On August 4, I spent a day in London at two flagship customer centers: HP's Customer Welcome Center on the 32nd floor of the Gherkin and Zoom's Experience Center in Holborn. The newest episode of the Xperience Center Tour follows that day with Frankie (Francis) Vu, Experience Centre Evangelist for EMEA at Zoom, and Brian Phillips, Director of Product Marketing at HP, starting in the first hour at a home office and ending in front of HP Dimension.
I approach this series the way a good exploration show approaches a new place. I walk in curious, ask the questions I think you'd ask if you were standing next to me, and let the people who built the space show me how it works. My first words inside HP's center were "Oh wow, look at this space," and that feeling held for the rest of the day.
One discovery came early. In Zoom's center, HP is right there in the mix, and in HP's center, Zoom runs throughout. Each company gives the other real room in its own flagship, and seeing both in one day made the partnership easier to read than either center would alone.
I walked in with a notebook and the question I hear most from customers in the field. I left without needing the notebook, and with four ideas that deserve more space than a social post gives them.
The premise of the episode is simple. Work these days is a series of conversations. Some happen in meeting rooms, some in a hallway, some on the train, and more of them now happen with an AI agent. A lot of that information gets lost in the moment, so my first question to Frankie was the obvious one: where is all of that supposed to go?
Zoom has a name for closing that gap: conversation to completion. Frankie framed it this way.
"Everything that moves work forward starts with a conversation, and these conversations can happen in many different places." (Frankie Vu, Zoom)
Zoom describes Zoom Workplace as an AI-first system of action, meaning a platform that takes the context gathered across calls, chats, email, and meetings and gives you the tools to turn it into a finished asset such as a presentation, a document, or a report.
An analyst's aside: "System of action" is a phrase to watch. For the last decade, collaboration platforms competed to be the place where meetings happen. The next contest is over where the work coming out of those meetings gets finished, and it's the same shift I'm tracking in my research on vendors positioning themselves as orchestration platforms for blended human and AI teams.
Craig Durr and Frankie Vu at the Zoom Experience Centre in London
We built the episode around a small bit of theater to test that idea. Early on I pulled out my notebook, ready to take notes, and Frankie told me, "I don't think you're going to need this." My reply on camera was "But why not?" The day itself started at a home office setup, where Frankie greeted me with, "It's your home office, your rules, Craig." Zoom AI prepared notes on the meetings ahead, and when it was time to get moving, the session moved from desktop to mobile with My Notes ready for conversations on the go.
My takeaway as an analyst is that AI output can only be as good as the conversation it captures. That's the reason the device side of this partnership carries so much weight, and it's where HP comes in.
Brian drew a distinction I'd encourage every buyer to push vendors on.
"A lot of vendors claim to have devices that can work with Zoom, but that just means somebody ran an interoperability test. HP and Zoom have solutions that are co-engineered to work together." (Brian Phillips, HP)
It's a thread I pulled on earlier this year in [The Device as a Moat], my take on HP's AI strategy after HP Imagine 2026.
HP positions itself as having the broadest range of Zoom-certified devices on the market, and Brian walked that range by persona rather than by product catalog. His first persona starts the day "after you lose the robe on your commute," on the train with Poly Voyager Free 60 earbuds. The office collaborator and the remote collaborator share the new Poly Focus 6, built to move between a desk, a meeting room, and home. When Brian reached the remote collaborator, he added, "My kind of work story sounds like it."
The small collaboration room paired a Poly Studio X52 with an interactive touch panel, and it raised a question anyone who has sat in a glass-walled meeting room will recognize: who else are the camera and microphones picking up? Poly DirectorAI keeps whoever is in the room framed as they move, and its perimeter setting ignores people walking past outside. Poly NoiseBlockAI cuts the reverb that glass creates, and Acoustic Fence keeps hallway conversations out of the meeting.
The Boardroom of the Future is what I call a snowflake room, a one-of-a-kind space that no standard kit fits. We walked in on a meeting already underway, and I asked Frankie what I suspect you'd ask: how is this different from a single camera covering the space? HP Room Compute, built for Zoom Rooms on Windows, drives three Poly Studio E60 cameras and runs Zoom Intelligent Director to switch angles and frame each person, so everyone on the far end gets the same view of the room. Frankie called that meeting equity. Smart name tags add a name to every contribution, which he noted gives you "a much richer transcript, much richer action items."
"This is consistency of experience, so the user knows what to expect, and they get that full feature set no matter what room they're walking into." (Brian Phillips, HP)
For IT, Brian described the same consistency in manageability, provisioning, and insights, whether a room runs Zoom on Android, a USB video bar, Windows room compute, or a modular build.
An analyst's aside: That range of deployment options matters more right now than it usually would. My room video forecast work points to a full refresh pipeline, driven by Windows 10 end-of-life, Android certification expirations, and pandemic-era devices aging out, all arriving at the same time budgets are squeezed by memory shortages and vendor price increases. Enterprises refresh roughly a fifth of their rooms in a given year, and AI features don't change that pace. What they do is help IT defend which rooms get refreshed first.
Most conversations I have with buyers about Zoom come down to the same question: how does this work in a Microsoft environment? It isn't always an IT decision. Customers and partners ask you to join a Teams meeting or work from a shared Microsoft file, and you have to show up well. We put that question near the front of the episode on purpose so the answer could thread through every stage of the day.
Frankie's response set the tone.
"From a Zoom perspective, I don't feel like this is an objection. I feel like it's more of an invitation, so it's not either or. It's better together." (Frankie Vu, Zoom)
The demos backed it up at each layer. Zoom Workplace in the Experience Center runs on Microsoft Calendar and Mailbox. A OneDrive connector in the Zoom AI side panel reads and writes files without leaving the window. For people who live in Teams, the Zoom app runs inside Teams, so meetings and phone calls happen in the Teams interface on a Zoom backend. An IT team can standardize on Zoom Phone or Zoom meetings while employees keep Teams as their chat home.
The room story holds the same line. Brian invited a Zoom Room to a Teams meeting; it appeared on the calendar, and one press of the join button put the room in the call. HP's audio and video intelligence carried over unchanged, and when I asked whether I'd lose My Notes, Frankie confirmed it works in Teams calls too. The test I'd put to any room vendor is to join a Teams call from the room and check whether camera framing, noise suppression, and note taking still work. In this demo, all three did.
Brian has been sharing HP Dimension with Google Beam with me for about a year, so I walked into the last room thinking I knew the story. It's a 3D video communication system with cameras built around the bezel and a lenticular display, a screen that shows each eye a slightly different image so the person across from you appears with real depth. The effect is sitting across the table from someone thousands of miles away.
The surprise Brian had promised all day was that HP Dimension is also available as a native Zoom experience. Frankie explained what that means for the people using it: the same Zoom controller, the same intuitive experience, and one touch to join whether the call is a Google Beam meeting, a Zoom meeting, or a Teams meeting.
An analyst's aside: My biggest concern with immersive systems has been utilization, and tighter room budgets make that concern sharper. A high-end room that only lights up for the occasional 3D call is hard to justify. A room that also handles everyday Zoom and Teams calls gets far more use.
Brian showed it by inviting the room to a regular Teams call and hitting join, just as you would in any other Zoom Room.
"It gives you that flexibility of getting that 3D immersive one-on-one experience, as well as all of your traditional calling types you expect to have from a Zoom room." (Brian Phillips, HP)
Frankie added that the room sits inside Zoom Workspace Reservations like any other real estate asset, so the most advanced room in the building is booked and managed the same way as the huddle room down the hall.
At the end of the day, I told Frankie and Brian I'd go gather my notes and put together a report. Frankie had already sent me the summary. Across both flagships, neither company told its story without the other. I had a double-decker bus to catch.
Watch the full episode HP + Zoom: Inside The Experience, read the complete transcript on HP and Zoom Experience Center Tour: AI, Collaboration, and the Future of Work, and follow the short clips from this tour on The Collab Collective: Posts | LinkedIn.