Zoom’s CEO says employees should come back to the office because it’s “really hard” to work on Zoom

The CEO of video conferencing giant Zoom wants his employees to stop by at least two days a week to tell staff at a company-wide meeting that they simply “can’t have a good conversation” via remote meetings alone.

Zoom, the San Jose technology company that transformed office work during the Covid-19 pandemic, has now mandated that every employee living within 50 miles of a Zoom office be on site at least 40 percent of the time must clock in.

“You come up with great ideas a lot,” said Zoom CEO Eric Yuan at the Aug. 3 company meeting, “but when we’re all on Zoom, it’s really hard.”

“We don’t debate well,” Yuan explained, “because everyone tends to be really friendly when you join a Zoom call.”

Zoom, one of the main beneficiaries of the Covid-era remote working revolution, has come under fire in recent weeks for making potentially exploitative changes to the terms and conditions (T+C) of their conferencing app.

Buried in Zoom’s new T+C, the tech company quietly announced its intention to scrap its own users’ private video, audio, and messaging sessions to “train and tune” its future artificial intelligence (AI) projects.

Zoom, the San Jose tech company that transformed office work during the Covid-19 pandemic, has now mandated that every employee living within 50 miles of a Zoom office must clock in on site at least two days a week . “When we’re all on Zoom,” said Zoom’s CEO, “it’s really hard”

“In our early days, we all knew each other,” Yuan said in the audio of the Aug. 3 meeting, which was leaked to Insider.

But as the company has scaled up to accommodate its growing role in the global office culture, Yuan says Zoom’s camaraderie among executives has eroded, both through the isolation of remote working and the expansion of their workforce.

“We’ve taken on so many new ‘Zoomies’ in recent years that it’s very difficult to build trust,” explains Yuan.

“Trust is the basis for everything,” he added. “Without confidence, we will be slow.”

The erosion of internal trust at Zoom reflects customers’ own reservations about the app’s privacy standards, both in terms of personal security and trade secrets.

Zoom’s new T+C sparked an outcry online, with users threatening to cancel their accounts over the potentially invasive changes.

Elliot Higgins of news organization Bellingcat said, “We run our training workshops on Zoom, so Zoom effectively intends to train its AI on the full workshop content without any compensation, so goodbye Zoom.”

Artificial intelligence models are usually trained on large amounts of publicly available data, often sourced from the open internet through web scraping programs.

But Zoom’s move will apply the same techniques to private customer data, which will likely include everything from intimate family conversations to sensitive business meetings — ironically similar to Zoom’s own meeting leaked to Insider.

Buried under Zoom’s new terms and conditions, the tech company quietly announced plans to scrap its users’ private video, audio, and messaging sessions for “training and tuning” future AI projects. Outraged users took to Twitter (now called X) to vent their frustrations

High-profile users, including Elliot Higgins of the Bellingcat news organization, threatened to cancel their Zoom accounts over the video conferencing app’s potentially invasive changes

The changes have been made to Section 10.4 of Zoom’s Terms and Conditions (above)

Yuan’s comments in the leak aren’t the first indication that Zoom would make a U-turn on the benefits of remote working and video conferencing.

While the company once said its staff would be allowed to work from home “indefinitely,” the revised plan went public in August, with Zoom stating it plans to mandate “a structured hybrid approach.”

The company said in a statement that the new policy – which will be rolled out country by country over the next two months – is what “most effective for Zoom.’

Despite the new policy, Zoom insisted it would still “continue to hire the best talent, regardless of location.”

According to reports as of late January 2023, the company currently employs 8,400 people, with more than half of them based in the United States.

“As a company, we are in a better position to leverage our proprietary technologies,” Zoom said in a statement, “to continue to innovate and support our global customers.”