Eric Yuan

Eric Yuan (born 1970) emigrated from China to Silicon Valley in 1997 — after eight visa rejections — engineered WebEx’s early product, and founded Zoom in 2011. The pandemic made his company a verb; the AI boom has become his plan for what Zoom does next.

The digital-twin vision

In a June 2024 interview on The Verge’s Decoder podcast, Yuan sketched the most vivid — and most mocked — vision of AI in the workplace: everyone gets an LLM-powered “digital twin” that attends meetings, answers most email and takes calls on their behalf, freeing humans for judgment calls and shrinking the workweek to three or four days. “I can send a digital version of myself to join so I can go to the beach,” he said, while conceding the technology “is not there yet” and might take five or six years. Commentators questioned why a meeting anyone can skip via avatar should exist at all, and deepfake researchers winced; Yuan held that self-directed AI clones are the natural endpoint of work software.

The company has followed the rhetoric. Zoom bundled its AI Companion assistant into paid plans at no extra cost in 2023, shipped meeting summaries, scheduling and document drafting, added photorealistic AI avatars for its Clips feature in 2024, and in November 2024 dropped “Video” from its corporate name — becoming Zoom Communications — to mark its pivot to an “AI-first work platform.” Yuan has said he wants Zoom judged as an AI company, not a pandemic-era video app.