivity gains delights the end user. I want minimal friction in my day. If I’m bogged down in mundane tasks throughout my day, that’s lost productivity. We focus on bridging conversations to task completion seamlessly, without friction. That builds trust with end users.
Q. Zoom has made several small acquisitions over the past 12 months. What’s the strategy, especially in the AI context?
We look at opportunities that help us build value for customers. Recently, we acquired a company called BrightHire in the employee engagement space. We look at vertical capabilities that could enable customers in a specific industry to deliver productivity gains or enhance AI functionality. We evaluate many opportunities, but customer value is the lens.
Q. So, how do you balance product expansion with profitability?
It’s about adding value to customers. We launched AI Companion and included it at no additional cost for paid customers. That’s different from competitors who charge a premium at a pretty hefty per-seat price.
We have a simple, customer-focused architecture. We strive to keep things simple enough to drive costs down and pass that value to customers. You will see us drive significant value in AI at lower cost than many average technology companies. That comes from architectural discipline and know-how.
Q. How big is the India market? How are enterprises here different, and what’s the roadmap?
India is tremendously important to Zoom. It’s a giant market, and people here adopt technology quickly. The scale of innovation is remarkable. It’s also important from a talent perspective. We have a devops centre in Bengaluru and also have development centres in Bangalore and Chennai. The talent pool here is superior. India is also an important place regionally in the sense that many of our multinational customers insist on seamless collaboration between their India centres and global teams. That’s a key use case for us. Everyone knows us for our meeting tools, but we’ve seen strong adoption of Zoom Phone and Zoom Contact Center, active across six telecom circles including major metros and expanding further.
For example, Lenskart uses Zoom Contact Center to reach customers in areas without ready access to optometrists, diagnosing patients and delivering eyeglasses. That’s meaningful technology adoption. India is a huge opportunity for every technology player, not just us.
Q. How do you see geopolitics and data localisation issues evolving, and what does that mean for global companies like Zoom?
We fully respect countries’ needs to protect citizens’ rights and sovereignty. But there are trade-offs.
For example, strict data localisation across many countries means building infrastructure in each jurisdiction. That can be challenging, especially for startups and mid-sized companies competing with hyperscalers.
It’s about balance. Prime Minister Modi’s emphasis on innovation-friendly regulation is encouraging.
We all agree that harms like deepfakes must be addressed. But frameworks need balance.
When someone in New York speaks to someone in Mumbai, data crosses borders by definition. Digital trade enables global prosperity, but it must be balanced with sovereignty concerns.
Q. But there seems to be no global consensus on this. Does that make things complex for companies?
We respect the laws of every country we operate in. We can’t assume there will be global consensus.
At a basic level, (French) President Macaron said that if something is wrong in the physical world, it’s wrong online. That’s a principle most can agree on.
While a simple global framework would be ideal, it doesn’t exist. So we adapt and ensure we remain a trusted partner in every country, regardless of regulatory differences.