Eric's contribution to the world cannot possibly be exaggerated. We all know what you've created. I mean, truly, you've changed our lives, so thank you for this breakthrough. I mean, we don't see things like this happen in our lives that often, so what a revolution. So congratulations. The company's created something truly special, which is gonna be part of our work life for a long time. So, Eric, great to have you at the Goldman Sachs conference.
My pleasure. Thank you, Kash. Your security do not allow me to join over Zoom today, so...
Yes, we did, about two years back, two or three years back. My colleague, Matt Martino, is here with us as well. So we're gonna be doing some Q&A session. Eric, I just wanted to set the stage. Where do you see the company going in the next four to five years? If I had asked you this question before the pandemic, we could not have predicted how successful the company is gonna be. Right now, we're at the point where we're out of the pandemic, and we had a big adoption thing. How do you see the company four to five years from now? So it, it's probably gonna be very different from where we are today. And so what are the things that you can see solving for customers?
What are they asking you for that could present you opportunities?
Yeah
- 4-5 years from now?
Yes, it's a great question. First of all, one thing for sure, I know actually, you know, four or five years later, Zoom will be, Zoom will be four or five times better than today. So. And overall, I think, you know, before I answer to that question, I'd like to take a step back, you know, to share a little bit about how we started. When we started, right, back to 2011, the goal was just to build a better solution than Webex, right? Which is just to focus on video conference service. But over the past many years, in particular over the past three years, you know, not only did we focus on video collaboration, but also we built a, you know, a great, great collaboration platform.
You know, video, and phone, and Team Chat, and a whiteboard, meeting scheduler, email, calendar, you name it, right? Ultimately, we would like any user to stay within the Zoom client, can get most of work done.
Mm-hmm.
Essentially, that's a collaboration platform, right? And also, we can empower any user, right, to support their hybrid work, and also leverage AI to improve their productivity, and that's our goal. And a lot of new services, new services will be added to our platform. So that's our, you know, the, the vision for the next several years. And also, given that we are building up an open platform-
Mm-hmm
... we also want to support a third party, you know, developers and startup companies to build all kinds of applications upon our platform as well. So that's our goal, you know, for the next four to five years. Again, I'm very, very excited. So probably more excited than when I started, you know, back in 2011, so.
That's amazing. In just 12 years, 11 years, you're a $4.5 billion revenue company. It just happened so quickly, right?
We're just getting started.
Yeah, exactly. We think of, you know, software companies have a hard time going from $100 milllion-$500 million, and then from $500 million-$1 billion is tough, and $1 million-$2 billion, oh, my God, that's really tough. And $2 billion-$5 billion, forget about it. You just blazed right through all this without even realizing that, "I'm going from $1 billion to $2 billion." It's just-
Yeah
... just happened so quickly. So as you, as you lay out your vision, what are the white space opportunities you see ahead for the company?
I think that look at the enterprise, right? You know, quite often, you know, a lot of enterprise customers, you know, they deploy multiple vendor solution, a lot of on-prem solution. I think in next several years, very likely, most of enterprise customers, they would like to consolidate into, you know, two, two or three, at the most, three, you know, solution providers. I think Zoom, for sure, is one of them, right? That is one good opportunity. And also look at international growth-
Mm-hmm
... like, even to this world, like, given the sort of the, you know, the challenge we are facing-
Mm-hmm
... and you look at the, you know, like the Middle East, you know, Southeast Asia, still growing very well, right?
Mm-hmm.
So international growth, enterprise growth, even look at our online business. Like, prior to COVID crisis, you know, probably around 18%, 17%. Essentially, that's a part of our marketing, you know, game, right? It's really to now focus on online business. Today, you look at our online business, you know, I think, you know, during, especially during the COVID, it grew extremely well.
Mm-hmm.
Given the COVID crisis, now there's a little bit of change. Now, you know, kind of online business is stabilizing. But also, look at the revenue growth, you know. I think that's good opportunity in the future as well. You essentially look at online, look at enterprise, international, and new services. I still think a lot of opportunity ahead of us.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So Eric, can you, can you talk a little bit about the online business as we look out over the next few years? You know, you talked about stabilization. What, what do you think it takes to get that business back to growth?
Yeah. So first of all, you know, as I said earlier, prior to COVID crisis, right, the online business was not our focus.
Right.
However, during, you know, over the past three years, you know, especially, you know, during the year 2020 and in 2021, you know, almost every family, you know, had a paid, you know, account, right? I think after that, you know, for sure, you know, a lot of families, they probably can use our, you know, free service. That's why we see the return over the past several quarters. Now, it's going to stabilize. It's getting better and better. I think the way for us to further grow our online business is to add more value. You know, we add a whiteboard, meeting scheduler, we are going to add more and more, like, AI features as well. We're going to add more value. And essentially, those customers who, I mean the online buyers, who like our service, they are gonna stay with us.
Also the new customers, new free users, because of those, all the newly added values, they are also going to become the paid customers. That's the way for us to grow our online business, so-
... So I want to go back to the five-year-old vision and the white space, and you talked about a platform. That reminds me of a few other company, including your prior employer, Webex, had this platform-
Webex do not have any platform, you know?
Yeah.
Webex is a product, one product.
This is a much, much more advanced platform. So how do you see this platform playing out, and what, what kinds of opportunities are there for third parties to write enhancements that sit alongside the core Zoom product?
Yeah, so you look at a Zoom product, right? We also have a marketplace. Like, you know, like if you use our Team Chat, by the way, Team Chat is a great product, and it's free. If you are already a Meeting subscribers, you just use our free Team Chat product, right? You do not use any other competitor's product. And within a Team Chat, right, you know, like, you know, like this morning, I got a notification. I need to go to work today to approve something. I do not need to go to work today, right? Just within a Team Chat, I get all those third-party application notifications, right?
Carl is gonna be coming here-
Oh, great.
In an hour, he's gonna be here.
So, and also, like, a Jira ticket as well, right?
Yeah.
Essentially, the greater integration with the third-party apps, right? Within the Team Chat, within our meeting product as well.
Mm-hmm.
We also have a meeting apps as well. That is one way. Another way is we do have SDK.
Mm-hmm.
You know, quite often, you know, we may not have enough bandwidth to focus on, let's say, you know, some vertical product, like healthcare or education.
Mm-hmm.
Third-party companies, like, one edu company called Class, right?
Mm-hmm.
They leverage our SDK to build a specific solution-
Mm-hmm
... for the education market.
Mm.
You know, they added quite a few, you know, the specific EDU features, right?
Mm-hmm.
A lot of opportunity out there, right?
Mm-hmm.
How to support those vertical market-
Mm-hmm
... to leverage our SDK. I think that is also the opportunity for us.
Why would you not create those extensions yourself? I mean, if it's-
Yeah, why? I, you know, I can write a code, and not everyone can write a code, right? So, essentially, you do not have a lot of engineers.
Yeah.
You know, it's hard. Even you have engineers-
Yeah
... you also need to invest, you know, into your go-to-market.
Yeah.
It's very challenging as well.
Yeah.
Ideally, we should do all, but I do not think that's realistic, so.
Got it. Got it. That makes sense. Zoom always had the super agile functionality. At one point, you were the only one, and it looks like competition is catching up on functionality. So at this stage, and this is the question I keep asking you on your earnings conference calls, and I'll just ask it, anyway, again, where is the differentiation for Zoom? You still are higher in terms of quality, reliability, there's no question about that, right? But in a market which seems to be mature-ish, and I'm sure that will change if your vision comes through in the next four to five years, this SDK platform thing sounds very exciting.
As of now, how do you really in a market that's seemingly mature, where there's more competition, what are the avenues for growth in the near term for the company?
I think, first of all, we really, you know, to look at everything, you know, from an end user perspective.
Mm-hmm.
Make sure, you know, our mantra is always build something customer truly love.
Mm-hmm.
Right? Like, recently, you know, I joined a meeting. I received a link from a friend, and their company use a different product. And before I see anything, my friend on a mission, "Oh, Eric, sorry, we do not use Zoom." I knew I hated that experience, right? So make sure end user love our product.
Mm-hmm.
There's always number of opportunity. At the same time, we want to focus on innovation.
Mm-hmm.
I think no matter how, you know, competitive this is, you know, industry or our competitors, right, we really need to focus on innovation. Innovation not only for product innovation-
Mm-hmm
... but also for business model innovation as well.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Otherwise, you know, quite often, you know, we have a huge competitors, right? Sometimes they bundle everything together.
Mm-hmm.
We also need to focus on the business model innovation as well.
Mm-hmm.
Right? So if you focus on innovation, make sure you spend enough time, maybe ahead of any of your competitors.
Mm-hmm.
Spend as much time as possible-
Mm-hmm
... with customers. You'll be the first one-
Yeah
... to understand the customer pain point.
Mm-hmm.
And to be the first one-
Mm-hmm
... to release something. Like this morning-
Yeah
... we just announced our, you know, GenAI, all those cool features, right? We are the first one, you know, look at our-
Tell us more about that. Yeah.
Yeah, because you look at, you know, good news, we already invested, have the AI-
I woke up, and Matt's email is there from 3:57 A.M. Pacific. "Hey, take a look at what Zoom did today." Okay-
Yeah, because-
You need to answer this question.
This is not all-
Charles sent me an email, too, this morning-
Yeah
..."Make sure you got this.
You know, like a meeting summary, or maybe you are late to the meeting, you want to understand what happened, and so on and so forth. A lot of GenAI features, again, that's not a free trial, not a beta or alpha. We already reached the GA, right? So meaning we already invested before, and also it's part of our paid services, meaning at no extra cost, right?
Mm.
You know, add more value, right, to our customers. Not like, not like our competitors, right?
Mm-hmm.
Essentially, it sort of give you a so-called free product. Guess what? We charge you a crazy price per user.
Mm-hmm.
That's not a way to deliver happiness to our customers, right?
Mm-hmm.
Customers are pretty smart. They understand, "Wow, Zoom truly cares, cares about us," right?
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
That's a way to build trust.
Mm-hmm.
You know, quite often, recently, you know, I talked with many enterprise customers. When we realized we have very good scalable AI features-
Mm-hmm
... plus, as part of a package, they really like our story.
Mm-hmm.
You know, otherwise, you look at the total cost of ownership, it's much higher-
Mm-hmm
... if you deploy other competitors' product. You know, also, you know, have a team, you know, we are going to work on monetize the GenAI features to build a brand-new service.
Mm-hmm.
That's why AI does bring a lot of opportunity for us, for our existing services or for the future new service as well.
Just give us a teaser. So what are the new things that are possible that could make your Zoom users' life more productive, more exciting with generative AI? What are the things we could be doing two years from now, a year from now?
Oh, so for now, if you did not get a chance to play around, so, like, today, the feature, you know, all the G and all the meeting summary, meeting query-
Mm-hmm
... during the meeting time, you can ask them any questions, right, so during meeting time. And also, then you write a chat and can use the GenAI to help you compose a chat as well, right? Those are the features are already available. But down the road, there's a lot of new GenAI features, like for email, calendar as well.
Yeah.
No, let's say I want to schedule a meeting with you next week.
Mm-hmm.
Now, I needed to talk with my EA. You talk to your EA, right? To coordinate a time. Down the road, I can just ask AI, I want to schedule a meeting with Kash next week.
Mm-hmm.
I'm done. I do not need to check with my EA.
Mm-hmm.
You know, we can leverage AI, you know, to schedule a meeting on behalf of us.
Mm-hmm.
Like, you know, those kind of, you know, GenAI features can truly, you know, help us.
Mm-hmm.
And also, we build a lot of features like, you know, the whiteboard, a lot of the content, you know, content-centric features. You know, essentially, you can leverage AI, right? To essentially help you to either build a doc or whiteboard, all those, you know, the cool features. You do not need to spend a lot of time to do that, right?
Mm-hmm.
All those features will be empowered by AI, so.
So Eric, I think maybe pivoting gears a little bit to maybe one of your more promising growth vectors, which is Zoom Phone. Recently crossed 5 million.
Yeah, it's doing very well.
Yeah, 5 million seats, 10% of revenue, growing much faster than the overall base. So can you speak to maybe just kind of what's driving the success there? You know, maybe the verticals where you're finding the most traction, competitive displacements-
Yeah
... or greenfield opportunity. Kinda how do you think about this?
Yeah. So before I talk about opportunity, today, look at it from the user's side, from customer side, where's the pinpoint? You know, on one side, some customers still deploy on-premise solution.
Right.
On the other side, some customer already migrate to cloud solutions, however, multiple solutions. You know, today, let's say, you know, you are using Zoom as a video conferencing solution, use a different cloud solution for the phone, right? Essentially, doing a phone call, right, you know, I, Mary, you and I on a phone call. I also want to share content with you, want to talk to you, literally one click, I want to operate a video call, right? Because two different product is really hard to have a seamless experience. That's why customer, they view video conferencing and phone as, essentially, one solution. They call it UCaaS solution, right? And the customer really like our video, you know, the solution, and essentially, you turn off the video and with the phone number, right? That's the phone service. My customer really like that experience.
That's the reason why, you know, more and more customers, when they look at either migrate from on-prem to the cloud or after they deploy existing cloud solutions, you know, with from other vendors, they look at Zoom as a future solution. Either they, either they already deployed a Zoom Phone or they are going to. But that said earlier, I think five years out, very likely, you look at it, you see the space, probably only two vendors can survive. 'Cause, you know, only, you know, one or two, two vendors can build a platform, entire platform, so.
Interesting. Yeah, so, maybe then let's just talk about, you know, just kind of what you think the key initiatives will be to kind of re-accelerate growth, for the overall business, right? So we talked a lot about these different vectors, whether it be phone, contact center, even kind of core video conferencing, kind of where you see the green shoots in the market, the most demand to kind of reignite the business and, and get back towards kind of double-digit growth.
Yeah, for sure, you know, phone is still probably the very important opportunity. That's huge, still a huge opportunity all there, right? That is the one. You know, look at the contact center, the CCaaS, right? So we built the contact center from ground up, right? For now, by and large, probably focus on SMB customers, given the feature set, but we are innovating very quickly, rapidly, right? So look at it every quarter, how many features we added. Look at the workforce management. We also introduce that, you know, services as well, right? So essentially, look at the phone, look at the contact center, look at all other new services, like a meeting scheduler. Last year, we announced the email, calendar, and a whiteboard.
Essentially, you look at our platform vision, so we are going to add more and more new services, right? Essentially, add more value, and also we can leverage, you know, the platform capabilities to monetize. That's one area for sure. At the same time, as I said earlier, we also collaborate with AI to build some brand-new service to help us monetize.
Sure.
So that's another opportunities we are looking into as well. Overall, I think there's still opportunities all there in the from international, you know, perspective, right? So a lot of customers, you know, probably still use a very, you know, on-premise solution or not at the, you know, the greatest solution. You know, I think that's still opportunity for us to further grow our international business.
Sure. And, and you talked a lot about, you know, monetization, and you guys recently introduced the Zoom One bundle.
Yeah.
So can you talk a little bit about that, kind of the strategy there, how much runway you have, let's say, in the installed base to go after?
Yeah. Yes, one thing I think we did not do well, because of our marketing, you know, and, you know, a lot of customers, even for those customers who already deployed Zoom, you know, video solution many, many years, they still did not realize we have platform, we have Zoom One. Because, you know, Zoom brand was too strong, right? When it comes to video conferencing, they think that's Zoom. When it comes Zoom, they think that's video conferencing. That's not the case anymore. Right, how to make sure double down on marketing side. Zoom One, essentially, that's a platform, part of a platform vision, right? Give customer all the capabilities. I think most of customers, I think just, starting one and a half years ago, right, we just started that effort.
I think the huge opportunity for us, especially for medium-sized enterprise customers, to migrate to our Zoom One package. So-
Okay
... back to the Zoom Team Chat is part of Zoom One. Customers do not realize that. They, already paid Zoom Meeting customers, really do not need to pay for other, you know, service providers for Team Chat.
Yeah.
Right? Zoom, like, Team Chat is a great service. It's free... and it works extremely well. I still think better than any other Team Chat solution out there.
So thinking about kind of maybe the brand awareness for maybe more nascent products or bundles or product SKUs, you know, you've got this contact center product, which has 600 customers today. This is a pretty fragmented market, more broadly, and you have a number of competitors getting into the category, whether it be Twilio or RingCentral, and you have a lot of legacy incumbents in the category. So how do you think about your differentiation, perhaps beyond the scope of just your platform play?
I think it's a great question. You know, first of all, you know, we built the new solution from the ground up, you know. That's why, you know, from architecture perspective, it's a modern architecture, right? We do not have a lot of legacy components. That's why, you know, cost-wise, for sure, it's better, and also, we leverage the existing component, components, right? Where we already, you know, maybe deployed for other services for many years. This is very stable and mature components, right, in the back-end side. So the architecture is better, and also the cost-wise also is very manageable. Plus, we also have a tight integration with other Zoom services as well, right? I think those three things, I think, give us confidence. You know, plus, you know, customer trust us.
They know our innovation speed is pretty good, right, based on a positive track record. That's why I say when customer trust you, I think it's very likely down the road, they are either evaluating your service or they are going to deploy your service.
I think one thing we've observed in the market for UCaaS and CCaaS is enterprises' proclivity towards kind of bundled UCaaS solutions, if you will. In your own customer conversations, how topical is that in terms of having kind of that wholly integrated platform?
That's a great question. So, like, two to three years ago, you know, if you talk about UC and CC bundled together, it's not a topic customers they quite often share with you. But today, given the economic, you know, the situation, quite often the customers, they would like to, you know, consolidate multiple vendors into one or two to further save the cost and really look at the opportunity how to consolidate the CC and UC together. Today, look at all the solutions out there. You know, who is the standing out, you know, in this industry to build a CC solution and also UC solution with a multi-architecture from the ground up?
Right.
I think we are the only one. You really do not see any other vendors to build that solution. They own both CC and UC, and also, they built the solution by themselves. I think at this moment, I can proudly tell you, I think Zoom is the only one.
Sorry.
I had a question on that regard. For the customer, the advantage in deploying the whole platform, is there a cost of ownership benefit-
Total cost, yeah.
Total cost of ownership.
Yeah, yeah.
Can you talk a little bit more about people that have deployed the contact center and the rest of the Zoom platform? What does their life look like now, productivity-wise, economics-wise, versus where they were before? Just curious.
Yeah, you take Zoom, for example, right? You know, you look at our support team-
Yeah
... you know, previously, we deployed other contact center solutions.
Mm-hmm.
And still, you know, our team was not very happy about some of the features-
Mm.
And, uh-
Who was that? I'm kidding.
So, I'll tell you afterwards.
Yeah, exactly.
But anyway, last summer, a year ago, right?
Yeah
... our team migrated to our own contact center solution, and our I can tell you, our support team, you know, I just asked them, "Give me the very objective, you know, the comment about our own contact center solution." After one year now, it's they were pretty happy.
Mm.
You know, the reason why, you know, this modern solution is very easy to use, and also the integration with other platform is much better.
Mm-hmm.
Plus, based on the feedback, you know, our team innovation speed is much, you know, faster, right?
Yeah.
That's the reason why, in the event, you know, there's still some feature missing, but we, every quarter, we quickly add those features, right?
Mm-hmm.
That's why customer like our story. Like, not like some on-prem solution, other contact center solutions.
Yeah.
We already built that many years ago. It's really hard for them to have a rapid innovation, right? So that's the reason why we can even before, down the road. But again, that's more like start of SMB-
Yeah
... because, you know, even the one feature missing, sometimes enterprise customer RFP process, probably, oh, they want to wait. But then again, you know, we are innovating very fast.
Got it. On Zoom One, I just wanted to understand a little bit more. I know you, you captured the, the problem with this. People are not aware that we have all of the, the breadth of capabilities. What are you doing on the marketing side differently? Is there a new campaign to increase awareness of what Zoom has to offer?
Yeah, that is one of the top priorities. That's one thing that keeps me up in the night, right? So recently, I can share with you a little bit more. You know, we just added marketing reorg, right? I can tell you, our brand marketing team, they report to me directly.
Wow, okay.
So that's why it's become more and more critical-
Mm-hmm
... how to make sure, and the customer and the user public perception, right, really understand Zoom is a collaboration platform company.
Mm.
Not only do we have a great video conference service, but also overall platform.
Mm-hmm.
Right? You will see a lot of, you know, marketing campaigns, new marketing initiatives in the next several months, several quarters, so.
Got it. Zoom for the advertising industry-
Yeah
... and digital marketing.
Yeah.
What does go-to-market look like in this view of the world, where you want Zoom One to be a successful, widely deployed platform? What are the things you may need to do on a go-to-market perspective to achieve?
Yeah. Used to be, you know, it's always, by and large, more like a directed sales-driven. But given that I've introduced the contact center, a lot of the new platform services, right? For sure, we need to leverage, you know, channel partners more and more.
Mm.
In particular, for contact center, you know, or other solutions we are going to build down the road, right? So for a very large enterprise customers, when you migrate from on-prem to cloud, you need to leverage channel partners more and more. That's one thing added. Another thing is, as I said earlier, you know, prior to COVID crisis, online business, essentially not our, you know, key revenue driver. And given nowadays, the revenue-wise, it's not a, you know, it's pretty big chunk of revenue coming from online business, how to further leverage our online business?... to have more and more free users, and it can convert those free users to paid users, and also is important for us as well. So essentially, how to double down, double down, embracing the channel partners-
Mm-hmm.
as well as online, you know, the channels.
Mm-hmm.
That's, that's something new for us.
Got it. Got it.
Yeah.
I wanna do a quick pulse check. I know it's a very large gathering here. If you have a question, just raise your hand, and
Yeah, feel free if you have any questions. Thank you. Yeah.
Yeah. Go ahead. So David, Paul? Who-
Yeah, thanks, yeah. So Eric, following the EU decision in July about Microsoft bundling Teams, do you see that could possibly fall to the U.S. and the FTC ruling? And specifically, what type of uplift might you see from that unbundling in Europe?
Yeah, that's a great question about the EU, EU, and this policy, you know, about the Microsoft bundling. And I think we should've, we should—you should ask this question to FTC as well. So essentially, I think, you know, you look at it from a competition perspective. As I said earlier, you focus on the product innovation and also both business model innovation. But no matter what you do, you've got to be fair, right? That's very important. The more like we play sports, right? And if we have better team, I think we can win, but if you have unfair competition, you may not win, because the rules might be different. You had a wonderful jump shot, you know, two points, right? I made a jump shot of two points.
If you made a nice jump shot, it's three points, it's hard for us to win, right? That's why I think, for sure, more and more customers understand that, right? That is one thing. It's good to understand, right, sometimes the unfair competition. Another thing is, you know, if customer, now, more and more customers realize they got to look at the total cost of ownership, not like initially, the so-called free service, right? The total cost of ownership, like a support cost. If you use a, you know, competitor product, guess what? You know, every meeting, you know, every phone call, it's a lot of CPU problems, right? You need to call IT. That's one, one side. Also, look at other advanced features, like AI features, right? If you deploy a so-called free service, guess what? You have no choice.
I want to charge you $30, what can you do? You have to pay, right? That's why I say when it comes to total cost of ownership, I think we have a much better story. So that's the only way we can focus on. In terms of FTC decision or EU decision, I hope, you know, they will help, right? So... But customer very smart. They understand what's going on. So, yeah.
Thank you.
Appreciate it. Yeah, it's a great question. Thank you.
Thanks for taking the question.
Paul, we'll come to you in a second.
You announced a bunch of AI capabilities this morning, the AI Companion at no additional cost. Will the inferencing costs degrade your gross margins materially, or do you expect to be able to absorb that within the current gross margin profile? And then secondly, you talked about wanting to 4x the size of the business. Can you do that organically or do you want to do large M&A? Thanks.
I'm sorry, for the second question?
The second one was whether you have aspirations to do, you know, material significant M&A-
Oh, okay. Okay
... to grow the business, or can you do it organically?
Appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah. So you look at our gross margin, you know, for now, we are doing very well, right? So given the effort or investment, right, in particular, we started, you know, more than two years ago, right? I think we have a high confidence. Initially, for sure, there's a little bit of impact to the gross margin, but down the road, it's very manageable because, you know, we have our own large language model. We also use a federated... With our AI approach is a federated approach, right? So federated, Anthropic, Llama 2, and also the OpenAI, our own large language model. I think cost-wise, you know, it's, it's very sustainable. You know, in the long run, it's very manageable, right? That's our hope. Plus, our DevOps team is pretty good, very solid. They know where, how to save the money.
You know, every time, you know, our CFO, Kelly, always praises our dev ops effort. You know, that's why we have a confidence, right? We do not charge the customers, you know, at no extra cost for those GenAI features. So in terms of the second question, so I think, yeah, maybe you have some advice. You know, for sure, we are open-minded, right? So, you know, we are quite, quite a few smart startup companies how to further grow our business. You know, we are very open-minded. You know, every year, we generated a lot of free cash flow, is very good. And so again, you know, we also very disciplined as well. You know, if we do not see any good target, probably still focus on organic growth.
If you and a cash matter, whoever has any good, you know, you know, the advice, you know, we are open-minded. So, yeah.
Paul.
Hi. I'm just curious what the capital allocation strategy is. I just, I just noticed you have $20 a share in net cash on the balance sheet, and it doesn't appear like there's any share repurchase or meaningful M&A. Maybe you could talk about that.
Yeah. So I said earlier, so first of all, you know, cash flow positive, that is good news. However, we are very disciplined. You know, we are indeed looking at some potential opportunities. Again, you know, we're also disciplined, right? So, you know, when, whenever there's a good opportunity, you know, from a go-to-market perspective, from team culture perspective, right, from valuation perspective, we do it, right? However, if we do not see any good acquisition target in terms of inorganic growth, you know, we are also patient as well, right? Because we are very responsible from a, you know, from a shareholder perspective, right? Otherwise, oh, you have in general, a lot of cash, you have a cash flow positive, the balance sheet is very strong. It's just the, you know, the acquisition for the sake of acquisition does not make any sense.
We want to focus on sustainable growth... and again, we are not sitting there and say, without looking at those opportunities. We are, but we want to make sure, you know, with, with a disciplined approach, so.
Yes, right behind, please.
Can you please talk about the AI experts or talent that you have recruited from Azure or Microsoft, and what, like, expertise or they are bringing to the Zoom organization?
Yeah, so, as I said earlier, so, you know, we already invested into the AI, you know, quite a few years ago, you know? And you know, not like other competitor, like Microsoft, right, everything Azure or OpenAI. Our approach is you know, federated AI approach, and we build our own large language model, and with our own, you know, we you know, the training data as well, and we do not use the customer data to train our AI, by the way. So and also sometimes, you know, how to for the level Anthropic or the OpenAI, right? You know, in some cases, you know, that is in some use cases, maybe the Anthropic model is better. Why not call Anthropic rather than call you know, your your own model?
Like, essentially, that federated AI approach, I think is probably will be better, is more sustainable from a cost perspective, from a quality perspective. That's our approach. So it's a very differentiated approach compared to other solutions.
Has there been any pushback on the change in terms of conditions that have followed for your training models?
So, you know, long story short, we do not use any of our customers' data to train our AI model or the third-party AI models, no matter free users or paid users. Even if some customers really like our story, really wanted to help us, to share the data with us, to let us train, we don't use that data at all. We make it very clear, very simple, so.
I have one question as we end this conversation. As you talk to CIOs and decision-makers next year, you know, board members, CEOs, CFOs, what is your early assessment of what calendar 2024 budget's not—this is not your forecast, by the way, okay? What are your customers generally saying about next year's budgets for IT?
Yeah, I think early this year, I think, I did not see any conversation is sweet. So meaning every enterprise customer, CIO, CEO, really wanted to consolidate, right? Meaning save the cost. Used to be the best service we would because every CIO or CEO, they really wanted to deploy the best greater service to make sure focus on employee engagement, focus on employee experience.
Mm-hmm.
However, I think over the past eight or nine months, that's not the case. But recently, I think the good news, given there's no economic recession, given the AI investment, I think we see more and more, you know, customers, you know, either from a CIO or CEO, they are more open-minded. They want to invest more, right? Especially how to support AI, they want to invest more. How to embrace the hybrid work, right? They want to make sure invest more to those solutions that can support, embrace the hybrid work. I think it is, it's much better than eight or nine months ago. I think essentially, you know, we are very optimistic now, assuming there's no economic recession in the next couple of years.
That's a house view, by the way.
Yeah.
Jan Hatzius,
Yeah
... reduced his recession probability from 20%-15% this morning, and was a very bullish outlook, and I think that's-
Yeah. We... Yeah.
You probably see the economic indicators in your-
Yeah, yeah
... line of business anyway. So with that, why don't we give a round of applause for somebody who changed our lives?
Thank you. Appreciate it.
Literally a life changer. Yeah, thank you so much.