May 22, 2026
Zoom’s Virtual Agent Is Now the One Making the Call
Zoom’s Virtual Agent is no longer just answering calls. As of Q1 FY2027, the company’s AI-powered ZVA is being deployed to proactively contact customersm a capability illustrated by a new win with marketing and BPO company Rensa, which is using it to make pre-confirmation calls tied to utility connections before customers ever reach out.
According to Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, this use case could ultimately prove larger than the inbound deflection model that virtual agents were originally built for.
From Inbound Deflection to Outbound Engagement
Virtual agents have traditionally served one purpose in the contact centre: to intercept inbound calls, handle common queries, and route customers to human agents when needed. Yet, the Japanese marketing and BPO provider Rensa has selected Zoom Virtual Agent, Agentless Dialer, and ZCC Elite to handle high-volume customer interactions, deploying ZVA for outbound engagement that frees human teams for higher-value sales activity.
Yuan said he expects to see far more of this in the future: “Naturally, you think probably we focus on inbound. That’s not the case. I think outbound might be even larger. Because more and more companies want to leverage AI technology to reach as many customers as possible.”
When it comes to pricing, Yuan indicated that an outcome-based model suits outbound deployment particularly well, since customers pay for results rather than consumption. “If I reach 1,000 prospects to leverage our technology, and only five out of 1,000 reply back, that doesn’t make any sense. That’s why outcome-based mode is more [suitable] for outbound,” he said.
Contact Centre Becomes a Displacement Machine
The Rensa win was one of several contact centre deals Zoom highlighted in the quarter. Eight of the top ten Zoom Customer Experience (ZCX) deals in Q1 involved displacing an existing contact centre provider, with Yuan noting that the company is “replacing almost every one of them.”
Chelsea FC selected Zoom Phone, ZCC Elite, and ZVA Chat to modernise fan engagement across touchpoints, building a connected data foundation to improve insight and long-term growth. Caliber Collision, an automobile repair provider, deployed Zoom Phone and ZCC Elite across more than 1,800 repair centres, aiming to eliminate the cold-call experience for customers and unify CX analytics end-to-end.
All ten of the top ZCX deals were channel-driven, which Yuan pointed to as evidence that Zoom’s go-to-market motion in contact centre is now scalable. “Our channel partners know how to pitch our story, how to sell to our enterprise customers,” he said.
AI Is Now Central to Every Major CX Deal
Nine of the top ten Zoom Customer Experience deals in Q1 involved paid AI features. Zoom CFO Michelle Chang pointed to this as the sharpest indicator of what is driving contact centre growth: “The area where we have the most momentum is to scale the clear signal that we have in customer experience.”
The company launched CX Insights during the quarter, a new product within its contact centre suite that gives business and CX leaders a natural language interface for analysing data across contact centre, workforce management, quality management, and Virtual Agent, consumptively priced, and designed to give leaders visibility across the full stack rather than any single channel.
AI Expert Assist 3.0, customer workflow orchestration, and advanced quality management for Virtual Agent were also announced, all oriented around moving customers away from reactive service and toward faster, AI-assisted resolution.
The UC and CX Convergence Argument
Zoom argues that legacy contact centre vendors cannot replicate what it offers. It serves as a single platform spanning unified communications and customer experience, with no seam between the two.
Four of the top ten ZCX deals included Zoom Phone, and four of the top ten Phone deals included Zoom Contact Center — customers buying across both sides of the platform rather than treating them separately. The combined footprint is also how Zoom differentiates itself from Salesforce, whose Agentforce Contact Center launch drew analyst questions on the call.
“Their strengths are really about CRM and the marketing cloud,” Yuan said. “We entered this market based on our customer feedback. Many customers already deploy our UC solutions and our meeting solutions. Naturally, the next step is contact centre. It’s more conversation-centric rather than system-of-record-centric. That’s our key differentiation.”
Every Conversation as a Data Asset
Yuan’s argument is that every Zoom conversation generates data that AI can immediately put to work.
“Zoom conversation will generate a lot of very meaningful, important asset or data to help you drive your next step,” he said. “I call that a context layer.”
His example was a sales representative who previously had to manually log call notes into a CRM after a customer conversation. With AI, that step disappears and the agent handles it automatically once the call ends. The same logic applies in healthcare, where a doctor’s post-consultation system update can be automated from conversation data.
Rather than the interaction being an isolated event that ends when the customer hangs up, it becomes the starting point for automated workflows, follow-through, and insight generation. This is what Zoom means when it describes itself as a system of action, and contact centre, increasingly, is where that argument lands most concretely.
The Numbers
Q1 revenue came in at $1.24 billion, up 5.5% year-over-year and above the high end of Zoom’s own guidance, among the company’s strongest growth rates in recent years. Enterprise revenue grew 7.2%, accounting for 61% of total revenue.
In terms of what lies ahead, Zoom raised its full year FY2027 revenue guidance to $5.08–5.09 billion, putting the company on track to surpass $5 billion in annual revenue for the first time. The value of Zoom’s longer-term contracted deals grew 19% year-over-year, reflecting an increasing number of customers committing to the platform over multiple years rather than on short renewal cycles.
