On this episode of Direct from the Expo, the Collab Collective’s Craig Durr speaks with Chris Morrissey, GM & Global Head of CX Sales & GTM at Zoom. Recorded live at Enterprise Connect 2026, the conversation explores how Zoom is addressing workplace and customer experience friction through its AI-powered platform approach. Chris shares insights into Zoom’s evolving CX strategy, the role of orchestration across employee and customer workflows, and how AI-driven automation is reshaping contact center operations and beyond.
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Craig Durr: Hey, everyone, this is Craig Chief Analyst and Founder of the Collab Collective. I want to welcome you to this edition of Direct from the Expo at Enterprise Connect 2026. And I've got a really special guest right off of the keynote. I wanted you Chris Morrissey, GM of Zoom CX.
How are you doing?
Chris Morrissey: Great, Craig. It’s great being here. The energy was amazing at Enterprise Connect. It's insane what’s happening.
Craig Durr: I have to tell you, from what I saw on the show floor, what I saw in the keynote room, there's a lot of great customer reception right now. You have a flood of announcements coming out right now.
Chris Morrissey: That's probably the hardest part to keep up with. How do you contain all the innovation in the 30 minute keynote?
I think one of the most important things to take away in this keynote is we don't really talk about products, we just talk about the capability of the platform, which is really where we're focused.
Craig Durr: And that's great. I want to talk to you about some of these high level ideas that I think you mentioned, and let's talk about some of those core problems you're trying to solve. The keyword I heard was “friction.” And the fact that Zoom is actually enabling AI platform solutions both from the employee side and the customer side to reduce friction. Tell me how this all ties together.
Chris Morrissey: Friction is, in how we define it anyway, a lot of the work around your work. It's not necessarily your job. People are working harder these days, but not just because the job is hard—it’s because they’re working across disconnected platforms. Their knowledge is at different places. So it’s all that work around the work is how we phrase it to actually get your job done. And that's friction. And it shows up in employee empowerment, but it also manifests as how customers experience working with your brand.
Craig Durr: It does. You actually did some research in partnership with Deloitte, and I think you guys came back with a figure that’s something along the lines that 94% of employees say they have some friction to the course of their day, which is challenging for them to complete their work, right?
Chris Morrissey: Yeah, and some of the other stats in that same report, by the way, from Deloitte, is 25 hours a week is spent in meeting and meeting-related activity. And it turns out 63% of that time isn't actually in the meeting itself. It's everything around it, so we're talking about things like, “I need to prepare for the meeting,” “After the meeting, I have to take actions, assign tasks, and schedule things,” “I have to remind myself what the prior meeting was about.” That's the work around the work, right? Hunting and packing different systems. So you show up and actually get something accomplished at the meeting. But then does that translate into something that's completed?
Craig Durr: Let's talk a little bit about those workplace solution ideas. Where and how are you trying to tackle some of that friction? Maybe there's something that you can share with me that kind of shows something through an employee's day or something like that.
Chris Morrissey: We talk a lot about in-meetings. One, preparing for the meeting. Usually meetings are connected to other meetings, like this is a meeting about the meeting that touches another meeting. As opposed to going hunting, we bring all that together. So I have a very concise summary of what this is. And it's not going to look at past meetings; it’s going to look at CRM data, emails, and chat. It's going to pull context from all these places to prepare you for the meeting. That's the preparation side.
Craig Durr: This leads into that system of action idea that I heard you guys speak about as well, right? It's the idea that you have data that can help inform other decisions, and this might be data from other parts of the business from the day.
Chris Morrissey: Yes. It's rare that any customer these days has one platform. I think interoperability is the key here. It’s how you navigate and create workflows that bring that together to make the employees life better. And then, it's the actions afterwards. Getting prepared is one thing, but now do I have to prepare a deck so I have to go to a QBR or a customer meeting, and do I have to do a summary, or do I have to write an email to a customer about the result of the meeting? Automating all that, again, that's the work around the work.
Craig Durr: Now, I'm going to challenge you on something because you could always say that I can bring technology to the solution. But a lot of these friction points… Are these culture? I mean, is this just what's inherent to the workplace? And if it is culture, can a platform help resolve that?
Chris Morrissey: Yeah, it's a fair question. I always say technology in and of itself doesn't solve a problem, but it will amplify a problem or it can make it less of a problem.
I actually have, I think of it as a three legged stool… You have your technology, your people, and your processes. All three of those have to be working together. So even if you have process optimized and culturally you figure it out, but your technology isn’t in there, you're still going to have friction. You need all three working together.
Craig Durr: And that's what the Zoom platform is offering here in this scenario, right?
Chris Morrissey: Absolutely.
Craig Durr: Well, let's go ahead and transition to one area that I think is near and dear to your heart. The friction in the customer experience and how Zoom can help alleviate some of those challenges.
Chris Morrissey: It's probably more visible actually in the contact center, in many ways. One of the stats I say is the industry actually created a KPI that measures friction. They call it after-call work. That's all of the work an agent has to do after they’ve solved the problem and the conversation ends with a customer, they have to update a system, update a ticketing platform, schedule a follow up activity, and take notes. That's the work around the work, and it was so prevalent. They’re like, “We have to create a KPI to measure this.”
Imagine taking all that away so the agents can do really what you hired them to do, which is solve problems and engage with their customers.
Craig Durr: That's also one of the big challenges that people think from an agent point of view. Is AI the platform approach, is it actually there to help me do more work? Does it help me do better work? I like this notion of quality versus quantity and what it's doing.
Chris Morrissey: Technology and AI falls into that category. It’s not a panacea; It's not the easy button, so I think it's both. In some cases, the high volume, low complexity calls… Let's automate that because it's probably better for a customer, and it reduces some of the burden on the agents. But then, when they have complex problems that require more quality, empathy, and human skills that matter, you want to turn a video on.
Sometimes I say there's two times I would love to see the eyes of who I'm talking to: when I’m talking about my money or my health, just turn on the video. There are cases where I'm turning on video and that's when the deep empathy, connection, and complex problem is present. So it's both. I would say.
Craig Durr: I love that. Well, let's walk through a workflow or an example right now. Let's try and bring this to life.
Those customer friction points… because you share some stats along the lines of 34% of customers don't feel like they get resolution when they're dealing with a virtual agent or a bot. A lot of times, people leave feeling incomplete or unresolved about what's taking place here. But now you've got Zoom Virtual Agent 3.0, and a lot of new features and functionalities incorporated into that. Walk me through one of these workflows and how this might be.
Chris Morrissey: Yeah, there's two I would highlight, although there's six core capabilities that we could talk about that's specific to your question.
One is from a virtual agent perspective, ideally it's contained and resolved within the virtual agent… not all calls, some will get elevated. Now, you need to speak with the human agent to complete the interaction. What a lot of companies have done is, “I have this virtual agent technology I'm using to self-serve, and if it doesn't happen, I can transfer the call to human agent and then they'll try to solve,” but if the human agent just walks you through the exact same processes that the virtual agent did, you're just doubling… It’s so frustrating, like, “Hey, did you turn off the computer?” “Yes, your virtual agent tried to. Why are you telling you the same thing?”
So that's one of the things that we do. We have context and content awareness when it's handed off. So if the human agent, using Expert Assist, knows that we've tried step one, two, and three, I'm not going to have the human agent tell you to go through step one, two, or three because you’ve done that. And if it's disconnected, those things happen all the time. And what I say, if you do it that way, all you've done is automate the friction.
Craig Durr: Okay. That's a true statement there. Now, there are some other elements I think you guys spoke about within the CX part of the portfolio.
Chris Morrissey: Yeah, the other piece is knowledge. With any AI solution, knowledge is usually at the core because without knowledge, you can't really… AI shouldn't make stuff up. It should be looking at a source of truth. But sometimes, there’s conflicting or missing data from knowledge sources. Sometimes virtual agents are not doing what you expect them to do. The virtual agent is like the knowledge it's accessing.
So what we have now is if we see engagements that start with the virtual agent, get elevated, the human agent solves for it… We're using those best trade agents to see what that human agent did that we didn't have in our knowledge. And then, we augment the knowledge so that going forward, that same case will be handled by the virtual agent. And it's also going to be used to guide your human agents going forward.
Craig Durr: So you've just elevated the whole knowledge base for both the human agent and virtual agent, and the customer then benefits from all this as well.
Chris Morrissey: With human in the loop, the human can check it and make sure that this is the right knowledge. It’s not fully automated because you still want humans somewhere applying the frontal lobe to make sure it's…
Craig Durr: It would always be a good thing. Yeah, I love that. Hey, let me go ahead and ask you this. I want to kind of do a little bit of a recap of a history here. Zoom launched its contact center in 2022. Within about a three year period, you made it to the Gartner Magic Quadrant, which is a fantastic achievement. But then, it's a very crowded space right now. And as you continue to look at that group of players, I want to understand from your perspective, how is Zoom differentiating itself from this market?
Chris Morrissey: That’s a great question. When we first entered, the people were saying, “Why are you even doing this? It's crowded. There's a lot of established leaders.” But one I would say, we're standing on the shoulders of giants. The Zoom platform itself has been designed to scale globally with reliability, resiliency, high quality video and audio. So the foundation was there, which is not a small part of investment in a good cost platform. We're standing on that. So when we innovate, it's more the innovation side, on the workflow is the AI automation, because that part is taken care of for us.
The other thing is the breadth of our portfolio. We really engage conversations much differently with customers in that I say contact center or CX isn’t a vertical practice, meaning not all problems we solve in the contact center never leave the contact center, and there you go. It's a horizontal strategy. In fact, even one of the Deloitte studies was 50% of organizations now view every team in the organization accountable for customer experience.
Now, if you have a platform that goes across all areas of the organization, that becomes true. So you think about video, phone, kiosks, webinar and events. We can start having very different conversations that aren't just like, “We're trying to solve your contact center problem.” We're trying to solve a customer experience problem.
Craig Durr: And I think by having that underlying AI platform being uniform across both that work experience and that customer experience helps that, in combination with some of the workplace orchestration features that you've introduced as well.
Chris Morrissey: The orchestration, which is used both for our CX workflow orchestration, as well as our employee orchestration, customer profile layer where we start getting more insights. So that'll help you make your virtual agents more personalized, like the more I know you as a person and what you've called for. And because we have more touch points, it just gets better faster.
Craig Durr: Okay, that's a great answer. I think you sold me on this. I like what Zoom is doing in the CX space. And I like how you're saying how you differentiate it based upon the combination of the front office and the back office orchestrating elements between this using a common AI platform. It's a lot of strength there to pull a lot of great data into making a better customer experience. That's what we're here for.
Chris Morrissey: It creates conversations that they haven't had in the past, which is exciting because the most exciting part is when you start to have these conversations and you see the customer's eyes light up. And they start solving problems in ways that I couldn't even think of because now, all of a sudden, the technology is what's hindering them.
Craig Durr: That's a great spot for us. Chris, I appreciate you taking time. I know it was a busy keynote. You just got off. I appreciate you sharing with us. This has been a great update. I can't wait to see how the market adopts these new features and solutions. We'll sit down here in a year, and we can talk about all the great achievements that were made, plus everything new that's going to be on the roadmap.
Chris Morrissey: Yeah, I'm looking forward to it, and thanks for having me here today.
Craig Durr: Perfect. Everyone, this is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst at the Collab Collective. I want to thank you for joining us at this Direct on the Expo edition at Enterprise Connect 2026. Take care.