On this episode of Direct from the Expo, the Collab Collective’s Craig Durr speaks with Theresa Larkin and Michelle Couture of Zoom. Recorded live at Enterprise Connect 2026, the conversation explores Zoom’s vision for a “System of Action” and how AI is reshaping both employee and customer experiences across the enterprise.
Theresa and Michelle unpack how Zoom is bridging structured and unstructured data—connecting conversations, workflows, and enterprise systems—to reduce friction and drive meaningful business outcomes. They also highlight major announcements across Zoom Workplace and Contact Center, including AI Companion enhancements, agent-building capabilities, and new CX orchestration and insights tools designed for modern work environments.
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Craig Durr: 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. I've got some really special guests. They were participating in the keynote presentation here at Enterprise Connect, and I can't wait to dive into some of the announcements you guys made this week.
Let me go ahead and introduce my guests first. Theresa Larkin, she is Head of Product Marketing for Zoom Workplace and AI, and Michelle Michelle Couture, Head of Zoom Customer Experience Marketing.
How are you guys doing?
Theresa Larkin: Good
Craig Durr: Hey, so you had a lot on stage. I want to dive into a lot of details, but before we do that, we'll talk about some of the bigger ideas. You've been using this term, System of Actions. Help me understand, break this down. What does this mean for you?
Theresa Larkin: Yeah. Well, the Zoom platform has come a long way. And when you look across the entire workday, whether that's from an employee experience side or customer experience side, when you're trying to interact with each other or find information, there's a lot of friction that happens in that day to day. All of those contacts, all that information, they live in different places. They're different people.
So we're really looking at the platform and how we can streamline all of that, reduce some of that friction, and use AI to power some of those workflows. When you also think about how you have to do your day, there's a couple elements, right? You have your system of records, maybe that's a CRM or workday or things like that, or you have your files and other data assets. Those are what we call structured data, so within that lives rich insights and great information. But the reality is, they're only as good as the humans or the systems that update them. They're only giving you a piece of the pie.
What we can bring, then, is these real time interactions from both employee experience and the customer experience side that live in real time, and we call that unstructured data. But that's where we see some of that beauty living because those are where the ideas are made, the decisions are, and those nuances… Why did we get to that decision? Why did we decide on that and things like that? So we're marrying the two now into this system of action. So we take the conversations, tie that with your data, and then power it through our new AI engine to really drive those business outcomes.
Craig Durr: I love it. So you really are kind of taking this glue between the structured and unstructured data and helping pull it into workable, actionable insights and outcomes.
Theresa Larkin: Right, exactly. And whether that's for sales, CX, HR, they all have different outcomes. But that data then in those conversations can then be used to drive those.
Craig Durr: All right. Well, you hit a key idea—friction. And I think you actually commissioned some research with Deloitte, and you guys came up with some really interesting numbers. I want to dive into these a little bit deeper to understand what you saw. I think the key one that stood out for me was that 94% of employees said they hit some sort of friction through the course of their workday, and then it just waterfalls from there.
Michelle, tell me some more insights about this friction story.
Michelle Couture: I know Theresa can definitely talk a lot about the internal friction that you just referenced, but what people often forget is that also takes place on the customer experience side as well. And in fact, we even have a KPI after call work that agents have to do, which is what is the workflow and the next steps that happen after they wrap up a call? They have to do summarization, etc. They can really get bogged down going into different systems and trying to keep up with all that. It's a real productivity loss.
And on the CX side, when you have that, the customers are the ones that bear the brunt of that. So yes, it's friction on your agents and the way that that feels internally, but customers feel that as well. And that friction is very, very bad for a brand. It can really decrease loyalty and overall customer satisfaction. So if it's not addressed appropriately, it's definitely something that can cause a lot of problems.
Craig Durr: And that actually makes me think about something as I hear you talk through your answer right now. We're talking about an employee experience, a customer experience, but these are really merged together, especially the way that you guys address this as a solution, right? Tell me, how is this being merged together? The EX side and the CX side of this.
Theresa Larkin: This is where that conversation data becomes even more powerful. So we have this intelligent layer of those conversations that are marrying both sides of the house.
If you think about it, your customer experience really is only as good as the employee experience. So if we start internally, how do we make sure that we're reducing that friction, whether that's finding information or finding the subject matter expert to help the customer? We're able to bring that information together not only from a communications platform, but also those rich insights so that we're all pulling from those same data sources and have that real time engagement information readily available to us.
Michelle Couture: Today, most interactions are not just happening in the contact center. It's really an enterprise-wide CX issue, right? So it's really important that the entire organization is equipped and sharing customer signals in a way that can really help them. So if somebody calls in, they may not necessarily have a support issue…. Maybe it's a billing issue or something in finance that they need to take care of. And so, they need to make sure that that context is carried forward so that they can actually get to resolution and not be stuck in those loops that we're all so familiar with.
Craig Durr: Okay. Now, let's go ahead and dive into some of the details. Both of you had a lot that you shared on stage, and I won't be able to share all of it here, but I do want to hit some of the highlights. Teresa, why don't we start with you with Workplace?
One of the great things I noticed is that the Zoom AI Companion 3.0 had an update, more integration in terms of the actual desk application and other places. Why don’t you tell us about that?
Theresa Larkin: Yeah, we launched a companion three that in December on the web, and that just gave our customers a new work surface to have this conversation with AI Companion to surface insights, to orchestrate workflows, and uplevel their work through different canvases.
So this new conversational experience now gives you that rich data, whether that's the unstructured data I talked about earlier, the structured data from your files and other data sources, to then create work and take action on it. So now we're bringing that into the Workplace client as well as Workvivo. So you have your employee engagement all wrapped in one, as well as a good solution for frontline workers.
The other beauty of it is we're expanding its context. So now it'll have context from additional third parties Zoom Phone, Zoom Chat, and Revenue Accelerator. We're really marrying all of those rich conversations, whether they happen in chat, email, phone.
Craig Durr: The next thing that you actually announced that I want to talk about is Agent Builder. This is a really interesting use case because people have agent builders out there right now, but what you're doing is you're enabling end users to start creating their own agents. The first thing I want to know is what does that mean to IT? I'm sure they brought up concerns, and how are you addressing those?
Theresa Larkin: Yeah, definitely. You know, we started with IT-built agents, and what we realized is that now that AI is becoming so predominant throughout the workday, and there's a lot of benefits in reducing that friction and surfacing those rich insights that the amount of use cases that you can apply to varies. So we really want to put it into the employees hands so that they can really address their unique needs and reduce that friction throughout their day.
We have everything from org level agents where maybe you want one for the sales team or HR teams to answer questions and scale work that way, all the way down to custom agents that I could build for my own personal workflows and really help me throughout my day.
And how we're doing that, yes, there are IT variables depending on the different organizations and what they want to control and maintain and govern. So IT can put in those guardrails up front, so as they're implementing these agents, they have different controls that they can set. Maybe they want to review the agents before they get deployed, or maybe if it's a personal agent they don't need to review those but at an org level, they do. So now, we give them that control and flexibility so that they feel safe and secure in the way that those agents are being run.
Craig Durr: That's interesting. It's democratizing it. I like that. You have another announcement that I really want to dive into. Docs has grown up… It's now AI Docs and it has some siblings, AI Sheets and AI Slides. The question that comes to mind is, does this mean that Zoom is now leaning into that space, that Microsoft and Google play, that productivity suites, or how do these coexist?
Theresa Larkin: This isn't really designed to be your next office suite; this goes back to that system of action. So taking those conversations to drive those outcomes, what do you do to drive those outcomes? Many times, it's to create a document. Many times, it's creating slides. Many times, it's taking those rich insights and putting it into a data table of sorts or a spreadsheet and then aggregating it.
This just gives our customers new canvases to take action on. We're giving them that Swiss army knife that then they can apply those insights to and really meet their unique needs. And if they want to export it to a PDF or Microsoft or Google, they can. And that could be the end product that they share with the customers or partners and things like that.
Craig Durr: I love it. So it's going right from what you called before, from conversation, where I might capture this information all the way to closure, which might be another productivity suite or something like that, right? Okay. Got it.
All right, Michelle, let's turn to you. You also had a lot of announcements on stage. I want to dive into some of those; four of them caught my eye. You had an update to Zoom Virtual Assistant, Expert Assist, workplace orchestration, and insights. I mean, that in itself sounds like a platform launch, not just individual product features. I mean, was that by design?
Michelle Couture: That was exactly by design. As we think about the system of action, that applies to CX as well. So with the growing trend that we're seeing with a lot of contact centers is automation. That really being the front door to customer engagement. But when you're doing that, you need to make sure that you're supporting your human agents who are then going to be handling more complex interactions that might require more empathy and more focus than before.
Conversations don't just typically get resolved or end after the interaction, oftentimes are next steps that have to happen after that. That's where orchestration comes into play. And then, you need to bolster all of that with insights in order to grow, optimize, and continue to drive efficiency across your contact center.
Craig Durr: It's a lot. Okay, I'm gonna dive into each one a little bit. A large percentage of customers don't get resolution when they go to these virtual agents. They have abandonment on these issues as well. Now, one of the things you introduced is something like multi-modality within that. Is this a path to help trying to solve some of those friction points?
Michelle Couture: You got it. So for this launch, we were all about enterprise grade capability. Specifically when you're trying to automate, you need to do it with confidence. One of the things that we find is we've all had that experience with a bad bot where you're just stuck in a loop. It sucks. You can't escalate. It's so frustrating. So if you're only focused on containment, you're going to be delivering a bad experience.
For us, it's really about resolution, and so multimodal was one of those things. Today, if you have a product number or serial number you need to do, it can kind of create friction within the engagement. It's often a point where the virtual agent might fail. Now, the customer can just take a screen, picture, upload it, and the virtual agent will know exactly what they're talking about.
Now, that's only as good as being able to understand the actions that the agent is actually taking as well. So we launched a new capability called Agent Tracing, which gives administrators the ability to go in and see exactly the steps that the virtual agent took so they can identify and understand any efficiencies or changes that need to be made. Optimization is key with a virtual agent.
Lastly, we introduced a really cool new capability that when Virtual Agent is integrated with Zoom Contact Center, if an engagement is escalated, the virtual agent can actually learn from a successful human engagement and write a KB article based on that transaction that can then help inform the virtual agent to solve it in the future. So it's really automation at scale and driving those really successful resolutions for customers.
Craig Durr: I love it because you talked about that… the fact that this isn't such a containment story, but a resolution story. I think that's really important. Now, there's another thing you hit here, too, what you're doing in terms of helping the humans in the loop here. You've actually introduced some capabilities. It's not there to replace humans or automate, but actually make them more efficient when they're working.
Michelle Couture: Exactly, we announced AI Expert Assist 3.0, which is bringing agentic capabilities to Agent Assist. What we know now is with Virtual Agent handling more complex engagements, human agents are going to need a little more support and more complexity. They might need a little bit more empathy; they need to be able to focus on the customer, and that's what we're doing with Expert Assist 3.0. We're really taking the ability of going into multiple workflows and systems and bringing that all together and really providing that next step for the agent, and it's able to take action for them as well, which is really cool.
Craig Durr: Wow, and this leads into the orchestration part that we're talking about. Tell me about this.
Michelle Couture: Totally, with orchestration what we've done is we've created a no-code and builder that allows administrators to go in and pick the actions that happen post in engagement. So, for example, you may need to follow up in a CRM record, or you may need to have someone follow up with a customer a couple weeks later. Now, you can automate that workflow so that the human agent doesn't have to spend a ton of time after a call, making sure that they set up all these workflows.
And what's really cool about our connected platform as a system of action is that we can not only trigger things like a CRM or an ERP but also within Zoom Workplace. We can also trigger like team chat engagements, for example, or scheduling different tasks within the platform itself. So the entire organization can be informed and know what next steps need to happen.
Craig Durr: I love this, this really blends that line, and taking advantage of the AI platform that underlines both the workplace and the customer experience part as well. And then the last one, I think one of the things that maybe not appreciated upfront, but it takes that time is the CX Insights.
Michelle Couture: CX Insights is so cool. It's one of my favorite features. What it does is it takes a look at the entire CX suite across all of Zoom Contact Center, including workforce management, quality management, and virtual agent. Now, contact centers never are at a lack of reports, right? There's reports everywhere and every system, but what they don't do a great job of is bringing them all together and really analyzing everything, holistically across the entire context.
So you might know that something is happening, but you may not know why it's happening. And that's what CX Insights was designed to do; It's designed to take a holistic view across the contact center and really get to the root cause of what's actually going on.
The cool part about it is that you can query it in natural language. So you just type in your prompts, it'll pull up the reports that you need, and it's great for anyone who's in the contact center, as well as also sharing insights outside the contact center. You could have a product team where you could identify some product signals within the contact center and easily share them with them so they can make enhancements or updates to their product roadmap or the way that they roll out new products.
Craig Durr: This again, going back to the AI platform insights that you can derive from the front of house to the back of the house, and back and forth again. This is fantastic.
Well, this is a lot of information. I really appreciate it. I think we should probably wrap up here. So if our audience wants to learn more, either about Workplace or the CX Insights, where should they go?
Theresa Larkin: Zoom.com.
Craig Durr: Pretty straightforward right? That's great. So we're going to go ahead and wrap up now. Everyone, I want to thank my guest, Theresa, Michelle, this has been fantastic. I appreciate you getting off stage, sharing your insights with us afterwards and telling us a little bit more about the products and the announcements that you made.
Everyone, this is Craig Durr with the Collab Collective here at Enterprise Connect 2026. Stay tuned for some more insights as they come from the show floor.