In recent months, we’ve explored an emerging concept called Total Monetization, the primary strategy companies are adopting now that the Subscription Economy is our new normal. In essence, Total Monetization involves experimenting with various pricing models — bundling, unbundling, freemium, usage-based, and others — to find what resonates best with customers. It’s a journey of continuous adaptation, where companies can try different pricing and packaging, switch them out, or even offer multiple models simultaneously.
We started by defining Total Monetization, then emphasized the importance of understanding and meeting consumer demand, explored pricing models in depth, and discussed the technology required to put this strategy into action. In this installment, let’s explore Total Monetization in action with a company we all know well: Zoom. I recently interviewed Zoom Chief Strategy Officer Abhisht Arora onstage at Subscribed Live in Berkeley, and we explored how Zoom has evolved from a meetings platform to a business revolutionizing work, with a focus on AI and flexible pricing to meet diverse customer needs. If you missed it, you can watch the full conversation, including my keynote, here.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Abhisht, welcome! Let’s start with you. We all know Zoom. We all know the product. Give us a sense of what your focus is on a day-to-day basis as Chief Strategy Officer.
Thank you for having me, Tien! I work in support of Zoom’s growth and transformation objectives: product strategy, what businesses we want to be in, go-to-market. I’m also responsible for our monetization — pricing and packages. I’ve worked at Zoom for three years, and it’s been an amazing time filled with big transformations.
Yes, Zoom certainly isn’t the same company it was three years ago. What’s amazing, though, is you’ve talked about how it all started with a change in one word. Tell us about that.
Zoom started out with a two-word goal: “Meet Happy.” It was about making meetings delightful: intuitive, fast, always just works. That’s what made Zoom a household word.
Now, our transformation and the journey we’re on is shifting from being “Meet Happy” to “Work Happy.” That change in one word is pretty profound. We went from a company focused on the two-to-four hours a day that you’re doing meetings to about all of the collaboration that you’re doing, internal and external, personal productivity, group productivity, creating artifacts and beyond — all the reasons you’re meeting in the first place.
Another big part of this transformation is our focus on AI. Zoom has always been AI-powered, if you look at our features we have, like virtual backgrounds, noise suppression. The touch-up feature that I use every day.
That’s a great feature! When I don’t have enough sleep, got the bags under my eyes — I just move that slider more to the right.
Absolutely! Those are all AI-powered features. But now, we’re making the transition from being AI-powered to being AI first.
AI is top of mind for a lot of people in this community. What does an AI-first platform mean in terms of your “Work Happy” mission?
Today, it addresses what I’m going to call amplification. Amplification is about giving you superpowers. Today we’ll take notes, summarize meetings, capture action items, allow you to propose messages both in email and chat. Zoom AI Companion does that today. That’s about amplification.
And this is all available today? I didn’t know that.
Yes! But there’s more, in the future, you will see us investing in simplification. Think about it as reimagining your core workflows across all the apps you care about. An example would be giving AI Companion a prompt to create a video presentation (after a meeting) that you can share with customers quickly, or AI Companion could help identify and summarize what’s important for you to focus on given your personal and organizational context.
So it can take the meeting and summarize action items from that meeting?
Absolutely! Summarize actions from that meeting, but we go one step further; that last step, which is delegation, is about acting on the action items. So imagine, if I was a salesperson: after a sales call, AI Companion has captured the notes, it will now go ahead and update the CRM with the notes, open a ticket in Jira with the customer’s feature request, and schedule a follow-up meeting with the product team.
Auto-generated feature requests after every Zoom call. Our engineers are going to be busy!
Yes, absolutely! This will give our customers time back to focus on what matters most and reduce their time spent on the mundane.
I’m getting this picture. Your product set today is so broad. You talked about CRM capabilities, and your team even came in and outfitted our cafeteria with one of these Zoom conference rooms. A lot of people still associate Zoom with just meetings, so give us a sense of all the innovations that you’ve had.
We have a cloud phone service (Phone), video conferencing (Rooms), Team Chat — and we’ve also announced Zoom Docs, which is going to be a fresh take on a collaborative AI-first document. We also have Digital Signage, like the signs in your cafeteria, with key messages. We also have Workplace Reservation.
There’s a lot of categories that we’ve got, and we’ve done that because we’ve listened to our customers. We’ve heard what they want from Zoom. We’ve evolved so that we’re serving more than the IT buyer. We’re also including the sales buyer, the marketing, and service buyer. These products all work well together to help our customers on their own digital transformation journey, whether you’re a solopreneur or a Fortune 100 company.
Yeah, you guys sure have been busy! So when you think about all of that, how do you approach monetization?
There’s a lot of complexity in what we do. We have a large number of products, we sell worldwide across multiple channels. We use many different monetization models and payment mechanisms. To manage these complexities, we apply four principles.
The first principle is about creating outsized value for our customers. Second, is to keep things simple. The third is to ensure there is coherence across these dimensions, whether it’s the type of customer, product, volume they’re buying, the channel from which they’re buying, it all needs to come together. And the last one, but in some ways the most important, long term, is adoption. Adoption is ultimately the key to that long-term, sustainable growth.
That’s great! These are four principles we can all take away. So touch on that last one, adoption, because one of Zoom’s strengths is that it’s so easy to just get started. You had your free 40-minute meetings. How do you bring that easy adoption at the start for all of your products?
A big part of our success has been freemium. And that sales motion for Meetings continues to this day. It’s one of our best sales motions. We take that same approach and apply that across to the rest of our product portfolio. We go out of our way to make sure customers get the chance to kick the tires and try products.
When we started out, we were focused just on subscriptions. But it was not possible to address all of our customers’ needs with just one model. For our events and sessions business, we’ve introduced a pay-per-attendee, or usage-based model, because events are episodic, and customers told us they don’t want to have a monthly subscription around events, when they don’t necessarily have events every month. We had to match our offering with the demand that was out there.
And for our ISV and developer offerings, we’ve introduced a universal credit plan. Think of this as a single bucket of low-cost, prepaid credits that can eliminate the need to manage multiple accounts or accounts and give the developer flexibility to use the wide variety of APIs and tools that Zoom offers.
And where does AI play into this? How do you monetize your AI capabilities?
We have decided that we will deliver AI Companion at no additional charge to all of our paid customers. Over time, we can expect that customers will come and say can you customize my AI Companion. That level of customization, we’ll charge for. We also have functions that are role-based or vertical-based. We have offerings for the sales function, which I talked about — Zoom Revenue Accelerator, an AI-based companion that supports the sales function. We also have Zoom AI Expert Assist that’s part of our premium contact center offering that supports contact center agents when they’re dealing with customer service issues. And you can expect to see more such offerings from us in the future.
That’s awesome! Last question: Any advice for this community about how to approach Total Monetization at their companies?
As I look back at my career and my time at Zoom, three things stand out:
Number one, continue to deliver exceptional value to your customers by focusing on your core offering and diligently solving their problems.
Two, focus on longer-term outcomes. You have to focus on your customers’ outcomes and not just transactional sales. If you work with them and see how they’re using the product and drive adoption, you will see success.
And finally, invest in monetization holistically. It’s incredibly strategic. It will give you the option to drive revenue in the short term, but more importantly in the medium and long term, it will allow you to take advantage of any market shifts that happen, like they’re happening with AI right now, and allow you to differentiate on key business dimensions.
You’ve shown so much agility with so many ideas that you’ve been able to do. What’s the technology platform you use to enable all those things to happen?
Our business runs on Zuora!
That’s great to hear! Thank you so much, Abhisht. This is an amazing story.
Thank you so much, Tien!
This is the eighth installment of the Total Monetization Series. We’re challenging companies to move beyond one-size-fits-all pricing models and craft a dynamic mix of offerings and business models that meet ever-changing consumer demand. This customer-centric and future-proof approach can unlock recurring growth and give modern businesses staying power.
Stay tuned for more conversations about Total Monetization. We’re just getting started and have so much more to cover. See you next time.
