On this episode of Catching up with, the Collab Collective’s Craig Durr sits down with AVI-SPL’s Rob Whatley and Derrick Kelly at Zoomtopia 2026 in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, to discuss Zoom’s latest AI developments and their implications for enterprise collaboration. Following the keynote, the conversation explores how contextual intelligence, AI integrations, and workflow automation are shaping the future of workplace productivity and customer experiences.
Craig Durr: Everyone, this is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder of the Collab Collective. We are here live at Zoomtopia 2026 in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. Did I get it right?
Derrick Kelly: You did.
Craig Durr: All right, great.
Hey, I've got some really special guests here, and this is moments after the keynote, so I want to go ahead and have a deep dive conversation with some people from the partner community, in particular AVI-SPL. So I've got Rob Watley and Derek Kelly. How are you doing?
Rob Whatley: Doing well
Craig Durr: Good. Rob, you had this great title. You are the Director of Tech and Innovation.
Rob Whatley: That's correct.
Craig Durr: And I always joke whenever you have an ampersand, it means you pick up all those. It just keeps going.
Rob Whatley: You're absolutely right.
Craig Durr: And Derek, you are the VP of Solutions Enablement, and we were just talking through what you do. But this is a broad portfolio that you're covering and managing in that context, right?
Derrick Kelly: Yes, I cover quite a lot of things.
Craig Durr: I bet. Tell me in the context of AVI-SPL and Zoom, what's the partnership? What does it look like? Just to give context before we dive into the keynotes here.
Derrick Kelly: Yeah, so AVI-SPL is a global partner of Zoom. So we sell the entire stack of everything that they do. We install the room systems. That's obviously where AVI-SPL has grown the most, is in the kind of spaces and rooms. But we also do phone and contact center and sales as well. And then, we get into some of the other spaces that that Zoom is in, from kiosks and reservation systems and everything else like that. So we've got a very strong partnership with them. We are a platinum partner, and we are authorized in every country that we have physical presence, which is 84 locations across 14 countries.
Craig Durr: Obviously, AI is front and center of what we're doing right now. What were your key takeaways when you're coming off the? You know, what you saw in the big room. Let’s start at a high level, and then we'll dig into some topics.
Rob Whatley: Okay, gotcha. So, you know, conversation to completion, right? That was the theme that they had. What I thought was interesting about that conversation, if you will, and completion is how they incorporated My Notes. It's a strong conversation, right? So, not only did they incorporate it and talk about it a lot, but they recorded the session, the keynote with My Note. And I don't know about you guys, especially if you use Zoom, I use My Notes all the time to capture my meetings. By the way, it doesn't matter which platform I'm connected to, My Notes will do it.
Craig Durr: I love it. Derek, what about you? Is there a high-level idea that you saw when you walked off the stage?
Derrick Kelly: For me, how they connected everything to the context side of things. That was really interesting. So how they were not just doing it as, “We have a knowledge base of documents. We're just going to pull off of that or anything else like that.” When they really started to focus on the context side of it and how you know what they can do now actually brings in context from all aspects. So a customer record, from a call, from a presentation, and putting it all together inside of the customer experience is off of that kind of full stack of different AI tools.
Craig Durr: Let's dig in on that because this is my take on that. So you're right, we've heard them say conversation to completion for a while. It's probably been in market as a slogan, if you will, for six, eight, maybe 12 months or so. But this is delivering some meat behind that as well, and I think them showing that three concentric circle ideas in the contextual layer is really important. We've seen other vendors talk about that. They might call it like a work graph, or they call it something like that. But I love how these guys pull together a lot of interesting information, whether it was from chat, meetings, conversation, but also access to email, documents, and then connectors to other areas. It pulls a lot of solid information in place. Do you think they have the right ecosystem to pull in that context?
Derrick Kelly: As long as customers are deploying the full ecosystem, yes. That’s gonna be the part of the challenge, but it could also be part of the best growth opportunity for them as well, is to really expand into those spaces because part of that context that they they even highlighted this was taking information and where they took it from. And then, even if it was from a meeting, pulling the video or the screen grab from that meeting to show exactly where that came from, or if there was a presentation during that meeting, it was this slide during this presentation that had this.
So if they have access to all of that stuff, that's really powerful because it's not just dumping a whole bunch of information into a review or a transcript or anything else like that. It's actually putting it in relation to where it was in the meeting, how it got to that point, who was speaking at that point, what were they showing on the screen, and everything else like that. And then, that has an effect. People, when they're in meetings, you gravitate towards certain things, and if someone is presenting on something, and that presentation has a specific slide that you're like, “I really like the information in that,” sometimes that gets lost in the transcript. You don't see it. You don't visually see what's going on. You just hear whatever anybody's talking about. Being able to connect that inside of their actual context scenario is huge. It's a huge development.
Rob Whatley: And they're going to talk about this unified contacts layer. It’s what we're talking about right now, for the most part. And the example they gave was the contact center. All the information in the contact center, there was nothing that needed to be repeated, so the contacts were there, and when it got to the actual person, there was nothing that needed to again be repeated or restated because all the… how often do you go to a contact center? You talk to these folks, you get transferred to the next person. They don't know anything that you said or any context of what you had or you previously spoke about. I think they fix that.
Craig Durr: You know, I love this because the theme I really picked up on we've heard I said conversation to completion. We'll talk about that, but it was really about context this time. Now here's an interesting thing, I saw Russell Dicker, their Chief Product Officer, on stage. He actually said, "We don't care more or less what AI work service you work in.” And he was saying we can serve this as a headless model as well. He had a great interview with the Chief of Product for Anthropic. I want to dig into that just a little bit because I want to understand how you think that is believable. So what they are saying to what we're talking about is “We will be so great at pulling together contextual information that we're going to be so valuable in that process. We're going to be able to pull the conversation, the customer experiences, the data you're collecting elsewhere, and pull it into whatever pane of glass that you like.” Is that a strong story going to market?
Derrick Kelly: Oh, for sure, because most companies are starting to pick their models. They're starting to pick what they like, what they don't like, what is approved from a corporate security standpoint. And if you start introducing 2, 3, 4, 5 different models and everything else like that, then AI innovation starts to slow because then, it has to go through all the checks. They have to decide what's valuable, what's worth it, what's the cost of having all these different models inside of your space.
So if you can utilize the good stuff that is coming from Zoom in this contact layer, but still use the corporate approved structure or the company-designed platform, or if they have their own customized model that they have built, or anything else like that, you now have opened up a doorway for them to really utilize your product without having to then come across what everybody winds up coming across of, “Well, this isn't approved by by security yet, or this isn't approved by IT department yet because of compliance” or anything else like that, it reaches all these different layers. That it's like, “Well, we don't care.” Zoom's kind of that's how they approached AI from the beginning. They've had that open conversation about how many different models they wanted.
Craig Durr: They were one of the first federated companies doing that.
Derrick Kelly: Completely
Craig Durr: Now, Rob, one of the things he showed on stage, which I thought plays into that, was their guardrail story. And interestingly enough, they're showing guardrails taking place at the point of the meeting of it being captured. Click on a button and say this is sensitive, I don't want it shared with my AI agent in the meeting itself, or maybe afterwards with the transcript doing it as well. Are those strong enough guardrails? I mean, it seems to be a new model that's moving it to the end user as much as it is IT.
Rob Whatley: I think we're just getting started on that. I think they're getting there. Those are some strong guardrails. We realize that, but there's still more to come there. But I like where they're going. I do, with those two things as well. So yeah, I think they're going to get there. Remember, Eric first started off, he mentioned the questions were asked about. There's so many things, different things that are going on inside of Zoom. How do you focus on one or two things? And he said it's all about what the customer wants. So this is actually what the customer wants. They're asking for this. They're asking for more, but this is part of it, right? This is what the customer is asking you for. They want to be able to choose.
Craig Durr: I love it.
Hey, I want to hit the completion part, and we'll wrap it up here. So earlier on, when they shared this information with us a couple months ago about offering Slides and canvases, which is their former docs element, pretty powerful. But the way that it was pitched to me, the way I took it away from was that might be your productivity suite, but chances are it's not. It's the starter to get you into Microsoft PowerPoint. It's the starter to get you into a Google Slide or spreadsheet or... So that's my question: Do you think there is a market for their productivity suites, too? You do with a lot of large enterprises that may be mid-small size. How do you see that working within the Teams and Google productivity ecosystem?
Derrick Kelly: I think it'll grow faster in SMB marketplaces just because they're looking for an easier, kind of quick and everything else like that. Whereas enterprises are going to have a little bit larger of a stack, maybe multiple platform type stack, but I think once people… the hardest thing is getting people comfortable with the workflow first.
So once people start realizing, “Hey, I can use this call and use the notes from this call to load into this canvas, and then start building out all my stuff before I transfer it,” that might actually wind up once they actually do it, and somebody gives them the idea to to do it, and that might be an area where Zoom might have to do a little forward, you know, we're going to push in and teach you how to do this stuff and how to use this in a context type flow. That might actually be very helpful and useful because then, you can build off of things because everybody gets a transcript from the meeting, right? And then, they have to copy and paste it in, decide what's in context, what's not, remove this, add this. “Oh, they talked about it like this, but I want to talk about it like that.” If you can take that and use the AI tools to be able to start building those things off of that context from that meeting, and then any information that I might provide, you might actually be able to then just transfer that very quickly to your next document, whatever your productivity stack is. But it uses the meeting information, the transcript notes, and everything else like that to help you build it before it goes to write whatever the next platform is.
Craig Durr: Yeah, I feel the same.
Rob Whatley: Yeah, I have just nothing I can add to that. That was perfectly stated.
Craig Durr: I actually think you hit a key word, which is flow, and that's the way I think about myself working. If I'm in the moment and I can stay in that same pane of glass and move something... There was actually a use case that we were talking about before with a person at Zoom, where she had to hand out all the personal agendas for everyone here. But she used Zoommate from a meeting, created a spreadsheet, and then it was able to help generate those personal emails to everyone just to go off, so it all took place. And even then, she took that spreadsheet and transitioned it over to another platform for us non-Zoom sheets users. This is good. These guys covered a lot here, and we're only in the first couple of hours of the day's event, so no telling what's going to be next. You guys have technical sessions, partner sessions, partner connect sessions coming up. That's perfect.
All right. Well, Derek, Rob, I appreciate the insights. I think we are setting up these guys for what to look at. What would you tell the number one thing for the audience to go take a look at after this event?
Derrick Kelly: I would say the three layer context layer that they're building to really dig deep into that that world because you know while it seems simple in that that document or that layout, the picture they showed and everything else like that there's so much below that layer that really is the depth portion of it that really spells to what they're doing.
Craig Durr: We were talking about that. There's like five innovations all under that, which there was no way they covered all those.
Derrick Kelly: But they built it on three little simple wheels. You know, but taking that and then going in depth,there is so much stuff that people can find.
Craig Durr: Yeah. Rob, what's your one bit of advice for anyone zooming in?
Rob Whatley: I know that Zoom feels like it's here. It's finally up and coming. We thought for a long time, but all the innovations that they have got, they have going right now seems to be pushing them to the forefront of a lot of things that are going on out there in the industry, their focus points are now not just meetings, it's more on the AI side in the productivity side. And the fact that we use it, especially me who uses it every day, I can see how things are moving forward.
Craig Durr: I love it. It's not like Zoom is the meeting company that does AI. Zoom is the AI company that does meetings.
Rob Whatley: That's correct. Absolutely.
Craig Durr: Well, we'll end on that. I want to thank you, Derek, Rob. Thank you for helping out.
I am Craig Durr with the Collab Collective. We'll bring you more insights from Zoomtopia 2026. Thank you.
Rob Whatley: Thank you.